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Volume 76 › Table of Contents › Article Abstract
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An Exploratory Study on the
Use of a Phylogenetic Algorithm in the Reconstruction of Stemmata of Halachic Texts
Avishai Yorav, Jerusalem
Tal Dagan, Heinrich-Heine Universität, Düsseldorf
Dan Graur, Tel Aviv University and University of Houston |
Until recently, philological-historical analyses of ancient texts were based almost
exclusively on the know-how of experienced scholars. The main disadvantage of this
approach is the lack of a methodological means for resolving conflicting conclusions
reached by different researchers. Additional problems arise when the amount of data
that needs to be considered is too large to be dealt with manually, or when the evidence
precludes a simple description of the ancestry of the various versions. This article
describes the analysis of several halachic texts through the use of a phylogenetic
algorithm called maximum parsimony, which was originally designed for the study
of biological data. Hundreds of textual variants occurring in various manuscript
witnesses of three halachic texts were used in conjunction with the maximum parsimony
procedure to derive phylogenetic trees from encoded data. Group patterns
produced by this algorithm were found to be fairly similar to some results obtained
through conventional philological-historical research conducted on the same texts.
In a significant number of cases, however, particular stemmatic statements were
not supported by maximum parsimony. Our conclusion is that phylogenetic methodology
may be useful to historical-philologists in reconstructing the stemmata of
text traditions or the ancestry of halachic manuscripts. Computerized phylogenetic
algorithms are expected to outperform the traditional manual approach especially
as far as long documents are concerned, as well as in cases in which a proliferation
of text witnesses needs to be considered.
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