“4” in “Talmud and Philosophy” | Open Indiana

לעושָה נפלאות גדולות

For Lorraine Daston

Lack of knowledge of human beings is the reason

that morality and sermons [Kanzelreden],

which are full of admonitions of which we never tire,

have little effect.

Morality must be combined with knowledge of humanity.

KANT, LECTURES ON ANTHROPOLOGY (transcript attributed to Friedländer, Winter Semester 1775–76)

UNJUSTIFIED MARGINS

In a volume on philosophy /and/ Talmud, which aims to go beyond the historical one-way street from the former to the latter, the name Kant looms largest as a roadblock or a detour sign.¹ Due to the influence of neo-Kantianism on the philosophy of Jewish law (halakhah),² systems of Talmudic logic and their methods of textual analysis³ are widely associated with Kant—even if they do not reflect his thought.⁴ There are faster routes to a new relationship between the terms Kant /and/ Talmud (or, in the present case, a related more obscure branch of classical rabbinic literature). Another roadblock at this Kant/Talmud intersection is the prevailing emphasis within neo-Kantian halakhic theory—no less than among Kant scholars—on the thought of Kant’s Critiques. Until recently, the work Kant began before his critical period (especially his anthropology lectures, which ran for twenty-four years, culminating in Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798), his bestseller in his lifetime), received little attention. Most attention on the precritical Kant was centered around his connection to the Critiques.⁵ Both of Kant’s afterlives, then—a focus on his critical turn, and modern Jewish legal theory’s readings of the Talmud through the lens of avowedly Kantian transcendental logic—have marginalized the Kant of the Anthropology, just as they have marginalized anthropologies that could be recovered from the classical rabbis by way of Kant. Historically, it is not difficult to situate both margins: Kant’s Critiques are far more central to modern philosophy, just as halakhah plays an outsized role in the modern reception of rabbinic sources. Yet by placing the margins of not only the philosophical but also the Talmudic canon side by side, and scribbling across them, a new sort of conjunction will hopefully begin to emerge.

To that end, this chapter juxtaposes the spaces of German Enlightenment anthropology and classical rabbinic thought figured by Kant on one hand, and the Roman-era rabbinic discourse derekh erets (“the way of the world”) on the other. I propose that Kant’s approach to anthropology (his “pragmatic point of view”), and his way of integrating it with morality, is selectively analogous to how derekh erets discourse was also used to reflect on the relationship between rabbinic anthropology, in a philosophical sense, and moral norms.⁶

I begin by mapping a triangle of concepts within Kant’s system: the “pragmatic,” “prudence,” and “character.” The way in which Kant defines and interrelates those terms illuminates his distinctive view of the relation between anthropology and morality. I proceed to mark the spot on this map where Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” appears to build a bridge from anthropology to morality (but without crossing it). The two branches of his thought remain distinct in principle, but he gestures toward how they could be related.

Having come to the point where Kant stops—the crossroads of anthropology and morality—I analogize this corner of his system to the same conceptual intersection in the rabbis’ discourse of derekh erets. Here I argue that the way in which the discourse of derekh erets relates anthropology with morality may be productively analogous to how Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” does so as well, especially because Kant’s approach touches on a major unresolved question in the scholarship on derekh erets: How did the rabbis conceive of the bond between morality and what they labeled derekh erets: an expansive term with at least eight distinct senses? In particular, since derekh erets often designates the natural or the normal, as opposed to the normative, how did early rabbis envision the relationship between those poles of their discourse? Did they imagine a hierarchy or progression between the two? Is the moral sense of “derekh erets” the foundation of all its others? Yet the term also indexes what we would call anthropology: social norms and patterns of human conduct, which cannot be universal or absolute. Why, then, have modern scholars read derekh erets as the basis for all rabbinic morality; whether a version of natural law, a broad term for any and all “value-concepts,” or the residue of a primordial, universal Jewish-Christian piety?

Rather than privilege a few instances of derekh erets or strain its meaning through another theology, I reanalyze this discourse as a whole, in early Palestinian oral tradition, by developing my analogy with Kant’s “pragmatic point of view.” I argue that the way in which Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” bridges anthropology and morality can clarify how early derekh erets discourse incipiently relates those domains. I conclude by reviewing what this analogy to Kant contributes to our study of early rabbinic thought (leaving it to philosophers to explore the reverse: what a marginal discourse of rabbis in Roman Palestine could have taught the sage of Königsberg). Throughout, I reflect on the value and limits of this methodological experiment: analogical reconstruction, or conceptual translation, that is, using one system of thought to fill gaps in another.

THE CHARACTERS OF KANT’S PRAGMATIC ANTHROPOLOGY

Kant certainly does not advise leaping directly from the Is of anthropology to the Ought of morality. As his understanding of the latter develops—marked by the first Critique (1781) and the Groundwork (1785) but also by lectures on moral philosophy throughout his career—he tends to stress that on the contrary, in terms of human agency, there is a gap between anthropology and moral philosophy. Morality is the space of law and freedom; anthropology is empirically conditioned, which constrains agency. Kant presents his anthropology as a species of applied morality or as a proving ground in which to test out moral norms—not as a basis for morality.

Recent studies, however, have bridged that apparent gap in Kant’s system by showing how his anthropology extends morality “downward,” so to speak. Rather than the pure, rational, abstract morality of the agent of the Groundwork—the morality of an agent that “does not borrow the least thing from acquaintance with him (from anthropology) but gives to him, as a rational being, laws a priori”—these studies show that Kant also needed an “impure,” practical, and embodied anthropology, in order to apply the moral a priori to a posteriori knowledge of actual human beings.⁷ Rather than limiting the normative program of his anthropology to either a retroactive application of moral laws to specific cases or an instrumental “doctrine of prudence,” Kant stresses that one must observe humanity to teach and internalize morals.⁸ His observations of moral character in all its forms, including anthropology, are always already “value-embedded.”⁹

This mediating role of anthropology concerning moral norms is reflected in Kant’s uses of the label “pragmatic” as well as his gossipy, offensive, eclectic, “popular,” and original tributary of what looks more like cultural anthropology today: his lectures/textbook unit on “characteristic features” (Charakteristik).¹⁰

I do not use the term offensive lightly when describing this part of Kant’s course and writings devoted to the characteristic features of different human types. Like other areas of his work where his anthropology arose (especially his aesthetics and racial theory), others have long, widely, and rightly noted that Kant’s racism is strongest, or at least most obvious, in this domain of his thought. Nor am I persuaded by strenuous efforts to reinterpret him or argue that he changed his mind. Thus, as I pursued my analogical reading and borrowing of several concepts from his anthropology, I was led to reread it in the opposite direction: against the grain of his Charakteristik, as I reexamined the historical archive and context where Kant formulated his racial anthropology. This yielded another essay, critically rather than experimentally oriented, responding to literature on the racism of Kant’s anthropology and its implications for how and why we read Kant today.¹¹ I hope that readers of this chapter and my essay will arrive at a creative antagonism between the two, using the essay to critique this chapter, just as they reread this chapter in order to seek the proverbial baby of Kant’s anthropology in its vile bathwater. Since the goal of this chapter, read for the first time on its own, is not to probe Kant’s system per se but to read his anthropology selectively in order to rethink an analogous area of rabbinic discourse, I ask readers to suspend the valid but irreconcilable axiom that it is problematic to do anything constructive with his anthropology without critiquing it.

Beyond this temporary and tactical suspension of the claim that Kant’s racism causes major problems for his entire system—as often argued, including by my other essay—I would add (without yet being able to prove against myself) that it is legitimate to borrow concepts from the racist system he built without accepting all of the uses to which he put those concepts. In this case, I argue that his anthropological concept of “character” can clarify a lacuna in the early Palestinian rabbis’ own way of thinking, without using Kant’s concept to foster universalism or a hierarchy of character types, as I think he does. On the contrary, by exploring differences arising from translating Kant’s concept into a rabbinic mode of thought, I question his uses of his own ideas.

A second objection to this enterprise concerns the rabbis’ idea of derekh erets: that it, too, is universalist, hierarchical, and even racist, at least in their uses of it, and so it has the same contaminated and contaminating potential in their thought (as well as the same need for parallel critique and more patient dialectic) if it is to be translated. While there are a few passages in rabbinic texts where the function of the term derekh erets might support that objection, none of them are from the early period covered here—in this corpus, the rabbis are more vague about the borderlines of race and ethnicity (or ethnic/racialized religion) they drew in the Babylonian Talmud, Palestinian midrash, and even in some early legal texts. Early derekh erets discourse often seems to be addressed to Jews and proto-Christians, specifically to pietists and circles of the sages, as its ethical norms and rules of protocol would be unintelligible in other contexts. Yet the discourse also questions humanity in its universal form—those who suffer and strive in the raw world of death, sex, and labor—without erecting a Jew/Gentile boundary. If there is an antagonism here, a need to critique derekh erets in terms of rabbinic “racism,” it would have to be the antagonism between earlier (Tannaitic) and later (Amoraic) sources, requiring a comparative study of another kind, which also does not exist.

As the Talmud says, gufa, “the body”: now back to the matter at hand. The first task of this analogy is to show how scholars have rediscovered the very narrow bridge that Kant built between anthropology and morality; one we will recross when we come to the same gap in the early discourse of derekh erets. After clarifying Kant’s definition of “pragmatic” and the moral theory he buries in that definition, I explore how Kant’s projected synthesis between anthropology and moral philosophy takes shape in his observation of humanity’s “characteristic features” and the concept of “character” that stands behind them. Those key terms (pragmatic, prudence, character) draft his faint blueprint for the relationship between anthropology and morality.

The Pragmatic World

Kant defines pragmatic both negatively and positively.¹² In his negative definition, he opposes it to alternative ways of doing anthropology: physiological and scholastic/speculative. Physiological anthropology, in Kant’s historical context, was mired in the material basis of thought: “sources of the phenomena” that we experience.¹³ It did not even rise to the level of empirical psychology (the closest thing to anthropology, in Kant’s view), instead remaining a popular anatomy that tried “to give itself a comprehensive character with the name ‘Anthropology’ or ‘Philosophy.’”¹⁴ Kant’s immediate target here was Ernst Platner, whose Anthropology for Physicians and Men of Worldly Wisdom (1772) appeared the same year that Kant began teaching the subject, occasioning his famous programmatic letter to Marcus Herz (1773). Rejecting Platner’s “subtle and, in my view, eternally futile inquiries as to the manner in which bodily organs are connected with thought,” Kant envisioned his own anthropology as a study of “phenomena and their laws” and “the sources of all the [practical] sciences” (my emphasis).¹⁵ He sought what is particular to human experience in human nature, not in human anatomy.

Similarly, Kant opposes “pragmatic” to scholastic/speculative anthropology (which he also associated with Platner). He distinguishes the two in terms of their sources and purpose.¹⁶ Platner et al.’s sources were things of nature that they misinterpreted as causes of human conduct. Their purpose was abstract cognition of those causes.¹⁷ Kant’s textbook example—explicitly attacking Descartes but, implicitly, Platner—is the faculty of memory. It is all very well to meditate on “traces of impressions remaining in the brain,” but this “theoretical speculation is a pure waste of time,” for one “does not know the cranial nerves and fibers.” Even if one did, one would not be able to use this knowledge to modify those impressions. If, however, one studies what is known by observation about the faculty of memory in order to “enlarge it or make it agile,” knowledge becomes “pragmatic.” Pragmatic anthropology is thus distinctive in both its sources—direct observation of humans—and its purpose: to apply knowledge of human nature, derived from such observations, back to human behavior. Hence the two-way traffic between anthropology and moral philosophy resurfaces within pragmatic anthropology itself. One observes human conduct in order to derive not merely its empirical regularities but also a clear picture of the human agent to whom moral laws must apply. Anthropological observations have normative value: they shape the scope and application of morality, even though morality per se does not depend on them. This is where Kant’s “pragmatic” domain verges on an “impure ethics,” without becoming relativism.

Kant’s positive definition of “pragmatic” hinges on the specific sphere where he sees anthropological knowledge not merely as an accessory to moral laws but also as bearing a normative force of its own: the sphere where it shapes knowledge of ourselves and others as well as our conduct. He calls this sphere “the world,” as opposed to the “school” of his scholastic competitors. The human being, from a pragmatic point of view, is a “citizen of the world” (Weltbürger). Anthropology avoids egoism by teaching us to see ourselves in relation to our species as a whole and avoids anthropocentrism by linking our species to the nonhuman world. At the same time, by teaching us what is distinctive about our nature as humans, anthropology fulfills our “final end” (letzter Zweck) by leading us to the self-knowledge of which we are uniquely capable. Anthropology, therefore, “deserves to be called knowledge of the world” (Weltkenntnis), rather than knowledge of humans as merely one among many “creatures of the earth.”¹⁸ Anthropology is not called “knowledge of the world” because humans are the world but because it helps us to be in the world as the hybrid natural/moral beings (“earthly being endowed with reason”) that we are.¹⁹ It acts on us pragmatically by redefining what counts as useful knowledge (“not merely for the school but rather for life”) and widening the scope of our self-knowledge beyond “noteworthy details” to “the relation as a whole in which they stand and in which everyone takes his place”: in a word, the world.²⁰

What good is this pragmatic self-knowledge? Kant’s answer is hard to grasp because it is practical rather than theoretical, yet it is not merely instrumental. When we develop his pragmatic point of view, we aim to “use” others for prosocial rather than selfish ends: the “pragmatic predisposition [Anlage]” is to “use other human beings skillfully for [one’s] purposes.”²¹ Out of context, this definition of anthropology seems to be the self-interested study of Others—a fear that haunts the modern field.²² In context, however, it simply places the pragmatic between two other predispositions: the “technical,” the exercise of skill, and the “moral,” or the exercise of pure reason. Kant argues that we must develop our ability to “use” one another to moral rather than merely instrumental ends and for the collective good: “to come out of the crudity of mere personal force and to become a well-mannered (if not yet moral) being destined for concord.”²³ Here, again, the pragmatic stands between raw skill and pure morality. It is a form of practical reason that is adapted to living with others. The pragmatic is a mode of self-cultivation concerning others (a sort of “people skills”), directed to fulfilling our telos as members of the human species. In pragmatic anthropology, as in education generally, we can learn to “use” others to more fully become, as individuals, what we already are as a species: social beings.²⁴

Prudence between Anthropology and Morality

This triad of technical, pragmatic, and moral abilities in the 1798 textbook is mirrored in the program for Kant’s anthropology that he had already outlined in his 1773 letter to Herz. He defined pragmatic anthropology, or “knowledge of the world,” as “a very pleasant empirical study [Beobachtungslehre],” which he aimed to turn into a “preliminary exercise in skill [Geschicklichkeit], prudence [Klugheit], and even wisdom [Weisheit].”²⁵ From a developmental standpoint, he suggested, the pragmatic is situated between these other predispositions: we use our hands in nature and other people in society; whereas, in morality, we submit to a “law of duty.”²⁶ Each predisposition marks a different stage in human progress. Yet within the middle stage, as we cultivate our pragmatic predisposition, individuals work on refining all three abilities. In this effort, again, the middle term is the crucial mediator: prudence is at once the supreme technical skill and the art of practical wisdom. “All pragmatic doctrines are doctrines of prudence, where for all our skills we also have the means to make proper use of everything.”²⁷ Prudence is not the pure morality of the Groundwork, but it is not normatively null either. Prudence elevates skill, and verges on wisdom, by making all of our human abilities useful, not unlike Aristotle’s “practical wisdom” (phronēsis), in contrast to theoretical wisdom (sophia).²⁸

This mediating role of prudence accounts for Kant’s conflations between prudence and skill, as well as for places where prudence brushes up against the pure realm of moral reason. As he said about his textbook: “If we are to speak of a book as an opus [. . .] then its end can be defined from a threefold point of view: how the human can become 1. more shrewd [gescheuter], 2. more prudent [klüger; geschickter], and 3. more wise: i.e., from a pragmatic, technical-practical, and moral point of view.—The pragmatic point of view is the one [on the] basis of which the others are formed.”²⁹

Here, skill (the technical predisposition) seems to change places with prudence (the pragmatic one). The pragmatic is identified with shrewdness, a “lower” exercise of practical reason than prudence: “A shrewd human being is one who judges correctly and practically, but simply.” Yet from a pragmatic point of view, “experience can make a shrewd human being prudent,” turning a shrewd mind into a more versatile one.³⁰ This is essentially the viewpoint of an educator, who focuses on what a person “makes of himself³¹ as a free-acting being, or can or should make of himself.”³² Insofar as it helps us to integrate all of our predispositions, the pragmatic integrates these stages of practical pedagogy even though, in Kant’s system, they correspond to starkly distinct ways of exercising our will (skill/prudence to nature, morality to freedom).³³

Just as prudence interchanges with skill, it also brushes against the “higher” term in the triad of the pragmatic point of view: morality. Indeed it has recently been argued that Kant attributed independent or semi-independent moral norms to prudence apart from his autonomous laws of pure morality.³⁴ These prudential norms seem to be grounded in both pursuing one’s happiness and acquiring and applying useful knowledge of other people.³⁵ These norms may indicate crucial areas where Kant’s anthropology converges with his moral philosophy, suggesting that Kant’s pragmatic and pedagogical interests in human nature and society bear normative implications that cannot be expressed as rational imperatives or a “universal moral law.” Prudence is, rather, a response to a human relationship: “Skillfulness is directed toward things; prudence, toward human beings.” For example, “The watchmaker is skilled if he makes a perfect watch; but if he knows how to bring it to the customer quickly because he repairs it according to fashion, then he is prudent.” Furthermore, because human beings make things, and things are made for them, to gain prudence (“knowledge of the human being”) is to gain the most important skill of all: the skill of “using” human beings, and through them, of using things.³⁶ Again, this “use” of people is not instrumental or self-interested; its end is the good of the species: happiness. Prudence is not founded on rational principles, and it is not quite wisdom (the use of reason to “judge about the true worth of things”). However, prudence does “use and apply” what one learns about humanity for constructive human ends. Like skill with things (technique), the end of cultivating this skill with humans (prudence) is our “well-being” in life.³⁷ Prudence, as the normative function of the pragmatic point of view, refracts knowledge of the human world back onto the human world—approached as an end in itself.³⁸

We have reviewed what pragmatic anthropology is knowledge of (the human world), what it teaches (how to use things and people as we make ourselves civilized), and what its good is (happiness in the world). But what methods can we use to obtain knowledge from others and use it to remake ourselves, in a civilized world, so that we progress toward happiness as a species? In short, how can we become prudent? According to Kant, the best way is through “observations of others”; a method similar to what anthropologists today call “participant-observation.”³⁹ It is not enough to “know the world”; one must also “have the world” (die Welt haben), for the former “only understands the play that one has watched, while the other has participated in it.”⁴⁰ No less than the pulpit’s didactic morality, the practical morality of pragmatic anthropology is useless as mere theory. However, Kant sees pernicious obstacles to accurate participant-observation (not to mention self-observation), especially the obstacle that “in the field,” so to speak, we encounter people under empirical conditions that have shaped their behavior into habit (second nature) rather than human nature, the object of pragmatic anthropology.⁴¹ We observe society, not humanity. To access human nature, therefore, a pragmatic observer must look not for habit but for character.

Two Senses of Character

Like prudence, Kant’s character (Charakter) places pragmatic anthropology squarely between empirical and moral views of human nature. In its singular, indivisible sense (“character purely and simply”), character is the individual’s capacity for practical morality.⁴² In this sense, we say that someone “has character” in general. They adopt “definite practical principles” and resolve to follow them rather than to “fly off hither and yon, like a swarm of gnats.”⁴³ Those principles adhere to “the formal element of the will.” At its origin, then, character is no less lawlike than the morality of the “good will” in the Groundwork (although with prudence, the universal form of character is more negative maxim than categorical imperative).⁴⁴ Moral character, in this indivisible singular sense, is what any human being “is prepared to make of himself.” In other words, moral character is the fulfillment of an individual’s “pragmatic” predisposition: the moment of epiphany when one internalizes principles that one has learned from experience as an invariant “property of the will.”⁴⁵ As Kant says, “Like a kind of rebirth, a certain solemnity of making a vow to oneself,” moral character is not natural or innate but “acquired.”⁴⁶ When this fit between the empirical individual and their rational principles is strong, practical morality manifests as active, internal, self-consistent “conduct of thought” (Denkungsart) and not passive “sensibility” (Sinnesart).⁴⁷ Moral character, in this absolute singular sense, is an exercise of rational freedom to transcend one’s empirical character. Through character, one is not born, but becomes a human.

That said, Kant is curious about humans’ various and relative empirical characteristics. His anthropology teaches prudence: how “citizens of the world” should interact with other people for mutual happiness. This requires not only inner certainty about what one ought to become but also observations of humans as we are. To that end, the second half of Kant’s textbook, on “that which is characteristic” in humanity (das Charakteristische), spans four scales of analysis: person, sexes, peoples, and species.⁴⁸ Whereas the framework for the first half of his course was empirical psychology, focusing on inner qualities or faculties using methods of self-observation, in this highly original unit on empirical “character” (Charakteristik), Kant adopted the opposite approach. He systematized his observations of what can be known of human nature “from the outside,”⁴⁹ echoing his distinction in the first Critique between such “empirical character (sensibilities)” and inner moral character.⁵⁰

As Munzel shows, Kant aspires to turn the former into the latter, integrating empirical with moral character. He aims for a “synthetic unity” where morality is the basis for culture without substituting for it.⁵¹ Yet in this “popular” mode of his anthropology course, he seems to bracket that lofty goal, simply displaying a range of human characters under passive categories such as “temperament” (Temperament), here equated with “sensibility” (Sinnesart), in other words, the very opposite of the principled Denkungsart of moral character.⁵² His course on Charakteristik surveys the flux of human actions and reactions in an externally conditioned cosmos. It seems to contrast human types in a protobehaviorist way: as patterned responses to stimuli, regulated by inner motives (desire, inclination, will, or weakness). His ideal of the rationally self-governed individual moves to the wings. At center stage is human difference, not unity; under the sign of nature and necessity, not reason and freedom. This self-consciously “popular” program appealed to a taste for the varieties of humankind in provincial Prussia, and here, Kant dabbles in doctrines like the four humors or physiognomy—albeit limited to “observed effects” rather than causes, to intuitive “illustration and presentation” rather than concepts.⁵³ This part of his course resembles what many college students still seem to expect from their anthropology courses: classification and anecdotes about the varieties of humankind in terms of how we typically feel, appear, and act.

Pragmatic Normativity: Prudence and Character

Kant’s Charakteristik, however, is more deeply “value-embedded,” more closely intertwined with morality, than it may appear. This part of the course, in both textbook and lecture formats, shows Kant repeatedly lining up both aspects of prudence with character—also in the second, empirical sense of character. Prudence, as the skill of “using” or getting along well with people in the world, is well served by studying human features that are hard to understand or that cannot be understood in rational terms. Physiognomy, for instance, is a useful proxy for moral character. What we observe of someone’s face and gestures “makes us suspicious even before we have inquired about his morals”—and there is something to our intuition. It cannot be expressed systematically according to a rational rule, and, therefore, physiognomy cannot teach us to predict how people actually think. But it can still cultivate our “taste [. . .] in morals, manners, and customs, in order to promote human relations and knowledge of human beings.”⁵⁴ Similarly, prudence as a form of social normativity, directed to the welfare of the human world—ultimately, to the happiness of our species—has much to learn from empirical character. Rather than the origins of national characters, for instance, pragmatic anthropology can teach prudence on a geopolitical scale: what each nation can “expect from the other and how each could use the other to its own advantage.”⁵⁵ Finally, on the scale of the human species, prudence joins empirical character at the point where our “use” of one another has a civilizing effect: education. Conceding that it cannot be proven on the basis of certain knowledge about human nature, Kant reaffirms his faith that, through education, humanity can progress to happiness (becoming “the creator of its own good fortune”). By way of “prudence and moral illumination,” he insists, each person can be “educated [erzogen] to the good.”⁵⁶ Here again, prudence brushes against morality just at the point where norms enter society: education in practical morality, the pragmatic domain par excellence.

So Kant does grant an important role to anthropology, the empirical study of character, within prudential norms. By studying human beings, we can make better use of others and move incrementally toward happiness, removing obstacles to our natural development and opting for more evolved forms of social organization that benefit the species.⁵⁷ It is hard to see, however, how an education in human characteristics—in the plural and empirical sense—could relate to the formation of moral “character” in the singular, indivisible, and lawlike sense. The chasm between morality and anthropology still looms: anthropology is normatively null if not an obstacle in its own right. Like a preacher who tries to “deduce morality” from history, it is a natural human tendency to try to establish moral principles on the basis of culture. But, Kant maintains, that impulse is entirely backward. We should reform our culture in the image of moral rules, established on the basis of reason.⁵⁸ How could anthropology offer these? If anything, it risks turning a student into a man without qualities: a mere “imitator (in moral matters)” who derives his moral character from the study of others rather than “a source that he has opened by himself.”⁵⁹ The study of characters, using outer traits and sensibilities, opposes moral character as one’s own inner “conduct of thought.” The “rules” that Kant derives from his observations are useful regularities of human conduct, not a substitute for moral principles.

Despite that obstacle to reconciling morality and anthropology in Kant’s system as a whole, within his pragmatic point of view, he does sketch a tentative bridge between the two. I believe that is what he means when he (reportedly) says that “morality should be combined with knowledge of humanity.” If ought implies can, as it does, then one must observe what humans are (our nature) in order to know if we can do (in the pragmatic world) what we should. This is entirely different from trying to justify our actions a priori: empirical and moral characters are distinct in principle but coextensive in reality. Therefore, the normative role of pragmatic anthropology is that it can teach us to modify our empirical character in accord with prudence. “Everything that bears no relation to the prudent conduct of human beings, does not belong to anthropology,” and vice versa: “Only that from which a prudent use in life can immediately be drawn, belongs to anthropology.”⁶⁰ The prudent is not the good, but, within our social world, it does have normative value. It serves as a check on morality’s penchant for inflexible, egoistical, abstract, or inapplicable laws. Prudence helps us to live in a civilized way by facing our nature as we are: normativity in medias res.

Analogical Interlude

Having mapped the relationship of anthropology and morality within Kant’s “pragmatic point of view,” we can draw an analogy to rabbinic derekh erets discourse that stands to clarify a central issue about the latter. But first, a word on analogy. Analogy is not homology. Analogical reconstruction does not reduce concepts to one another, let alone conflate systems of thought. Rather, the premise of this analogy is that one relationship (gap, inconsistency, contradiction) in one system can appear in a new light (be “reconstructed”) by looking at another system of thought containing a formally similar relationship. Just as we define a difficult word in one language by translating it into another language (“In German, one would say . . .”), thereby comparing sets of pure relations between terms in the two systems (rather than the terms’ original etymologies or decontextualized dictionary meanings), so, too, can we clarify a difficult relation between concepts by translating it into another relation between concepts. We are not obliged to know either “language” (system of concepts) perfectly as a whole (as if that were possible). Nor must we capture the conceptual relation in the target “language” perfectly. Rather, like any good translation, analogy helps us to reflect on a relationship between elements in our source(s) by exploring something that is, in some sense, like it. When the two systems of thought do not correspond, valuable questions can be asked about why they do not and can help to clarify our original problem (“That aspect of the analogy does not hold for this system, because . . .”). Like translation, analogy enhances meaning not despite but because there is never a perfect fit between the original and the target. In fact, friction between partly mismatched, partly congruent concepts can emphasize the contours of the wholes where they are embedded.

In this case, our analogy is between (a) the anthropology/morality relation in Kant’s “pragmatic point of view”—which relies on his concept of prudence, his study of empirical human characteristics, and his idea of moral character—and (b) a parallel set of relations within the discourse of derekh erets. This rabbinic discourse also treats anthropology (in the general sense of a theory of human nature); it is also empirically grounded in the observation/description of humanity, and it also offers (men, normatively) an education in moral skills.⁶¹

I suggest that the conceptual structure of Kant’s anthropology is further like—that is, formally analogous to—the conceptual structure of derekh erets discourse in one area where derekh erets is notoriously opaque. By setting up an analogy between the two systems, we can reconstruct that difficult area. The difficulty is in the relationship between the moral aspect of derekh erets and the rest of this term’s myriad meanings. Derekh erets clearly involves morality, but not in a consistent or comprehensive way. Efforts to cherry-pick prominent instances, thereby imposing the interpreter’s theologies on the early rabbis’ conceptual system, have not done justice to the discursive integrity of derekh erets as a whole. On the contrary, there must be some relationship between the vast majority of this term’s mundane, nonexplicitly moral instances, on one hand, and the passages where it reveals a fundamental, even cosmic moral order, on the other. That relation, however, has not been—and perhaps cannot be—uncovered from within the discourse itself: every philological analysis, however scrupulous, has ended with a leap into the scholar’s own theology at precisely the point that he tries to explain how these senses of derekh erets fit together.

However, if we examine several ways in which derekh erets is like—formally analogous to—Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” on human nature, we will be better positioned to see that they resemble one another in this respect as well. Like Kant, the early rabbis who formulated and transmitted derekh erets were concerned with the relationship between anthropology—the Is of human nature and the empirical, observed regularities of human conduct—and morality: the Ought to which those observations should be applied and which, at a deeper level, is the very law of their existence. They did not state that relationship explicitly with reference to derekh erets, but there are enough interconnections among the different uses of this term to show us how they may have done so—if we turn a Kantian “pragmatic point of view” on their sources.

DEREKH ERETS: ANOTHER PRAGMATIC POINT OF VIEW

As we recall, Kant’s central category in his triad of human predispositions and abilities is prudence, which is fully coextensive with pragmatic anthropology in general: both subject matter (“the prudent conduct of human beings”) and application (a “prudent use in life”).⁶² Hence, the empirical evidence that Kant saw as worth collecting, and what he sought in it, is also defined by prudence. “For we study human beings in order to become more prudent, which prudence becomes a science.”⁶³ The procedure of empirical anthropology is to study characteristic features of humans (by categories like sex, race, nation, etc.) in order to find regularities of their conduct. Then pragmatic anthropology, informed by prudence (the skill of knowing how to “use” other people for the common good), draws consequences from those regularities about how to live in the world in a more civilized way. This is the normative function of prudence: it establishes what we are capable of becoming as individuals in society, based on observations of how human beings typically think, feel, and act. Prudence thus plays an essential role in mediating anthropology (the study of what people make of themselves in the world) with its empirical basis (the observation of human characteristics and regularities of conduct).

The normativity of prudence is not morality. Morality comes from a law (rather than from observed regularities); it is solidified as an individual’s inner conduct of thought (rather than as sensibility and temperament); and it results in having character (not merely in sharing characteristics with other humans who occupy the same particular categories). Yet prudence also mediates the pragmatic aim of anthropology (educating us to live in the civilized world) with the, systematically speaking, separate province of morality (because we need to know about our characteristics and behaviors in order to determine whether we can do what we should). Prudence thus confronts human nature as the limit of human freedom. It shows practical morality what it has to work with: only laws of moral character that are “joined to knowledge of humanity” can be called practical and not merely theoretical.

Derekh erets plays an analogous role to Kant’s prudence in both respects: it mediates between rabbinic anthropology and its empirical basis as well as between empirical and moral human character. First, like prudence, derekh erets is both a means of self-observation and an end of rabbinic anthropology. It describes norms of human conduct and applies those norms usefully to our conduct, becoming a branch of study unto itself. Derekh erets, in its sense of manners or know-how (see app. item 7), is analogous to Kant’s Charakeristik.⁶⁴ It encapsulates typical patterns of human thought, emotion, and action. It is also like Kant’s prudence because it documents human characteristics with a pragmatic final end (Endzweck/telos): to help a rabbinic student live well in the world by aligning his conduct with those patterns. That is the term’s most-common sense (app. 7): it covers a range of norms in every sphere of life, from the privy to the bedchamber, study house to Roman road. In this sense, derekh erets is the precondition for life in society: early rabbinic sources do not forbid contact with Jews who are unlearned in the oral Torah, but they do insist that “he who does not have [i.e., know] Scripture, Mishnah, or derekh erets is not of the settled world,”⁶⁵ just as later sources enjoin rabbis to forswear any traffic with such individuals.⁶⁶ Much as Kant described pragmatic anthropology as useful “knowledge of the world,” for would-be “citizens of the world,” derekh erets served as rabbinic grounds for membership in a universal society (yishuv, oikoumenē) that it conjured into being. Much as Weltkenntnis was aimed at better living as a Weltbürger, rabbis promoted derekh erets as a mode of empirical inquiry that projected, and so created, a normative social horizon: an education in something like “prudence.”

As a collection of observations on humanity, with a prudential normativity, derekh erets became a telos of rabbinic anthropology: an integral subdiscipline. It was taught and transmitted as its own area of study (see app. item 8), composed of such norms. It was a less-vaunted part of the curriculum than Scripture or Mishnah (e.g., one could teach “rules of derekh erets” in a state of minor ritual impurity, but not those subjects).⁶⁷ Yet it was not fully distinct from other sets of legal or nonlegal norms, in rabbinic tradition or in Scripture. Rabbis derived derekh erets rules exegetically, reading Scripture as a participant-observer of human nature like themselves and articulating normative conclusions on that basis with formulas such as “Scripture comes to teach you derekh erets from the Torah” (citing a verse as a rule of conduct).⁶⁸ Alternatively, they invoked derekh erets as “best practices” (see app. item 5) to apply a rabbinic law or to interpret a law in Scripture. For instance, attributing meaning to the redundancy “hunteth and catcheth” (yatsod tsed), they extended a hunter’s obligation to cover the blood of his prey with dust (Lev. 17:13) to the slaughter of domesticated animals: “It is best practice [derekh erets] that one should eat meat only with this preparation.”⁶⁹ The term here cannot mean simply “good manners”: at stake is the scope of a commandment. Derekh erets includes the “skill” of applying Scriptural norms in life, just as Scripture can teach about, or speak in the language of, derekh erets.⁷⁰

Social norms and the observation of everyday life also intersect within the concept of derekh erets. Many rabbis assumed that if we know how people normally talk or act, or what normally happens in our world (see app. item 6), it might clarify how we should apply norms in Scripture or earlier rabbinic traditions. They sometimes invoked that very assumption to apply those inherited norms more strictly. For instance, because the “usual way” (derekh erets) for a man to be angry in his household is to attack (“cast his eyes upon”) its youngest member, when the Israelites challenged Moses, they upended this social norm by attacking its most senior member. They had violated the social hierarchy between great and small (reading “the people did chide [vayyarev] with Moses,” Exodus 17:2, as “the people made themselves greater than Moses”).⁷¹ Therefore, they “transgressed [averu ‘al] the line of justice.” It is not that they did something wrong or immoral, a priori, but they misapplied a social norm that could have been applied less wrongly or even constructively. Derekh erets is not a prescriptive norm here; the rabbis mean that it is more normal for a man to abuse his children than the reverse—not that it is good! Rather, derekh erets here is a social “rule of thumb” for narrowing a general rabbinic norm.⁷² Conversely, rabbis used the same assumption to relax their inherited norms. In these cases, their source’s “manner of speaking” (app. 6) need not be taken literally. For instance, Scripture says to recite Shema “when going on your way,” but this refers to the time when one normally goes out, not literally during one’s daily commute.⁷³ Hence “Scripture spoke [only] derekh erets”—i.e., “[only] in a manner of speaking.” Like the formulas “Scripture spoke only of the present” and “Torah spoke according to human language,” the notion seems to be that ordinary language use can restrict or expand a norm beyond how it was literally formulated.⁷⁴ (The formula also functions this way in nonlegal contexts to designate, e.g., items in biblical stories as abnormal or unusual—thus implicitly marking the boundaries of what is normal in nature or society.)

All four of the preceding functions of derekh erets—“best practices” for applying inherited norms (5); “normal” aspects of language, nature, or society (6); “know-how”/“people skills” and the norms of conduct based on them (7); and a body of such rules (8)—bear a normative aspect analogous to Kant’s “prudence.” Like prudence, derekh erets, in all four of these senses, is a way to study human nature, derive norms from it, and navigate such norms in our world. It is an expertise in navigating between the norm and the normal.

The Problem of Morality

The great difficulty within the discursive structure of derekh erets is its relationship to morality. This difficulty arises because none of the previous senses of the term are moral in a deontological sense of good and bad, right and wrong. Nor are they moral in a more specifically Kantian sense: absolute, autonomous norms that we, in an exercise of our rational freedom, internalize in the form of our character and conduct of thought. Rather than moral character, in an absolute and universal sense, the normativity of derekh erets conjoins nature, human nature, and society. Rather than deontological, the normativity of derekh erets, like that of “prudence,” is pragmatic. It concerns the contexts where norms are applied and the room for maneuver that one has in adjusting a given norm to its context. Furthermore, such contexts are overwhelmingly anthropocentric (even if some norms at play in them are emanating from a divine text). The autonomy of Kantian moral law is not prominent, nor is there a clear hierarchy between human and divine norms—no explicit grounding of human morality in divine will and law. The worst sanction for violating norms of derekh erets, exclusion from society (the “settled world”), is a social sanction administered by people—not a moral sanction administered by God.⁷⁵ Perhaps the early rabbis were indeed a bit Kantian, but were they so Durkheimian as to elide that distinction?

Additional senses of derekh erets bear no moral connotations either: natural death (1), intercourse (2), and literal work (3). On the contrary, the first two, originally biblical senses of the term, are explicitly amoral. “Natural death” is defined by opposition to death for moral reasons (karet, premature death by God’s will).⁷⁶ As for sexual intercourse, already in Genesis 19:31, the biblical source for rabbinic derekh erets is a fact of nature: “Our father is old,” says Lot’s daughter, “and there is not a man in the earth to come in unto us after the manner of all the earth (kederekh kol ha’arets).” What the daughters then do with Lot may or may not be moral (perhaps because that phrase scans as an explicit justification, many readers are remarkably easy on them).⁷⁷ Regardless, derekh kol ha’arets is not a moral term: it simply means that sexual intercourse, like death, is universal and natural for all creation. In the rabbinic canon, too, derekh erets in the sense of sex has nothing to do with morality per se. It is listed (with sleep, pleasure, conversation, and laughter) as something that one must restrain in order to “acquire Torah,” just as it is later listed with other things (travel, wealth, work, wine, sleep, hot baths, and bloodletting) as “harmful in quantity and beneficial in small measure” for one’s health.⁷⁸ Sex is not intrinsically moral: it is normal, albeit dangerously distracting for a scholar. Finally, like sex, derekh erets in the sense of literal work (3) can be incompatible with the study of Torah, but that does not make it moral or immoral. For example, it seems better to “accept the yoke of Torah [study]” because if one does, one may expect the “yoke of political [life] and the yoke of derekh erets [= literal work]” to be miraculously lifted.⁷⁹ However, nobody explicitly says that if one fails to prioritize Torah over derekh erets, one is transgressing a commandment or otherwise committing a sin.⁸⁰ Rather, explicit criticisms, or critical remarks in stories, indicate at most a degree of social pressure within rabbinic circles.⁸¹ At issue, again, are pragmatic rather than moral norms. (Later, and perhaps even among the earliest rabbis, the norm runs in the opposite direction: an “inheritance” offers one the freedom to study Torah.⁸²) Death, sex, and labor: these are categories for how things are, “the way of the world.” When they bear upon how things ought to be, when human embodied reality overlaps with divine and social norms, the discourse remains in a pragmatic register that strives for a prudent hierarchy of norms in particular contexts.

Why, then, is derekh erets so often seen as a moral axiom, even as the foundation for all normative order in rabbinic thought? It depends to some extent on which sources one prefers and whether one tries to synthesize them rather than first weighing and distinguishing all (early) senses of the term equally. Kadushin, for instance, assimilates all instances of derekh erets to his “concept of the ethical as such.”⁸³ Relying on Seder Eliyahu (a late and altogether peculiar rabbinic work), he defines derekh erets as the moral basis for the study and practice of Torah.⁸⁴ A subject of rabbinic law does not face a choice between morality and dogged fealty to tradition, Kadushin argues, because both morality and Torah are based on a universal “value-concept” of human nature called derekh erets. Kadushin thus uses derekh erets to argue against his own reductive version of Kantian morality.⁸⁵ For Kadushin, derekh erets points to an “organic” rather than rationalistic morality, where Torah norms are grounded not in the absolute but in nature/human nature, thereby avoiding the individual’s moral imperative to exercise Kant’s “good will” and actively choose conformity to the moral law of Torah. Kant’s supposed hierarchy is reversed: Torah is based on morality, which is in turn based on universal natural law (derekh erets). For Kadushin, morality, like Torah, is given. And there is no essential gap between Torah, which is unique to Israel, and morality, which applies to everyone. Indeed, these later sources like Seder Eliyahu say that other nations can “have” (i.e., know and practice) derekh erets even if they are idolatrous.⁸⁶ One can have derekh erets even without Torah.

In a similar but less radically humanist and more theologically traditional vein, Novak glosses derekh erets as a natural law tradition like the Noahide laws: “The general standards of civilization that preceded the giving of the Torah and are considered the preconditions for the Torah’s giving and acceptance.”⁸⁷ Like Kadushin, he holds that derekh erets absorbs the act of accepting a moral law into its own natural givenness and universality. There is no place for Kant’s “good will” in freely (i.e., rationally) taking the law on oneself. On the contrary, to the extent that Novak does allow a connection even between positive (rational, human-made) law and derekh erets, he naturalizes the former’s moral grounding in the latter. Because rabbinic law (oral Torah, tradition) was based not primarily on revelation but on human reason, as Novak holds, the rabbis needed an idea of natural law as “a limit and corrective of positive law made by humans.”⁸⁸ Like “repairing the world” (tiqqun ha‘olam), that role was played by derekh erets.⁸⁹ When early rabbis said, for example, “If there is no derekh erets, there is no Torah,” and vice versa, a Novakian would gloss them as tempering the moral authority of oral Torah by recalling its bond with natural law.⁹⁰

Because the phrase derekh erets literally conjoins the normative (“way”) with the natural (“world”) and because both Kadushin and Novak seek alternatives to a Kantian morality grounded in the rational will, it makes sense that they appeal to derekh erets as the “natural” foundation for both human and Torah norms. Their syntheses of its various senses, however, are supported not by the discourse in early sources but by some later sources filtered through their own modern theologies. Some Amoraic sources contain dicta like “If the Torah had not been given, we would have learned derekh erets from the rooster,” that is, sexual conduct (2) adhering to social norms (7).⁹¹ This may sound like natural law, yet this dictum is not a definition of derekh erets; it may be simply a convenient euphemism. Other Amoraic sources explore aspects of natural law theory without the term.⁹²

Only in one sense might early rabbinic derekh erets bear unambiguously moral force. Even this sense, “good works” (4), never surfaces in a context where it is sharply distinct from literal work (3).⁹³ However, Flusser and S. Safrai do support a moral interpretation with contextual and comparative evidence. According to their analyses, this moral meaning was the earliest rabbinic sense of the term derekh erets after the senses of death (1) and sex (2) in its biblical predecessor. For Flusser, “the original and fundamental sense of the term ‘derekh erets’ was pure practical morality”; a practical morality that Qumran sectarians, Jewish Christians, and protorabbis envisioned as both universally imperative and independent of the Torah.⁹⁴ Flusser argues that this idea originated in the “Two Ways” morality of 1QS, the Didache, and other sources, which posits a duality of the “way of life” and “way of death,” absolute good and absolute evil, mapping neatly onto a social schism between the elect and the wicked. Such moral dualism, Flusser argues, morphed into the one-“way” model of early rabbis, who advocated adherence to a universal “path” of morality. The “way of life” lost its opposition to the “way of death” and became simply “the way of the world.”⁹⁵ S. Safrai supports Flusser’s conjectures via closer analyses of the term.⁹⁶ He agrees that homilies in Avot and some exegetical works reflect a common stock of moral discourse such as the “Two Ways.” Safrai also agrees that this discourse developed into the piety (hasidut) of Jesus and contemporary Jewish sages and, eventually, into rabbinic derekh erets. This mode of piety valued action over study but did not neglect the latter—on the contrary, in some cases, it held stricter legal restrictions, presenting itself as supererogatory (“above and beyond”) the law.

In this sense, and only in this sense, we could speak of derekh erets as expressing a properly moral norm. Its other senses cover nature and human nature’s regularities of conduct and articulate norms for aligning one’s conduct with that order, according to criteria and sanctions to be applied and sanctioned within human society. In Kant’s terms, they are pragmatic. Alternatively, they add nuances or strictures to Torah-law. But only in this sense of pious “good works” (4) may derekh erets be an absolute moral norm, whether this means observing norms other than Torah, going above and beyond in Torah-observance, or prioritizing good works over scholarly virtues.⁹⁷ Only in this sense does derekh erets mean “morality” and not just a pragmatic good.

But what is so good about it? Standard philological approaches to its meaning founder. Other than a vague association with “deeds,” a “joyful” way of performing commandments, refraining from theft, or, in later sources, philanthropic “good works” like donating money and fostering peace between people, we cannot tell what makes derekh erets in this sense so distinctive—let alone a precondition to receiving the Torah.⁹⁸ On the contrary, most of the term’s early normative force seems to be concentrated in sense (7), proper conduct, which is pragmatic rather than moral. Derekh erets, in that sense (7), clarifies the intent of Scripture; sets paradigms for social and even for divine conduct, instructs would-be sages in manners, and lists the empirical regularities of human behavior. Or, derekh erets refers to natural givens of human experience: death, sex, and labor. But its morality is not clearly defined. Between the useful and the natural, it is difficult to define the good that derekh erets serves. It is a more practical virtue than Torah-study, yet its social orientation is no different from other normative senses, such as legal “best practice” (5) or “know-how” (7). If anything, derekh erets seems like a different—perhaps more sincere or devout—way to do ordinary things. The term’s various contextual senses do not reveal how derekh erets goes beyond natural and social norms. Nor is the historians’ solution—the view that its most common senses (5)–(7) reflect later derivations, or “degradations” of its original, universally moral sense (4)—persuasive, due to vague chronology or circular logic.⁹⁹

Rather than limit the moral dimension of derekh erets to a single sense of the term good deeds (4), an analogy to Kant prevents conflating this term’s confusing semantics with its integrity as a discourse. It bridges what people are and can be—the pragmatic domain—with what they should become, morally speaking. In that respect, derekh erets discourse is much like the precritical, anthropological Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” (not the critical Kant, against whom Kadushin and Novak tried to redefine this term).

Toward a Solution (By Way of Analogy)

Sharpening the analogy to Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” can help clarify how derekh erets bridges not only the natural with the social—not only what is normal with what we take to be normative—but also connects that pragmatic domain with morality. In principle, Kant opposes the pragmatic and the moral, just as he opposes the Is of anthropology to the Ought of morality. But he also outlines three aspects of “pragmatic normativity,” within the pragmatic point of view, which contribute to moral development: (1) skill, (2) character, and (3) education.¹⁰⁰ All three terms illuminate how derekh erets discourse bridges morality with the pragmatic world of anthropology, as well as the order of nature: a potent triad.

First, as a “doctrine of prudence,” the aim of the pragmatic point of view is to teach us to “make proper use of everything,” pursuing the telos of our happiness as a species. Prudence is “skill in the choice of means to one’s own greatest well-being.”¹⁰¹ This includes morality. If one lacks the skill to absorb morality, then one is preaching rather than teaching about humanity: mere “sermons . . . admonitions of which we never tire.” If morality does not change one’s character, then it is not practical morality but sterile theory. However, if, one can make a prudent use of moral teaching (in the rabbis’ case, Torah), it has a transformative effect.

Here lies the second bridge from the anthropological to the moral in derekh erets: Kant’s twin senses of character. Moral character is formed in a different way than our empirical, pragmatic character in the world: by rationally accepting a law of duty (in the rabbis’ case, Torah) rather than by “making of oneself” a good citizen of the world. And yet, insofar as the law of duty is only applicable if we know what we are and can be, moral character does require knowledge of empirical character. Anthropology is a propaedeutic to morality. This is what it entails to be “educated to the good”: via immersion in prudence (a sort of “people skills,” also an aspect of derekh erets), we can learn to live in a more civilized world. Through the cultivation of prudence, pragmatic anthropology—midway between raw technical skill and lofty pure morality—offers us some practical wisdom, even if we cannot define “the good” a priori or adopt moral imperatives as a rational law of conduct.

By integrating prudence, moral character, and education, derekh erets is an applied anthropology no less than Kant’s, and in both cases, morality is a key domain to which it is applied. Derekh erets investigates human nature and helps an individual to cultivate moral character within the given order of nature and society. At the same time, derekh erets teaches prudential normativity that uses human nature and social convention as a basis for evaluating one’s actions, even as such evaluation remains pragmatic rather than moral in an absolute sense.

As a skill, derekh erets, like prudence, offers technical “know-how” that helps one to be a better citizen of the world. Yet it also teaches one how to “make proper use” of morality and to “make of oneself” a better person. If derekh erets is not itself character, it is preparation for character. This explains Rabbi Yannai’s question to his Torah-unlearned dinner guest: “So much derekh erets in you, yet I called you a dog!?”¹⁰² He suddenly sees his guest’s good manners (derekh erets in the sense of proper social conduct [7]) not as mere politeness but as flutters of a moral pulse. Other strategic ambiguities between two senses of the term (work [3] and “good works” [4]) could be read in a similar light. The adage “Judge your words before they come from your mouth / and make your works accountable to derekh erets” plays across the gap between the mundane (words; works) and the normative (words of the law; good works).¹⁰³ Again, the presumption is not that an individual is already doing something moral when he speaks or talks, or already has a moral good in mind. Rather, what one finds in the ordinary social world—its words and works—can become a standard of conduct. By means of derekh erets, like Kant’s prudence, one makes the most skillful use of one’s faculties to prepare for character rather than submitting to a “top-down” and purely autonomous moral law. This sort of character is not the result of an imperative or negative maxim any more than it is the result of a divine commandment. It is a projection of the social order onto oneself (and vice versa). Everyday words are remade in the image of law, and deeds are remade in the image of derekh erets. In this respect, it is indeed a point of view “on the basis on which the others are formed.”

This brings us to the final node of analogy between derekh erets discourse and Kant’s “pragmatic point of view”: education. The pragmatic is not the good, as such. However, it helps one to be “educated to the good.” The final end of derekh erets as a form of moral education is not mere “know-how,” “best practices,” or “people skills” in social or legal realms (elite etiquette [7], halakhic scruples [5], etc.). Nor is derekh erets aimed at a purely descriptive analysis of how people “normally” talk, think, or act (6). Rather, those senses of the term as well as its sense of philanthropic “good works” (4) presume that the social order does reflect pragmatic norms—even if through a glass darkly. Hence a pragmatic point of view is a discourse of prudence: it studies what we are in order to know what we can and—within those limits—should become. As a moral educator, the pragmatic anthropologist—whether philosopher or rabbi—does not define the good and conform to it. Rather, they observe the order of nature and human nature so as to make our world, in a human image, relatively better.

CONCLUSION

This chapter has repositioned Kant at the Talmud/Philosophy intersection or, at least, has revealed the possibility of a very different Kant and a very different sort of intersection. Rather than the father of a transcendental logic that one uses to decipher the back-and-forth of a Talmudic argument, we rediscovered the popular, pragmatic (and profoundly problematic) pedagogue of a budding human science.¹⁰⁴ Correspondingly, rather than the dialectics of halakhah, we have encountered the down-to-earth and didactic discourse of rabbinic derekh erets—“the way of the world”—which mediates anthropology with normativity. As these margins of the two canons came into contact, they asked and answered each other’s different articulations of a shared fundamental question: What is the relationship between anthropology and morality?

I argued that a “pragmatic” point of view and the concept of “prudence,” which are Kant’s answer to those questions, can be translated into the early rabbinic discourse of derekh erets. This conceptual translation, or analogical reconstruction, accounts for connections among the latter term’s eight different meanings. Specifically, it strengthens the link between pragmatic and moral aspects of derekh erets discourse, a link that has not been explained by analyses of the sources alone. Kant’s pragmatic anthropology thus serves as more than a comparandum or “think-piece” with respect to early rabbinic thought. It is a clearer response to the rabbis’ own problem: it fills a gap in their system of thought, showing how its internal contradictions could cohere philosophically. At the same time, this approach avoids synthesizing the term’s senses or deriving them all from one “master” sense, a procedure that has hampered analyses of derekh erets by historians and theologians alike.

To recapitulate the chapter’s argument, I began by showing the bridge from anthropology to morality within Kant’s “pragmatic point of view.” Whereas, in Kant’s system, morality is set apart from anthropology, his pragmatic point of view operates as a crucial hinge or mediator between those two areas. It incorporates both a normativity of its own (prudence—our skill of “using” people to make ourselves and society better) and a link with morality (as the empirical limit of moral laws and the zone of their practical application). Just as the pragmatic is, so to speak, in the middle of Kant’s philosophical system—drawing together technical and moral aspects of our capacities and final ends in the social world—so is prudence the centerpiece of pragmatic inquiry, constantly referring the study of human nature back to the direction and progress of civilization. Although it is not equivalent to morality, prudence can be preparation for, and accessory to, our moral formation in three respects: skill, character, and education. Redefining our skills with things in terms of other humans and teaching us “people skills” in our various social capacities, prudence helps us to remake ourselves in the world. Observing and characterizing patterns of human thought, feeling, and action, it sketches the outlines of that upon which a moral law might act. Educating us as “citizens of the world,” it draws us into a practical, sociocentric normativity. Prudence’s outward forms of human knowledge and self-knowledge are not a priori laws, but they are valuable nonetheless.

After an interlude on method, I proposed an analogy between the preceding sketch of Kant’s “pragmatic point of view” and the classical rabbinic discourse of derekh erets; specifically, in terms of how derekh erets also mediates between rabbinic anthropology and morality. First, I showed that the most common senses of derekh erets are translatable by Kant’s “prudence” in terms of how they relate observation and description of nature and society, on one hand, with social norms, on the other. Like Kant’s anthropology, the basic orientation of derekh erets discourse is pragmatic. It offers situational classifications of what is normal or typical as well as rules of conduct applying to, or modeled on, such situations. Its sources are diverse: inherited oral and Scriptural traditions, both legal and nonlegal, and anecdotes or off-the-cuff generalizations. What draws all of these senses together is their use of human society (and, often, the order of nature) as a norm for one’s conduct. Like prudence, derekh erets teaches one how to become a social being: it builds character, in a non-universal sense. The limits of membership in this category are the limits of society, not of morality in general.

Yet to what extent is the normativity of derekh erets also moral? Does it have reference to a good, to some universal horizon beyond the social? Where are God and the commandments in this rabbinic version of the “pragmatic point of view,” given that Scripture “comes to teach you derekh erets from the Torah” and even God’s behavior, at times, makes sense within social conventions of derekh erets?¹⁰⁵ This is the major quandary. Whereas previous studies have defined this moral dimension of derekh erets by privileging one sense of the term, good works (4), or by synthesizing its senses into a theology of “natural law” or “the ethical as such,” I treated each sense of the term as distinct and coequal yet discursively complementary. By analogy to Kant, I argued that derekh erets similarly involves three practical aspects (prudence, character, and education), which structure an agent’s moral formation in the pragmatic sphere of society, as a “citizen of the world.” These practical aspects define the scope of morality, providing criteria for moral self-evaluation and orientation. To the extent that it emphasizes character development and an education in prudence—that is, the skill of living by immanent norms—derekh erets relates anthropology with morality much like Kant’s “pragmatic point of view.” One does not have to posit derekh erets as the foundation of all morality or ascertain those foundations to appreciate its distinctively pragmatic role in bridging observation of norms in the human world—rabbinic anthropology—with the natural order, the normal course of things, and the noumenal brought down to earth. As an education in prudence, derekh erets opens a human-centered, pragmatic point of view on morality that is sparse in other rabbinic discourses: not Torah from Sinai but practical teaching for daily life.

I conclude with a reprise of my interlude on method. What I call translation among systems of thought, or “analogical reconstruction,” has its utility and its pitfalls. I have surely demonstrated some of both. Philological sifting of terms and their contextual senses can only go so far in grasping an ancient discourse whose social context and wider literary context are full of gaps. We need some way to move from terms to discourse—a whole greater than the sum of its parts, where senses intersect, clash, and complement one another under the pressure of culturally inflected, often opaque problems. Too often, solutions to these problems are forced by imposing an external (“historical”) context or monocausal motive (“ideology”) onto our sources. Or, within the philological horizon, one tries to marshal more texts, and an invented “tradition” supplies the missing links between them. Analogy is another way. Like translation, analogy is an act of expressing one system in terms of another. Without pretending that two different formulations say the same thing, one can weigh the specific excess, invariance, and incongruity that arise from their juxtaposition. Some relations (“meanings”) are added to the original. Others carry over, and still others simply do not fit. In our case, the juxtaposition helped to highlight and fill a gap within the system of derekh erets that was clearer in Kant. If “words of Torah are poor in their place and rich in another,” ¹⁰⁶ all the more so are Talmud and philosophy.

APPENDIX: THE TERM DEREKH ERETS IN EARLY RABBINIC SOURCES

The term derekh erets (literally, “way of the land” and probably originating from “the way of all the world,” derekh kol ha’arets, in Gen. 19:31, Josh. 23:14, and 1 Kings 2:2) appears in all branches of classical rabbinic literature: works of both legal and narrative exegesis as well as apodictic and aphoristic (“wisdom”) works. It is also preserved in its own set of works with shared contents, likely reflecting oral traditions going back to the Second Temple period.¹⁰⁷ These works are labeled derekh erets according to some Palestinian and Babylonian Amoraim (third-to-fifth century CE) and, much later, by the hands of medieval scribes, who preserved works under that title among what commentators called the “minor,” “supplemental,” or “external” tractates. These tractates generally take the form of collections of oral traditions according to topic (Converts, Slaves; etc.).¹⁰⁸ Many of those traditions are paralleled in Tannaitic and Amoraic sources, but the relative chronology of these parallels, not to mention the Derekh Erets compilations, has not been fully mapped.

As a term, derekh erets is ubiquitous in early rabbinic oral tradition (c. 70–250 CE), which is the focus of this chapter. These early attestations are preserved in late-second to mid-third-century works from Roman Palestine, as well as in later works from Byzantine Palestine and Sasanian Iran, traditions bearing adequate markers (attributions, citation formulas, parallels) to be dated no later than the third century.¹⁰⁹

These early sources reveal eight contextual meanings. They are, in ascending order of frequency: (1) natural death, as opposed to death by the evil eye,¹¹⁰ or divine punishment;¹¹¹ (2) marital sexual intercourse and abstinence, whether voluntary (perishut derekh erets) or involuntary;¹¹² (3) literal work or business;¹¹³ (4) good deeds (“works” in a metaphorical sense, following Safrai);¹¹⁴ (5) observance of a stringency or precaution with direct legal implications in the local context (what we might call “best practices”);¹¹⁵ (6) accounting for the language of an earlier law as a reflection of real life/how people really talk or classifying something in a biblical story or in real life as “abnormal,” “unnatural,” or “marvelous” (Josephus: thaumastos);¹¹⁶ (7) lessons in customary/proper conduct, good manners, or “know-how”;¹¹⁷ specifically, how, when, and with how many people to travel on the road;¹¹⁸ how to be a good host¹¹⁹ or guest,¹²⁰ how to respect the honor of your fellow¹²¹ or your teacher;¹²² how to speak properly,¹²³ how to eat or drink at a banquet;¹²⁴ and miscellaneous tips on how to build your banquet-couch¹²⁵ or your house;¹²⁶ how to look after your health;¹²⁷ how to manage your money;¹²⁸ when to acquire land, a house, and a wife;¹²⁹ how a groom should follow his bride’s lead to enter the wedding canopy¹³⁰ and during sex.¹³¹ Finally, derekh erets designates (8) a body of rabbinic instruction about such matters, although, unfortunately, we can only be sure that it contained in its earliest period a rule for the order in which to put on one’s shoes (a matter of dispute, of course).¹³²

JAMES ADAM REDFIELD is Assistant Professor in the Department of Theological Studies, Fellow of the Research Institute at Saint Louis University, Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, and author of Adventures of Rabbah & Friends: The Talmud’s Strange Tales and Their Readers.

NOTES

1. The epigraph is from “Anthropology Friedländer,” in Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 49. Bracketed additions here and throughout are my own [JR]. Compare Kant, Groundwork, 23: “The whole of morals, which requires anthropology for its application to human beings” (emphasis in original). On the textual history of Kant’s anthropology, see Stark, “Historical Notes and Interpretive Questions.” I focus on his main publication (“Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education), supplemented by his other writings and transcriptions of his lectures. My thanks to the weekly seminar of the 2019–20 Cornell Society for the Humanities for feedback on this chapter, especially Paul Fleming, Lori Khatchadourian, Ariel Ron, and Samantha Wesner.

2. See Dolgopolski, “Constructed and Denied.” Even when the grandson of the Brisker Rav, Joseph B. Soloveitchik, rejected the neo-Kantian Marburg School as a model for reconstructing the philosophy of halakhah, he continued to draw from their dispute with Kant to support his axiom that objectivity is prior to subjectivity. See Soloveitchik, The Halakhic Mind, 65–66, 101; Munk, The Rationale of Halakhic Man, 14–51. For a more nuanced treatment of his position, see Brafman, “The Objectifying Instrument of Religious Consciousness.”

3. For descriptive accounts of the Brisker method of Talmud study, see Solomon, The Analytic Movement, 96–239; Blau, Lomdus: The Conceptual Approach to Torah Learning.

4. Kühn, “Interpreting Kant Correctly.”

5. Here, a landmark is Foucault’s 1964 thèse complémentaire, which both connected Kant’s anthropology to his critical philosophy and set up Foucault’s aim, in Les mots et les choses (1966), to “anthropologize philosophy.” See editors’ preface to Foucault, Anthropologie d’un point de vue pragmatique, 8. This connection is still central to work on Kant’s anthropology. Particularly important for this chapter has been Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character.

6. In this chapter, I use anthropology for any empirically inflected theory of human nature. I also use the term in the historical sense that it had in a specified context of use. I may alternate between general and historical senses, referring to Kant’s “anthropology” (in a general sense) and also to his “Anthropologie.” I may refer to rabbinic “anthropology” (in the general sense—despite the lack of such a term or science in the rabbis’ era). Despite this fluctuation among uses, it should be clear, in context, which sense is meant.

7. Kant, Groundwork, 3; Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character; Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics. Indispensable to any study of Kant’s anthropology is Sturm, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen; on the link between anthropology and morality, 502–18.

8. Klugheitslehre. On the literature that wrongly treats Kant’s notion of “prudence” as instrumental and self-interested, see Graband, Klugheit bei Kant, 7–8.

9. Louden, Kant’s Human Being, 77.

10. Kant defines “popular” as an anthropology that has “reference to examples which can be found by every reader.” This has a methodological value: it encourages readers “to make each particular into a theme of its own, so as to place it in the appropriate category” (Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 233). He seems to have imagined students specializing by descriptive category, according to their tastes. On the pedagogical Sitz im Leben of this form, see Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 89. Kant selected Baumgarten’s textbook on empirical psychology as the basis for the first part of his course (Didaktik) but used no text for the second part (departing from his own Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime [1764]). On his relationship to Baumgarten, see Wood, “Kant and the Problem of Human Nature,” 58n10; Lorini, “The Rules for Knowing the Human Being.”

11. James Adam Redfield, “Kant’s Racist Anthropology in Context: Ethnographic Archives of the German Enlightenment,” (forthcoming in CROMOHS vol. 27 (2024)). On race in the political theology of Israel and the Jews, see Ophir and Rosen-Zvi, Goy and Redfield, “Review of Goy.”

12. Cohen, Kant and the Human Sciences, 62–65.

13. What Kant dismisses as a search for “die Quellen der phaenomenorum,” 1774 ms. of his Geography lectures (in Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 51).

14. See Diem, “Deutsche Schulanthropologie,” 365. See also Tommasi, “Somatology.”

15. Kant, Correspondence, 141.

16. Zammito, “What a Young Man Needs,” 232–35; Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 56, 68.

17. “Such an anthropology, considered as knowledge of the world, which must come after our schooling, is actually not yet called pragmatic when it contains an extensive knowledge of things in the world, for example, animals, plants, and minerals from various lands and climates, but only when it contains knowledge of the human being as a citizen of the world. Therefore, even knowledge of the races of human beings as products belonging to the play of nature is not yet counted as pragmatic knowledge of the world, but only as knowledge of the world.” Kant, Anthropology (1798), 231–32 (emphasis in original). See also Kant, “Anthropology-Mrongovius” (1784–85), in Kant, Lectures on Anthropology, 343: “There are two ways to study: in school and in the world. In school one studies scholastic cognitions.” And 344: “In scholastic anthropology, I search for the causes of human nature. In pragmatic anthropology, I merely look at the human constitution and attempt to apply it.”

18. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 231.

19. Ibid.

20. Kant, “Of the Different Races of Human Beings” (1st ed., 1775), in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 97.

21. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 417.

22. A comprehensive history of the uses and abuses of “applied anthropology” in the modern period is a desideratum, despite important syntheses such as Asad, Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter; Gusterson, “Anthropology and Militarism.” Regardless, what Kant means by “use” is certainly quite different.

23. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 418.

24. Compare Kant, “Lectures on Pedagogy” in Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 444: the civilizing form of cultivation requires, inter alia, “prudence”: the ability to “use all human beings for one’s own final purposes.” Again, the reference to final end (see his use of letzter Zweck) means that cultivation has a social end, not a selfish one.

25. Kant, Correspondence, 141. See Kant, “Anthropology-Mrongovius,” 345, and further references in Kain, “Prudential Reason.”

26. Summarizing Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 417–20.

27. “Anthropology Friedländer,” 49. Similarly, in the life span of an individual, “middle age [. . .] is the age of prudence, where one can rightly estimate the worth of things,” as one is no longer misled by passion and not yet too old to use one’s judgment. “Anthropology Friedländer,” 167 (see Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 308).

28. For a strong reading of this analogy, see Pozzo, “Kant on the Five Intellectual Virtues,” 178–80. That said, the proximal origins of Kant’s term “pragmatic” lie less in Aristotle than in Polybius: much as ethnography and historiography coevolved from Herodotus on, so did “pragmatic anthropology” emerge from a debate on “pragmatic historiography” in Enlightenment Germany. See Sturm, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, 311–12.

29. Kant in Pozzo, “Kant on the Five Intellectual Virtues,” 179 (my emphasis) n26.

30. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 316 (my emphasis).

31. Kant lectured to men, and “human” (Mensch) or impersonal locutions (man; sich) are often gendered male, as they are here. Additionally, he excludes women from whole anthropological categories (e.g., Kant, “Anthropology-Mrongovius,” 410: “Wisdom is the ultimate purpose [. . .] women do not have it.” The same goes for his concept of “character”: see Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 293). However, I view the androcentrism of Kant’s anthropology as less absolute than do some of his interpreters and translators, which is not to deny the misogynistic elements in his thought. He hopes that his observations of human character will be appreciated “even [!] by ladies at their dressing-table” (Kant, “Menschenkunde-Petersburg” [1781–82?], in Lectures on Anthropology, 291). Furthermore, when analyzing relationships between the sexes, he pays far more attention to women and, in many ways, sees women as more significant in society. A female subject of his anthropology should be kept in view, even if she is not the normative subject. On her paradoxical role as “the alien other of the Anthropology par excellence,” see Clark, “Kant’s Aliens,” 266–72.

32. Kant’s textbook definition of pragmatic (Anthropology, History, and Education, 231 [my emphasis]). The pragmatic and educational (as opposed to the technical preservation or moral governance of our species) similarly align at Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 417.

33. Compare Kant, “Lectures on Pedagogy,” in Anthropology, History and Education, 473: “Practical education includes 1) skill, 2) worldly prudence and 3) morality.” Here the “pragmatic” and “practical education” are synonymous. As Brandt notes (Kritischer Kommentar, 119), according to this threefold division elsewhere in Kant’s writings, Kant could not say “and should make of himself” as he does in the textbook. Kain, “Prudential Reason,” 238, also notes this important internal contradiction of the system but does not analyze it.

34. See Kain, “Prudential Reason”; Madrid, “Prudence and the Rules for Guiding Life”; Graband, Klugheit bei Kant, 72–79.

35. “In fact, one of the most significant developments in Kant’s conception of prudence over the course of the anthropology lectures is an increasing emphasis on the significance of the human social context.” Kain, “Prudential Reason,” 246.

36. Summarizing Kant, “Menschenkunde-Petersburg,” 291.

37. Kant, “Anthropology-Busolt” (1788–89?), in Lectures on Anthropology, 521.

38. See Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 338: “the pragmatic point of view,” in terms of a human individual’s happiness, is “the well-being that he intends to secure through skill and prudence.”

39. Kant, “Anthropology-Mrongovius,” 344.

40. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 232 (emphasis in original).

41. Ibid., 233. For a clear discussion of these obstacles, see Louden, Kant’s Human Being, 70–72. For the genealogy of “fieldwork” in different national traditions of anthropology, see Debaene, Far Afield, 35–44.

42. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 384.

43. Ibid., 389–90.

44. Ibid., 391–92: specifically, such maxims are not to (a) lie, (b) dissemble, (c) break promises, (d) have bad friends, (e) listen to gossip. The pietistic tone rings loud and clear.

45. See the definition of pragmatic as what a human being “can or should make of himself,” nn. 32–33.

46. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 392.

47. The former is Munzel’s translation; see her Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, xvi and 23–70, on “conduct of thought.”

48. As Zammito notes (“What a Young Man Needs,” 237–40), this structure varied a great deal over the lecture course.

49. The margin of Kant’s ms. reads under this heading: “In what can one recognize the particularity [Eigentümlichkeit] of each human being?” This is a better description of Charakteristik than the printed subtitle, “On the Way of Cognizing the Interior of the Human Being from the Exterior,” which may not be his own; see Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 125.

50. See Munzel, Kant’s Conception of Moral Character, 26–27.

51. Ibid., 53.

52. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 384. See Mensch, “Caught Between Character and Race.”

53. Ibid., 385, 394. On physiognomy, race, and difference in Kant, see nn. 11, 13, and 14 above.

54. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 394. See also p. 399: the habitual facial expressions of religious groups may become “hardened” into the characteristic expression of an entire society, but it does not follow that they are true characters of individuals. Nobody can rationally explain how to distinguish natural variations from morality in this case.

55. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 408.

56. Ibid., 420 (emphasis in original).

57. Ibid., 420–21 and 425–29, defines these obstacles and political forms.

58. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 423. The actual example may not belong at this location: Brandt, Kritischer Kommentar, 496.

59. Kant, Anthropology, History, and Education, 390 (emphasis in original).

60. Kant, “Anthropology Friedländer,” 49. See Sturm, Kant und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen, 293.

61. Like Kant’s pragmatic anthropology (see n. 31), derekh erets discourse does acknowledge the possibility of a female audience, but this is not its normative audience and sometimes actively marginalized. Some of its contents are gender-neutral—a woman might also want to know, for instance, to light a candle before dusk on the Sabbath, a derekh erets “best practice” rule. Sometimes, gender-neutral language (adam, “human,” not ish, “man”) even seems deliberate. But much of the discourse is addressed exclusively to male sages or to men who take their advice seriously. Even if we include sources outside our period, in works compiled near the end of late antiquity, the only one that asks if a woman “has derekh erets” (a daughter of a sage, at that) answers that it depends on whether her husband is learned (Yes) or unlearned (No). Derekh erets is not a consistently misogynistic discourse—yes, it is declared “normal” (derekh erets) for a man to forsake his wife for a prettier one, but several derekh erets rules are aimed to safeguard a wife’s conjugal rights. The discourse, however, has an androcentric, patriarchal profile, resembling some other strains of rabbinic wisdom literature.

62. The research in this section is drawn from Redfield, “The Sages and the World,” 141–206; the appendix is adapted from 157–60 ad loc. The context, however, and therefore most of the content, differ.

63. Kant, “Anthropology Friedländer,” 49.

64. Items in parentheses (1–8) refer to the eight senses of the term derekh erets as documented in the appendix. I designate a more verbatim parallel source with =, and a less verbatim parallel source (or a very similar source) with ≈.

65. m. Qiddushin 1:10 (ed. Albeck III:317) = Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:23 (ed. Becker, 370). The term settled world could refer to society, or it could refer, not to this world, but to the next (hence, exclusion from future society of a more radical kind, as in the infamous catalog at m. Sanhedrin 10:1: “All Israel has a portion in the world to come. [. . .] And the following have no portion”). Compare Hebrews 2:5, where οἰκουμένη (“the inhabited world”) means “the world to come” (עולם הבא). Similarly, at Massekhet Kallah 3 (ed. Higger, 126), to “have דרך ארץ” is equated with “having a portion in עולם הבא.” Contrast Avot of Rabbi Natan A 28:20 (ed. Becker, 218–19): “Anyone who makes דרך ארץ primary in this world (עולם הזה) and words of Torah secondary is made secondary in this world.” The next parable does not say such a person will be primary in the “world to come,” it simply stresses the need for a middle way between Torah and derekh eretz. For דרך ארץ reflecting rabbinic knowledge of the term οἰκουμένη, see Fischel, “Greek and Latin Languages,” 58.

66. b. Qiddushin 41a. The “b.” refers to the Babylonian Talmud in the standard edition of reference (Vilna).

67. b. Berakhot 22a, attributed to R. Yehudah (bar Ilai). Similarly, one may discuss laws of the bathhouse there, but only those laws, later preserved in the Derekh Erets corpus (Pereq Hanihas 3, ed. Higger, Massekhtot Kallah, 295–305).

68. On these cases, see Novick, What Is Good, and What God Demands, 68–79; Rosen-Zvi, “Structure and Reflectivity in Tannaitic Legal Homilies,” 287–88. On “Scripture” (ha-katuv) as a dynamic hypostasis of the interpretive process and its distinction from the figure of “the Torah,” see Yadin, Scripture as Logos, 23–33.

69. Sifra §Aharei Mot 7:2, attributed to Rabbi (ed. Weiss 84c; here, cited from ms. Vatican ebr. 66 via https://maagarim.hebrew-academy.org.il) = b. Hullin 84a, baraita. In this chapter, the Bible is cited in the translation/versification of the King James Version.

70. It is possible that the term is used here in this less common, nonsocial sense due to an association with the local literary context, which involves the physical earth. A similar case is t. Shevi‘it 4:2 (and, see further, Lieberman, Tosefta Kifeshutah: Shevi‘it, 527–28), where “derekh erets” labels a halakhic precaution (“best practice,” we might say) but does so in an agricultural context, rendering it ambiguously metaphorical.

71. Mekhilta §Vayassa VII (ed. Lauterbach, 129) ≈ Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai 17:3 (ed. Epstein and Melammed, 117).

72. On this norm (“line of justice,” shurat ha-din) in the Babylonian Talmud, see Barer, “Law, Ethics, and Hermeneutics.” On the earlier sources, and ours in particular, see Novick, “Naming Normativity,” at 397. Novick sees derekh erets and shurat ha-din as contextual synonyms that “interchange” in this passage (400). I see the latter as defined in terms of the former.

73. Sifre Deuteronomy §34 (ed. Finkelstein, 62) = Midrash Tannaim (ed. Hoffmann, I:27).

74. For example, Mekhilta §Kaspa II (ed. Lauterbach, II:465–66 [my emphasis]); see Harris, How Do We Know This?, 33–43.

75. Unless “the settled world” is a synonym for “the world to come,” which has some philological basis; see n.65. Despite this possible exception, the point is that violations of derekh erets are not consistently sanctioned, unlike violations of moral norms (a.k.a. “sins”). Hence it seems to be of a very different normative order from morality. This vagueness of sanctions for violating derekh erets, in contrast to law, has been virtually ignored by theologians who see derekh erets as equivalent to morality and is a significant problem for that approach, such as a Novakian “natural law” reading of derekh erets.

76. y. Bikkurim 2:1, 64d (ed. Academy of the Hebrew Language [AHL], 354:47) = Treatise Semahot 3:9 (ed. Higger, 114). In this chapter, I cite the Palestinian Talmud (“y.”) according to halakhah and Venice pagination, following by column and line in the Talmud Yerushalmi published by the AHL.

77. Amoraim were reluctant to condemn Lot’s daughters, commenting: “They thought that the world had been entirely destroyed as in the generation of the flood” (Gen. Rabbah 41:8 [ed. Theodor and Albeck, 537]). Rashi (commenting on Gen. 19:31) ventriloquizes Hillel: “If not now, when? Perhaps he will die or become infertile.” Compare Didymus Caecus, Scr. Eccl., In Genesim (cited from the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae): “it was not done out of passion but for the sake of survival (καὶ ὅτι οὐκ ἐμπαθῶς τοῦτο πεποιήκασιν, ἀλλὰ ζώπυρον ὑπολιποῦσαι).” Chrysostom sermonizes: “Let no one ever presume to condemn the just man or his daughters. After all, how could it be other than a mark of extreme folly and stupidity on our part, laden as we are with such countless burdens of sin, to condemn those whom Sacred Scripture discharges of all sin and for whom it rather even supplies such a remarkable defense.” (Homilies on Genesis, §44, 465–66). Scribal dots over this verse are read as a justification in The Zohar (ed. Matt, II:160n340).

78. Avot (Qinyan Torah, an independent and later unit), 6:5, in Mishnah (ed. Albeck, IV:384); b. Gittin 70a.

79. Avot 3:5. As Flusser noted, the three “yokes” parallel the Stoic division of theoretical, political, and practical lives. Compare Epicurus’s aphorism in Seneca, Epistles, I:40–41): “If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of philosophy.”

80. On the larger issue of the tension between the demands of work and study, see Baer, “Talmud Torah vederekh erets”; Urbach, The Sages, 602–19 and references at 963n81; Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 134–66; Boyarin, “Internal Opposition in Talmudic Literature.”

81. Avot of Rabbi Natan A 28:20, see n. 65. See also b. Berakhot 35b. Avot of Rabbi Natan A 1:5–6 (ed. Becker, 6–7): “It is not right to forsake the words of the Living God and get swept away by derekh erets.”

82. Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:11, 1 (Midrash Rabbah ed. Jadler, XII:267) interprets the aphorism “Well-joined is Torah with derekh erets” in sense (3), literal work, by citing it as evidence for Solomon’s claim that “Wisdom is good with an inheritance” (Eccles. 7:11). In the original context, Avot 2:2 (ed. Albeck, IV:357), derekh erets may just as easily mean proper conduct (5) or “good works” (4). Avot 3:17 (ed. Albeck, IV:367): “Rabbi Elazar ben Azaryah says: ‘If there is no Torah, there is no derekh erets; if there is no derekh erets, there is no Torah.’” He then lists two other pairs of spiritual virtues that are interdependent (wisdom/fear [of God]; discernment/knowledge) and concludes: “If there is no flour, there is no Torah; if there is no Torah, there is no flour.” This context invites two glosses of derekh erets: it could be like flour, in the sense of earning a living, literal work (3), or it could be related to those other spiritual virtues, in the sense of pragmatic “know-how” (7).

83. Kadushin, Organic Thinking, 113–67; Worship and Ethics, 39–62; Conceptual Approach to the Mekhilta, 56–57, 85–86, 109–10, 203–4; Conceptual Commentary on Midrash Leviticus Rabbah, 63–64. In Worship and Ethics, 46–54, Kadushin is the most precise about the term’s distribution and internal tensions, but he still absorbs the rabbis’ uses of the term into his own concept of derekh erets.

84. See Lehmhaus, “‘Derekh Eretz im Tora.’”

85. Following Jaffee, “Halakhic Personhood,” 97.

86. Kadushin, Organic Thinking, 120.

87. Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew in Judaism, 149. Presumably, he is alluding to passages like Leviticus Rabbah 9:3 (ed. Margulies, I:179; = Leviticus Rabbah 35:6); (ed. Margulies, IV:823–24), where it is said that “derekh erets preceded the Torah” as it was given to the generations between Adam and Moses and that its role was “to keep the way [derekh] of the Tree of Life [i.e. Torah]” (Gen. 3:24). I read that source differently (Redfield, “Sages and the World,” 172–84), but, in any case, it is Amoraic, not from the early discourse.

88. Novak, “Judaism and Natural Law,” 130.

89. As another discussion of this term indicates (Novak, The Image of the Non-Jew, 14n24), he relies less on ancient sources for derekh erets than on an important modern synthesis of the concept, by S. R. Hirsch, founder of the “Torah with derekh erets” school of Orthodoxy. Novak’s conflation between derekh erets and tiqqun ha‘olam is not well supported by early rabbinic sources. In certain cases, tiqqun ha‘olam does function as a “limit and corrective to positive law” (e.g., m. Gittin 4:7: a man who vowed to divorce his wife is not allowed to retract by rabbinic law, but in one case, the sages permitted it “for the sake of repairing the world”). In contrast, derekh erets is a separate body of rules (app., items 7, 8), a legal precaution or stringency (5), or an inner-legal mode of interpreting legal wording (6). It is not used to “correct or limit” the scope of positive law (oral Torah) but flexibly adapted to it in many ways.

90. m. Avot 2:2 (ed. Albeck, IV:357) ≈ Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:21–22 (ed. Becker, 366).

91. b. Eruvin 100b, attributed to R. Yohanan (d. 279 CE).

92. See, for example, b. Hullin 57b, which explores whether or not the animal kingdom is ruled by a king and thematizes the tension between using the written Torah, on one hand, and observation, on the other, to determine the order of nature.

93. This debate goes back to medieval commentators; see Kadushin, Worship and Ethics, 248 n. 71.

94. Flusser, “Ezohi derekh yesharah sheyavor lo ha-’adam?” 175.

95. See van de Sandt and Flusser, The Didache, 179 and passim. Brock, “The Two Ways and the Palestinian Targum,” 139–52, shows that the Two Ways discourse in Targumim is characterized by synthesizing and expanding verses that mention the choice of a moral “way” (Jer. 21:8, Deut. 30:15–19, Gen. 3:4), although it is less dualistic than 1QS.

96. Safrai, “Muvano shel ha-munah. ‘derekh erets’”; “Teaching of Pietists in Mishnaic Literature,” especially 27–28 (rev. version, “Mišnat ḥasidim b’sifrut ha-tannaim,” in Safrai, In Times of Temple and Mishnah, II:501–17); “Ḥasidim v’anshe ma’aseh.” See also Büchler, Types of Jewish-Palestinian Piety.

97. For observing norms other than Torah, see Avot 2:2 (ed. Albeck, IV:357) (≈ Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:21–22 [ed. Becker, 366]), “Well-joined is Torah to derekh erets, for striving in both makes sin forgotten.” Even here, the meaning could be literal work (3) as opposed to “good works” (4). For going above and beyond in Torah-observance, see, for example, Leviticus Rabbah 34:8 (ed. Margulies, 792): “The Torah taught you derekh erets, that when a man performs a commandment, he should perform it with a joyful heart.” For prioritizing good works over scholarly virtues, see Avot 3:17 (ed. Albeck, IV:367–68) = Avot of Rabbi Natan A 22:5–8 (ed. Becker, 192–93) = Avot of Rabbi Natan B 34:13–16 (ed. Becker, 368).

98. For refraining from theft, see Deuteronomy Rabbah §Shofetim (ed. Lieberman, 96): “See what derekh erets is in her, that she shirks [literally “flees from”] theft.” For good works like donating money, see Kallah 21 (ed. Higger, 159). For making peace between people, see Leviticus Rabbah 9:3 (ed. Margulies, 178).

99. Contra Flusser (“Ezohi derekh yesharah,” 169–70), I see no evidence that Avot 2:2 is later than Avot 3:17, whereas 3:5 is later than both; neither do I see that “the original sense of derekh erets is preserved” in Seder Eliyahu (see n. 84). This speculative chronology is based on Flusser’s assumption that the earliest and broadest sense of the term good works (4) gradually narrowed to literal work (3) and other senses. The circular justification for his chronology is his vision of a primordial Jewish-Christian universalism that later splintered into “hollow halakhic norms” and “pure ivory-tower scholarship” in the hands of the rabbinic guild (van de Sandt and Flusser, The Didache, 173).

100. See nn. 32–33.

101. Kant, Groundwork, 26–27.

102. Leviticus Rabbah 9:3 (ed. Margulies, 178). Redfield, “Sages and the World,” 175, and n. 87.

103. Derekh Erets Zutta (ed. Sperber, 27 [my emphasis]).

104. See n. 11.

105. For example, Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai §Shemot 3:8 (ed. Epstein-Melammed, 2; best text according to the version of R. Avraham Halahmi): “He made His word accord with derekh erets, that the nations of the world would not say”; for example, Derekh Erets Rabbah (Pirke Ben Azzai) (ed. Higger, 181–82): “A man shall not take leave of his fellow or his teacher without asking his permission. And everyone should learn derekh erets from the Omnipresent.” On the latter, see Ehrlich, “Asking Leave,” 13, and “Verbal and Non-Verbal Rituals,” 13.

106. y. Rosh Hashanah 3:5, 58d (ed. AHL, 675:32).

107. See Kahana, Sifre on Numbers, III:653–54, 667–68, 684–85; The Two Mekhiltot, 298–99, especially 298–99n46; Paz, “From Scribes to Scholars,” 59–56; “Re-Scripturizing Traditions,” 285–86.

108. Lerner, “The External Tractates,” 379–89. Medieval sources refer to derekh erets literature in various ways, for example, “the way of the disciples of the sages” (Rashi, b. Berakhot 22a, s.v. הלכות דרך ארץ). A maximalist description of this literature and its parallels is Higger, Massektot Ze‘irot, 7–69. For a more complete list of mss., see van Loopik, The Ways of the Sages, 12–19. For an analysis of the families of mss. and recensions, see Higger, Treatises Derek Erez, 19–24. (On Higger’s method and its problems, see Briata, “Dereḵ Ereṣ Rabbah e Dereḵ Ereṣ Zuṭa,” 1–20). On the sections and indirect witnesses to these tractates, see Sperber, Derech Eretz Zutta, 71–74, 77–79, and Sperber, A Commentary on Derech Ereẓ Zuṭa. For a case for a relatively early, and coherent, redaction of a Derekh Erets tractate, see Krauss, “Le traité talmudique déréch éréç (suite et fin),” Revue des études juives 37 no. 73 (1898): 45–64, at 50–64. On the sources and witnesses of this nominal tractate, see Krauss, “Le traité talmudique déréch éréç,” Revue des études juives 36 no. 71 (1898): 27–46; 205–21; 214–18. Provocative cultural analyses of the Derek Erets tractates include Briata, “Dereḵ Ereṣ Rabbah,” 21–46; Sperber, “Rabbinic Manuals of Conduct,” 9–26; Schofer, Confronting Vulnerability, 57–63.

109. I culled this selection of “early” (Roman Palestinian) derekh erets discourse in four stages: (1) Cataloging roughly ninety-four literary units including the term in all rabbinic works possibly redacted by the end of the Amoraic era (including, at this initial stage, the Babylonian Talmud); (2) Removing all units in post-Tannaitic-redacted works that did not display at least one of the following: a formula introducing a baraita, an attribution to a Tannaitic sage, or a Tannaitic parallel; (3) Identifying parallels among the remaining sources as well as with both recensions of Avot of Rabbi Natan and Tanhuma-Yelammedenu sources; (4) Correlating possibly later sources (cited in square brackets) that offer useful comparanda for determining the sense of derekh erets in the corresponding Tannaitic sources. This procedure left a corpus of sixty-one unique sources (more may be preserved in post-Amoraic midrashic works and the Seder Eliyahu literature, but these are under-studied, their content seems to have been elastic, and most viable candidates lack attributions). NB: I did not remove sources attributed to seven first-generation Amoraim in Amoraic works, as these sources may overlap with the redactional period of Tannaitic works. The line between Tannaim and first-generation Amoraim (including sages whom I did not remove, Rav and R. Yohanan) was debated from the start (see Kimelman, “Rabbi Yohanan of Tiberias,” 154–56 at 173n163). Further, even if all instances based on attributions and citation formulas were removed, each of my eight contextual meanings would still be attested in at least one Tannaitic work; except for (1), which is already in the Tanakh and Targumim. This method thus yields solid evidence for my object, that is, the early semantic range of this term and basic contours of early derekh erets discourse. Of course, the sense of derekh erets in a given context may not be clear or singular. My gloss is based on a study of the context, direct parallels (=), indirect parallels (≈), and cited comparanda [in brackets]. I allow for interplay between several senses of the term in each context.

110. b. Bava Metzi‘a 107b, attributed to Rav.

111. y. Bikkurim 2:1, 64d (ed. AHL, 354:47) = Semahot 3:9 (ed. Higger, 114). Compare b. Mo‘ed Qatan 28a (baraita), מיתת כל אדם. Compare b. Sotah 47a (baraita), which refers to “the illness of which Elisha died” and y. Sanhedrin 10:2, 29b (ed. AHL, 1325:9), which refers to Elisha’s “illness according to the way of the world” (although the latter seems to mean an ordinary illness, rather than a natural death; as we say, “the common cold”).

112. y. Ketubbot 5:7, 30b (ed. AHL, 984:25–30; = Mekhilta §Neziqin III, ed. Lauterbach, II:374); Midrash Tannaim 26:7 (ed. Hoffmann, II:173) ≈ b. Yoma 74b, baraita cited as דבי רבי ישמעאל תנא ≈ Safrai and Safrai, Haggadah of the Sages, §16, 196–297); Genesis Rabbah 85:2, attributed to R. Yehoshua ben Qarha (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 1031–32; = Genesis Rabbah 18:6, ed. Theodor-Albeck, 168–69). Compare y. Shabbat 9:7, 12b (ed AHL, 421:32), cited under תמן אמרין, a formula often introducing Babylonian traditions; here, a prescription for a sex-depressant. At b. Shabbat 90b, Abbaye, the Babylonian Amora, prescribes a similar remedy for one who wants to acquire wisdom (!) Compare Abbaye’s remedy for impotence, b. Gittin 70a, where, again, derekh erets means “sex-drive.” It also refers to sex at b. Gittin 70a (≈ §Qinyan Torah, Avot 6:5, ed. Albeck, IV:384) as well as Ecclesiastes Rabbah 9:9,1 (Midrash Rabbah ed. Jadler, XII:327), לא נהג בה דרך ארץ: “he did not consummate the marriage”).

113. M. Avot 3:5, attributed to R. Nehunya ben Haqanah; Sifre Deuteronomy §42, attributed to R. Yishmael (ed. Finkelstein, 90) = Midrash Tannaim 11:14 (ed. Hoffmann, I:35) = b. Berakhot 35b, baraita cited under תנו רבנן—interpreted ad loc. as literal work. Compare Genesis Rabbah 19:3 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 171–72); Avot of Rabbi Natan 28:20, attributed to R. Yehudah bar Ilai (ed. Becker, 218–19 = b. Berakhot 35b); Avot of Rabbi Natan A 1:5 (ed. Becker, 6–7); Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:1 (ed. Becker, 365; = m. Avot 3:17); m. Avot 2:2 = Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:11,1 (Midrash Rabbah ed. Jadler, XII:267). Both Avot 2:2 and 3:17 place the term in a redactional setting where the contextual meaning is ambiguous: either literal work (3) or “good works” (4). However, both cited parallels to those sources more clearly interpret the term as literal “work,” weakening the case that (4) was the original sense.

114. There is no source where the specific pietistic sense for which Safrai argued is unambiguously distinct from the general, nonpietistic sense of “proper conduct,” etiquette, know-how, and so on, or a body of teaching about those matters (meanings [7] and [8], respectively). Bearing that caveat in mind, the best candidates for Safrai’s thesis are m. Qiddushin 1:10; t. Qiddushin 1:17; m. Avot 2:2 (≈ Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:21–22, ed. Becker, 366); m. Avot 3:17 (≈ Avot of Rabbi Natan A 22:5–8, ed. Becker, 192–93; ≈ Avot of Rabbi Natan B 34:13–16, ed. Becker, 368); b. Berakhot 32b (baraita cited under תנו רבנן); Leviticus Rabbah 9:3 (ed. Margulies, I:179; = Leviticus Rabbah 35:6, attributed to R. Eliezer [ed. Margulies, IV:823–24]). Compare Kallah 21, ed. Higger, 159; Derekh Eretz Zuta 3:1 (ed. Sperber, 27); Avot of Rabbi Natan A 8:8 (ed. Becker, 100–1; = m. Avot 1:6); Avot of Rabbi Natan A 28:2, attributed to R. Natan (ed. Becker, 214–15).

115. T. Shevi‘it 4:2 (ed. Lieberman, 527–28); Sifra §Aharei Mot 11, attributed to Rabbi (ed. Weiss 84c; = b. Hullin 84a, baraita cited under תנו רבנן); Sifre Dceuteronomy §75 (ed. Finkelstein, 140 ≈ Midrash Tannaim 12:20); (ed. Hoffmann I:52–53 ≈ t. Arakhin 4:26, attributed to R. Eliezer ben Azarya); (ed. Zuckermandel, 548 ≈ Tanhuma-Yelammedenu to Numbers 11:23, attributed to Rabbi [Judah], in Mann and Sonne, The Bible, II:78, compare b. Betzah 25a, attributed to Rami b. Abba; and b. Yoma 75b); Sifre Deuteronomy §306 (ed. Finkelstein, 342 = b. Berakhot 45a = b. Berakhot 53b = b. Yoma 37a, compare y. Berakhot 1:1, 2c [ed. AHL, 2:33], attributed to Rav Huna); Mekhilta §Beshallah I (ed. Lauterbach, I:126); Genesis Rabbah 7:5, attributed to Rabbi (Judah) (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 54); Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 10:7, attributed to R. Hoshaya, ed. Mandelbaum, I:169; = Tanhuma §Re’eh 15 (ed. Midrash Tanḥuma ha-mefo’ar, II:528); Deuteronomy Rabbah §Shofetim 2, attributed to Rav (ed. Lieberman, 96; see n. 109 ≈ b. Eruvin 100b, attributed to R. Yohanan). Compare Genesis Rabbah 20:12, attributed to R. Levi (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 196).

116. Exodus Rabbah 1:26 (ed. Shinan, 81–82 ≈ Josephus Ant. 2.230); Mekhilta §Vayassa VII (ed. Lauterbach, I:251 ≈ Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai 17:3); (ed. Epstein-Melammed, 117); Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai 19:4 (ed. Epstein-Melammed, 138); Sifra §Behuqotai (ed. Weiss, 111a); Sifre Deuteronomy §34 (ed. Finkelstein, 62 = Midrash Tannaim, ed. Hoffmann, I:27); Sifre Deuteronomy §215, attributed to Rabbi Ishmael (ed. Finkelstein, 248 = Midrash Tannaim [ed. Hoffmann, I:128]); y. Eruvin 6:5, 23c (ed AHL, 480:21, attributed to R. Yehudah [bar Ilai]); y. Sanhedrin 7:11, 25d (ed. AHL, 1306:6 = b. Sanhedrin 67a, baraita cited under תנו רבנן); Genesis Rabbah 6:3, attributed to R. Yose bar Ilai (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 42 ≈ Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 3:14, ed. Mandelbaum, 103). Compare Song of Songs Rabbah 1:1,10, attributed to R. Yonatan (ed. Midrash Rabbah Ha-mevo’ar, I:38); y. Berakhot 1:1, 2c (ed. AHL, 2:33), attributed to Rav Huna; y. Ketubbot 5:6, 50b (ed. AHL, 984:38–39); y. Gittin 6:5, 48a (ed. ARN, 1082:8–9), but meaning differs in the parallel = y. Pe’ah 3:7, 17d (ed. AHL, 93:46–47); Genesis Rabbah 20:18 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 194 ≈ Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 19:5 attributed to R. Abbahu, ed. Mandelbaum, I:308); Genesis Rabbah 32:7, attributed to R. Levi (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 294); Leviticus Rabbah 32:2, attributed to R. Levi (ed. Margulies, IV:737); Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 11:8 (ed. Mandelbaum, I:184 = Exodus Rabbah 20:11); (ed. Midrash Rabbah Ha-mevo’ar, 516–17 = Tanhuma); (ed. Buber, II:58 ≈ Mekhilta §Vayassa III, attributed to Rabban Shimeon ben Gamliel); (ed. Lauterbach, II:111), but Mekhilta has מעשה בראשית instead of דרך ארץ, just as Exodus Rabbah 1:27 (ed. Shinan, 84) has כדרך (כל) העולם instead of דרך ארץ at Exodus Rabbah 1:26); Ecclesiastes Rabbah 5:12 (Midrash Rabbah ed. Jadler XII, 209); Avot of Rabbi Natan B 32:2–3 (ed. Becker, 365; see m. Avot 3:5; see Avot of Rabbi Natan A 20:2–8, ed. Becker, 184–85; see b. Niddah 69b, baraita cited under תנו רבנן).

117. This broad sense of the term covers roughly twenty-eight sources, slightly under half of the total corpus.

118. Mekhilta §Pisha VIII, attributed to R. Yose Ha-galili (ed. Lauterbach, I:36); Mekhilta §Pisha XI (ed. Lauterbach, I:60); Leviticus Rabbah 26:7 (ed. Margulies, III: 599–600; ≈ Avot 3:4; ≈ Genesis Rabbah 55:8, attributed to R. Abbahu (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 594) ≈ Tanhuma, ed. Midrash Tanḥuma ha-mefo’ar, II:163, attributed to a second-generation Palestinian Amora).

119. Midrash Tannaim 23:5 (ed. Hoffmann, II:145; = Song of Songs Rabbah 2:5,3, attributed to R. Eliezer); (ed. Midrash Rabbah Ha-mevo’ar, I:271). Compare Avot of Rabbi Natan A 20:5–6, ed. Becker, 184–85; Derekh Eretz Rabbah 2:2 (ed. Higger, 176–77).

120. b. Bava Metzi‘a 87a, attributed to R. Yose; Genesis Rabbah 70:14, attributed to R. Yose (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 813, see variant attributions [compare y. Pe’ah 3:7, 17d (93:46–47)]).

121. Mekhilta §Amalek I (ed. Lauterbach II:257; = Tanhuma §Beshallah 26, ed. Midrash Tanḥuma ha-mefo’ar, I:423 ≈ Avot 4:12); Derekh Eretz Rabbaḥ 3:2, דרך ארץ של חכם (ed. Higger, 186).

122. b. Shabbat 114a, attributed to תנא דבי רבי ישמעאל (see n. 112); Derekh Eretz Rabbah 3:1 (ed. Higger, 181–82). Compare Derekh Eretz Rabbah 7:3, ed. Higger, 234.

123. Mekhilta §Bahodesh II:2 (ed. Lauterbach, II:299 ≈ Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai §Yitro 19:8 [ed. Epstein-Melammed, 140]); Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai §Shemot 3:8 (ed. Epstein-Melammed, 2); Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai §Shemot 6:2 (ed. Epstein-Melamed, 4); Sifre Numbers §102 (ed. Kahana, I:253–44); Derekh Eretz Rabbah 3:2, ed. Higger, 182–83; Sifre Numbers §105 (ed. Kahana, I:261–62 [compare b. Yoma 4b, attributed to R. Eliezer]). In Mekhilta of Rabbi Shimeon bar Yohai §Shemot 3:8, derekh erets is an antonym of “improper” (לא כדין). An early intimacy of דרך ארץ with דין also appears at Mekhilta §Vayassa VII (ed. Lauterbach, I:251); Mekhilta §Neziqin III (ed. Lauterbach, II:374). Similarly, in Tanhuma §Vayyiqra 1, ms. Cambridge Add. 1212 (Maagarim database—see n. 69) reads אינו דרך ארץ where other witnesses read אינו דין.

124. b. Betzah 25b, baraita cited under תנו רבנן (= b. Pesahim 86b, baraita cited under תנו רבנן ≈ Derekh Eretz Rabbah 4:5); (ed. Higger, 211–12 [compare Derek Eretz Rabbah 5:1]); (ed. Higger, 214–15); Derekh Eretz Rabbah 5:2 (ed. Higger, 215–17). Compare the quotation attributed to ben Sira, b. Sanhedrin 100b.

125. Genesis Rabbah 31:11, attributed to R. Yitshaq (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 285). Compare Genesis Rabbah 31:10, ed. Theodor-Albeck, 282.

126. Song of Songs Rabbah 1:17, 2, attributed to R. Yohanan (ed. Midrash Rabbah Ha-mevo’ar, I:228).

127. Mekhilta §Neziqin VI (ed. Lauterbach, II:393).

128. Genesis Rabbah 76:3, attributed to R. Hiyya Rabba (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 899). Compare Genesis Rabbah 20:12, attributed to R. Levi (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 196), see n. 129 for similar sources. Compare b. Sanhedrin 39b, attributed to R. Eliezer.

129. t. Sotah 7:20 (ed. Lieberman, III:199) (ms. Erfurt) = b. Sotah 44a, baraita cited under תנו רבנן. Compare Genesis Rabbah 60:16 (ed. Theodor-Albeck, 656–57) and a Tanhuma fragment in Mann and Sonne, The Bible as Read and Preached, II:169].

130. Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 1:1, attributed to R. Hanina (ed. Mandelbaum, I:1).

131. b. Eruvin 100b, attributed to R. Yohanan; see Ruth Rabbah 2:16, attributed to R. Yohanan (ed. Midrash Rabbah Ha-mevo’ar, 82).

132. This body of teachings is called derek ha’arets, y. Shabbat 6:2, 8a (ed. AHL, 397:3, baraita cited under כהדא דתניא בדרך הארץ ≈ Derekh Eretz Rabbah 8:1, ed. Higger, 298–99). Compare other derekh erets rules about left and right: y. Shabbat 9:7, 12b (ed. AHL, 421:32); Derekh Eretz Rabbah 3:2 (ed. Higger, 186); and further sources at Ehrlich, The Non-Verbal Language of Prayer, 302. This corpus is also called “laws of derekh erets”: b. Berakhot 22a, attributed to R. Yehudah (bar Ilai). Derekh erets or derekh ha’arets may already be a body of teaching in m. Qiddushin 1:10; t. Qiddushin 1:17; t. Shevi‘it 4:1; Mekhilta §Pish.a XI (ed. Lauterbach, I:60). Important, but possibly later, sources about its contents include b. Niddah 70b–71a (where derekh erets teaching at b. Niddah 69b, in a baraita cited under תנו רבנן, is explicated by teachings that have early parallels: ≈ m. Avot 2:5 (ולא כל המרבה סחורה מחכים) ≈ ben Sira 38:26, חסר עסק הוא יתחכם (ed. Segal, 251). The key terms underscored reflect Greek πολυπράγμων). Another Babylonian exposition of “derekh erets” (Ar.: orah ar‘a) derives from this teaching by interpreting one of Ben Sira’s sayings “in an extended sense” (מדרשא), b. Sanhedrin 100b. A final crucial source for early Amoraic crystallization of some sort of derekh erets corpus is Pesiqta of Rav Kahana 11:8 (see n. 116), where a (forced) rabbinic interpretation of this phrase’s only exact attestation in the Bible (Exod. 13:17), which has no shared meaning with biblical derekh kol ha’arets or rabbinic derekh erets, is attached to a list of “derekh erets” rules, in sense (7): how a sage should serve his master (compare Genesis Rabbah 32:7, attributed to R. Yose bar Ilai [ed. Theodor-Albeck, 42; Kadushin, Worship and Ethics, 248n69]). Compare Mekhilta §Beshallah I (ed. Lauterbach, I:116) to the same verse, responding to the question of why God made Israel take the long road to the Promised Land. “God said, ‘If I let Israel enter the Land now, everyone will immediately take possession of his field or his vineyard and they will neglect the Torah.’” In that version, it is possible that biblical “derekh erets” (Exod. 13:17) is also being glossed as (3), “work”—specifically, agriculture, which figured very early in the labor-versus-Torah-study debate (on which, see nn. 70 and 79).

4

PRAGMATIC POINTS OF VIEW

Kant and the Rabbis, Together Again

JAMES ADAM REDFIELD