Babylonian Rabbinic Case Narratives as Social Network

The Babylonian Talmud contains hundreds of narratives depicting cases adjudicated by a sage (“rabbi”). The narratives provide among the only evidence for local judging in the Sasanian Empire. The network constructed from these narratives is marked by low connectivity and negative degree assortativity. This suggests (against some expectations) that we should imagine this social group not as a “small world” but as made up of loosely connected, largely autonomous sages. In light of fundamental historiographical uncertainties and the preliminary stage of research caution is in order, and the paper reviews the data for possible underrepresentation and compares this data with other data on connections extracted from the classical rabbinic corpus. Nevertheless, the impression that as a group, rabbis were loosely connected does fit with other scholarship on interactions between rabbis. If so, case narratives attest not to high levels of institutional organization or governmental authorization, but to local agents serving clients.