The Rabbinic Legacy: Bavli Ketubbot
The rabbinic ideal of Torah study stood in tension with other ideals, such as marriage and procreation, particularly in Babylonia, where scholars sometimes had to travel great distances to attend institutions of learning. Commenting on m. Ketubot 5:6, which defines the frequency with which men of various occupations must fulfill the obligation of marital sex, the Babylonian Talmud presents halakhic traditions that permit scholars to absent themselves from their wives for extended periods of Torah study, as well as aggadic stories that warn of the dangers of neglecting one’s wife.
Rabbinic sources were produced in two localities: the land of Israel—wherein the Mishnah, Tosefta, Palestinian Talmud, and halakhic and aggadic midrashim were compiled—and Babylonia, where the Babylonian Talmud was compiled. By and large, these two communities reflect different attitudes toward residence in the land of Israel and toward the possibilities for Jewish life and identity outside the land. Palestinian halakhic and aggadic sources highly value residency in the land and recast choosing to live in the diaspora as treason or abandonment (see “Mishnah Ketubbot,” “Tosefta Avodah Zarah,” and “Yerushalmi Kil’ayim”). Although the Babylonian Talmud incorporates Palestinian traditions that champion the Holy Land and residence within it, it also moderates the rhetoric of loyalty to the land of Israel with a rhetoric of “local patriotism,” to use a term coined by scholar Isaiah Gafni.
The following lengthy discussion in b. Ketubbot 110b–112a opens and closes with strong traditions about living in the land of Israel attributed primarily to Palestinian authorities. The middle of the sugya, however, contains dueling Babylonian and Palestinian traditions in which the status of the Holy Land vis-à-vis Babylonia is contested. For their part, the pro-Babylonian voices in this dialogue subvert Palestinian claims, elevating Babylonia to a status that is sometimes second to, sometimes equal to, and sometimes superior to that of the Holy Land. In the passage presented, the sages’ places of residence are indicated as follows: [P] denotes a Palestinian sage, [B] a Babylonian sage, and [B/P] or [P/B] a sage who moved from one location to the other.