Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha I and II
Here is an error that the current version of Mivami has and, following the same process, Sefaria.
One major aspect of Mivami is named entity recognition of Tannaim and Amoraim in the Talmud. (Once recognized, we do other things with them, like creating interaction subgraphs.) So, in the image below for Gittin 58a, we recognize the Tanna, Rabbi Yehoshua, as spanning second and third scholastic generations — thus the gradient coloring. The beautiful child that he saved from the Romans was not Albert Einstein but Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, a fourth-generation Tanna. Thus, the green.
However, in the next paragraph, the full name should be Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha the High Priest, Kohen Gadol. After all, if we are assuming Rabbi Yishmael is a small child redeemed by Rabbi Yehoshua at around this point, then he would not have a son and daughter of marriageable age at the time. Unless of course we are talking about a much later time, still under the Romans. Now, Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha was martyred by the Romans, and the common modern assumption is that it refers to the former, rather than the latter.
(Here is the equivalent in Sefaria, with the same error:
)
So the error is that Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha Kohen Gadol in its entirety should be selected, and in yellow rather than green, since he is a second-generation Tanna. The problem is that the underlying database (I believe from Joshua Parker, not the more recent one which is based on Michael Satlow and Sperling) only had the later Tanna, not the Kohen Gadol. And it is dangerous to just continue and assume that more words are part of the name. Consider: “Amar Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha: Kohen Gadol shenasa almana”. Should Kohen Gadol indeed be part of the name?
Rishonim knew well the possibility that there were two such figures. I discussed this in an earlier article in the Jewish Link from June 2022, “Behold a Caravan of Yishma’elim”. (Or, flipbooks.) This image is better, because the images have captions and appear in appropriate places in the article.
As I discuss there, Tosafot have an issue with Rabbi Yishmael son of (fifth-generation Tanna) Rabbi Yossi could witness the behavior of Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha, who was martyred by Romans. One answer is that there were two such figures, with Rabbi Yishmael ben Elisha Kohen Gadol much earlier. But Tosafot also suggest that this earlier figure, #1, was the disputant of Rabbi Akiva, with #2 perhaps being much much later! I would say that #2 was Rabbi Akiva’s disputant, but even so, Rabbi Yossi could interact in his extreme youth. My other explanation is that this whole thing was a scribal error, because of the plethora of Rabbi Yishmaels, and the figure named was different, Rabbi Yishmael ben Elyashiv.