This article is protected by German copyright law. You may copy and distribute this article for your personal use only. Other use is only allowed with written permission by the copyright holder. Lothar Gall, Dietmar Willoweit (Hrsg.). Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in the Course of History: Exchange and Conflicts ISBN 978-3-486-59707-3. Schriften des Historischen Kollegs 82. Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag 2011 The Orality of Jewish Oral Law 237 Israel Jacob Yuval The Orality of Jewish Oral Law: from Pedagogy to Ideology * I did not imagine that things out of books would help me as much as the utterances of a living and abiding voice. Eusebius, History of the Church, III 39.4 I. The thesis I wish to present in this paper is that the orality of the “Oral Law” played an important role in the creation of a Jewish identity distinct from that of Christianity. In order to understand this, we shall need to examine in retrospect the changes that took place during the first centuries of the Common Era that de- termined the nature of Judaism from that point on until the present: namely, the meteoric development of the halakhah. At first blush, the halakhah is no more than a natural continuation of biblical law. The recognition that the covenant be- tween Israel and its God requires the people of Israel to fulfill the commandments of God is rooted in biblical literature and continues throughout the period of the Second Temple. Nevertheless, something decisive happened during the first cen- turies CE. A new class emerged, that of the Sages, who began to create a literary œuvre that had no precedent in the earlier period. In place of a collection of tradi- tions and interpretations of the commandments which already existed during the time of the Second Temple, a new corpus began to take shape, of a canonic char- acter, referred to by the name “Oral Law” (Torah sheb’eal peh) because it was con- veyed and preserved in an oral manner. This corpus enjoyed a canonic status by virtue of the belief that at the Sinaitic revelation God gave Israel two laws or teach- ings, one written and one oral. In practice, both enjoy an identical authoritative status, the function of the Oral Law being to interpret and complete the Written Law. The orality of the Oral Law was not limited merely to its revelation at Sinai and the nature of its transmission from generation to generation, but also ex- * I wish to thank my dear friend and in-law Professor Shlomo Naeh who shared his wisdom with me in both written and oral teaching.