Pirkei Avot is the most accessible and most-read tractate in the entire Mishnah, the central text of Rabbinic Judaism. The entire tractate is included in the traditional Jewish prayer book, and even though it lacks its own "Gemara," (classical Talmudic commentary), the list of thinkers who have written their own commentaries reads like an all-star list of rabbis and Jewish philosophers throughout the ages: Maimonides, Abravanel, the Volozhiner rabbi, Sforno, the Maharal of Prague, Samson Raphael Hirsch, all the way up to Ethics of the Sages: Pirke Avot (Skylight Illuminations), a wonderful edition by Rami Shapiro.
So do we really need another book on Pirkei Avot? You bet: we need it badly, for all the commentaries overlook, or treat perfunctorily, the critical historical and philosophical context of the work. Here, Tropper performs a crucial service, because he locates the methodology and style of Avot within the world of its creation, viz., the Greco-Roman world of the first two centuries C.E. While the book is unquestionably academic -- it was originally his doctoral dissertation -- it is clearly written, and far from hard slogging for anyone interested in religion or familiar with rabbinic literature.
Tropper beautifully demonstrates how many of the patterns usually associated with Avot -- in particular, its list of successive rabbis who transmitted "Torah" from Mount Sinai -- bear striking resemblances to Greek, Roman, and even early Christian texts. In doing so, he raises critical and evocative questions about the nature of the Mishnaic project.
Let us take the example of the succession list in the first two chapters of Avot. Tropper shows that it looks very similar to the work of the "Second Sophistic," i.e. a philosophical movement during the same period in Greece, in which Greek intellectuals and orators sought a heroic past to excavate as a way of compensating for their relative lack of powerlessness in the Roman Imperial system. Was the Mishnaic project similar? Tropper suggests that it was: Avot stood as a way to reinforce the authority of the office of the Patriarch among Jews by connecting it to the great events of the past. In this way, the story of a disciple circle -- that of the Patriarch -- became the story of a people. Anyone familiar with the account of the rabbinic chain of authority in Avot 1:1 can recognize that it attempts to make the case that the rabbis are the true heirs of Jewish authority. Tropper shows that this was not an isolated pattern.
The most frustrating thing about the book is that Tropper does not extend the comparative method to the PHILOSOPHICAL aspects of the book. If the rabbis, Roman legal scientists, Greek Sophists, and early Christians were engaged in similar literary and stylistic projects, does this tell us anything about their more general views of the world, of life, of politics, of economics? He shows with careful research in both primary and secondary sources that the Patriarch would have been familiar with the general Greek cultural milieu in the Galilee; but does this say anything about any interchange of ideas? Can Athens and Jerusalem speak to each other? But this just shows the value of the work: it raises bigger questions such as this, and gives subsequent scholars and modern Jews a chance to reflect and study them.
The second most frustrating thing about the book is its egregious price. I am lucky because I teach at UCLA, a major research university with an excellent Interlibrary Loan program. That's how I accessed this book. See what you can do at your own library: Wisdom, Politics, and Historiography is not worth the price, but it is worth the hassle of borrowing it, and definitely worth careful study and thought.
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