Inter-Community Relationships and Viewpoint Plurality in Medieval Rabbinic literature: A Citation Network Digital Analysis

• In Event: Computational Approaches

Abstract

Co-authors: Binyamin Katzoff (Talmud Department, Bar Ilan University, Binyamin.Katzoff@biu.ac.il); Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet (Department of Information Science, Bar Ilan University, Maayan.Zhitomirsky-Geffet@biu.ac.il); Jonathan Schler (School of Computer Sciences, Holon Institute of Technology, schler@gmail.com); Nati Ben-Gigi (Department of General History, Bar Ilan University, Nati.bengigi@gmail.com)
Analyzing the sources of authority cited in Medieval Rabbinic (RISHONIM) literature allows the delineation of in-group dynamics and mapping out inter-group relationships. This paper introduces a novel methodological framework designed to evaluate the degree of viewpoint plurality within intellectual communities, different BATEI MIDRASH, by conducting an in-depth analysis of the citations used in their literature, which has become possible due to the recently developed advanced computational analysis techniques.
To achieve this objective, we developed a set of network-based indicators, including standard network metrics and a few new dedicated measures. Among these new measures are: 1) The outgoing external vs. internal citation ratio, which quantifies the extent to which the assessed community cites sources from other communities relative to its internal citations within the community; 2) resource diversity, which gauges the normalized number of distinct resources (books, authors) from each community in the network cited by the assessed community. Through this amalgamation, we aim to address questions such as: How extensively does a community use content from other BATEI MIDRASH and how diverse are their referencing habits? Are there accepted sources among all Rabbinic writers? Can we track changes over time?
We implemented our methodology on all the Halachic literature spanning from the 10th to the 15th century CE, originating from all the known Jewish communities of that era. This corpus consists of hundreds of books penned by around 140 authors, citing about 250 authors and their works. After scanning and filtering the corpus, we amassed approximately 750,000 citations, forming our citation network. The proposed network-based quantitative analysis provides an exploration into the patterns of intellectual exchange, enabling us to trace the multi-directional influences among various rabbinic intellectual communities.

Authors

• Binyamin Katzoff, Bar-Ilan University

• Maayan Zhitomirsky-Geffet, Bar-Ilan University

• Nati Ben-Gigi, Bar Ilan Univercity