Many ancient Jewish texts claim to have been authored by legendary figures like Moses or Ezra despite it being clear that they were composed centuries or millennia later. This class explores the phenomenon of false authorial attribution in ancient Judaism, tracing its earliest manifestations in biblical texts while showing that this practice continued through the early Middle Ages. We will ask whether falsely ascribing texts to a famous figure is dishonest subterfuge or suggestive of an entirely different paradigm of authorship than that which we are used to. By examining a selection of texts that range across centuries we will eventually ask: is there a uniquely Jewish ethic of literary attribution?

Eliav Grossman is a PhD candidate in the Religions of Mediterranean Antiquity subfield at Princeton University. He studies Jews and Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, and his research explores rabbinic literature as it developed from the product of a narrow class of provincial elites to the dominant cultural idiom for Jews across the eastern Mediterranean.