A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism

3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE

Gwynn Kessler, Naomi Koltun-Fromm

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781119113973
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography.

Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume:

• Offers a one-volume exploration of "second temple, " "Greco-Roman, " and "rabbinic" periods and sources
• Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived
• Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity
• Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.

CHAPTER ONE
Introduction

Naomi Koltun‐Fromm and Gwynn Kessler

Opening Section

Several years ago, a Blackwell section editor contacted us and asked would we be interested in editing a Companion Volume on Greco‐Roman Jewish history? Our immediate reaction was: Why? Do we really need another volume on Greco‐Roman Jews? We eventually countered back with an offer to write, or co‐edit, a different sort of volume, one we thought we did not yet have: a volume focused on Jews and Judaism in all of Late Antiquity that tried to re‐chart the usual geographic and chronological borders established by modern scholarly norms. Our hope in this endeavor was to provide a wider angled view of Jews and Judaism over a larger swath of time and geographic expanse. If there is anything we have learned over the last two decades of situating ourselves within Late Antiquity, rather than Rabbinic, Babylonian, Second Temple, Hellenistic, or Greco‐Roman Jewish culture and history, it is to see ourselves as scholars of a broader subject area in its multiplicity and diversity as well as in its commonalities and similarities over a larger geographic and chronological landscape. Moreover, this scholarly re‐situating has laid bare the importance of approaches that zero in and those that zoom out and that bring together “telescopic” and “wide‐angle” lenses. Together, these approaches allow us to better see both the particularities of any given time and place as well as the moving dynamics of many different communities of Jews and Judaism within the multiple contexts of place, majority culture, and history, without reducing Jews or Judaism to singular, static categories. Situating this volume and its scholarship within Late Antiquity allows us to rethink how we study and categorize things Jewish over this 1000‐year period across ancient geopolitical boundaries that we have in the past used as guides to subdivide our studies. Hence, we have tried as much as possible not to predetermine essays by historical or geographic or chronological categories such as “Second Temple,” “Greco‐Roman,” or “rabbinic.”

Thus, we chose to focus our lens rather wide: Jews/Judaeans and Judaisms from the third century BCE through the seventh century CE, chronologically, and across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived in this period, encompassing the western most reaches of the Mediterranean to Mesopotamia, North Africa, Ethiopia, and Arabia. Moreover, we decided to seek out thematic essays that could in and of themselves discuss and analyze questions, issues, texts, and materials from across these same boundaries. That said, we are most often trained as scholars within more restricted boundaries and do not feel we have the skills or knowledge to be more expansive. Hence a volume of this sort is only a first step in that direction for many of us. To try to see and describe the bigger picture is in no way to minimize the necessary work that is more narrowly focused, because without the fine‐tuned detailed work on every single tile, the larger mosaic cannot be pieced together. Nevertheless, this volume hopes to illuminate the larger mosaic of where Jews/Judaeans lived, thrived, and created meaning across the late ancient Mediterranean world.

In a volume that seeks to cover such a vast geographical and chronological terrain and scope, certain terminology that is commonly used should be explained—“Late Antiquity,” for starters. In Western focused scholarship, Late Antiquity has been used as an amorphous bridge time, somewhere between Classical Antiquity and the Medieval period; in other words, it is a period remarkable only as the transformative moment from the former to the latter. Over the last few decades, however, Late Antiquity has transformed into its own field of study and time period. However, when does it begin and when does it end? The answer to that question often depends on the where and who as much as on the when. For our purposes we chose the end of the 300s BCE as a starting point, for it was the time of rising Hellenization, both culturally and politically, that confronts and challenges the peoples living in and claiming ethnic commonality with Judaea around the Mediterranean basin and creates a moment of interesting synergy, resistance, and reformulation among these peoples—themselves never a clear unity. However, we do not pinpoint a particular date, such as the reign of Alexander the Great (d. 323 BCE) or the rise of the Seleucid Empire (c. 312 BCE), in order to allow for more fluidity among our scholarly essays.

Determining the end of Late Antiquity also remains a moving target. In the West, scholars often point to the sack of Rome specifically, in 410 CE, or more generally to the breakup of the western Roman empire, as the end of Antiquity, if not Late Antiquity. However, in the East, the Byzantine and Persian Empires continued apace into the seventh century. Jewish peoples lived in all these empires in all these time periods. Some modern scholarship tends to use the rise of Islam as an easy break‐off point, the last gasp of Late Antiquity before the Middle Ages. Yet, this very liminal moment is also coming into sharper focus now as many scholars try to bridge even that divide, particularly between Late Antiquity and early Islam in order to see not a break as much as a continuity between the two, over (and under) that arbitrarily assigned scholarly divide of the Arab conquest. Nevertheless, we had to end somewhere; thus we chose to stretch into the seventh century, if not incorporating it as fully as we might have desired. However, the idea of fuzzy borders remains integral to this project. We wish to push beyond and over the normative geographic, political, and chronological scholarly field boundaries as we study these people and communities that we have come to know as “Jews” and “Jewish,” as well as their ways of making meaning, living in this world and expressing themselves, which we have come to call “Judaism.”

Another term that must be explored is the very term “Jew,” the common name, in English, for the people here under study. Much has been written in recent years on when this term came into use, and what other terminology we scholars should use to demarcate the various “Jewish” communities we study, especially since they themselves did not commonly use this term (see Chapter 11). We have asked our scholars to be reflexive and critical about the terminology they choose to use and to provide at least some brief explanation as to why. There remains no scholarly consensus on best practices here; thus in this volume we will find Israelites and Judaeans, Hebrews and the people of Israel, as much as Jews, or even, at times, Christians under the umbrella term “Late Antique Jew.”

Similarly, the same questions permeate the anachronistic term “Judaism.” There was no one monolithic thing (Faith? Religion? Cult? Culture?) that we can call Judaism that applies to all manifestations of Jewish practice, text, or materials across this geographical and chronological period. Thus, many of this volume’s essayists refer to “Judaisms,” or various manifestations of Judaism. It is not our purpose to sum up an essence of Late Antique Judaism, nor to profile the late antique Jew, nor to lay out a one‐dimensional relationship between “Jew” and “Judaism” in this period. Rather, by design we insist on the multiple and various manifestations of Jews, Jewish community, and expressions of Judaism, as well as Jewishness, some of which will eventually be called “gnosticism” or “Christianity” or even “Islam.” It is precisely by paying attention, and querying, the nomenclature of the specific text or material evidence in front of us that we can extract new meaning, not by superimposing our own assumptions. That the rabbis rarely refer to themselves as Jews/yehudim, but rather prefer Israel/bene yisrael, should catch our attention. That Paul never refers to himself or his intended audiences as Christians should also arrest our prior assumptions. That the authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls never refer to themselves as Essenes should raise issues about why we favor Philo or Josephus’ terminology over the language of the texts themselves. Yet, in attempting to bring together a volume of this sort, for convenience sake, or lack of better all‐encompassing terminology, we refer to our subjects as “Jews” and “Judaism,” even in the volume’s title and this introduction. Nevertheless, we hope to highlight the varieties, in name, deed, and material remains, with each and every essay.

Our approach was not to outline a political, social, or religious history of Jews or Judaism in Late Antiquity, but rather to provide a view into that larger subject through thematized essays that are more beholden to other scholarly endeavors in cultural, ethnic, or area studies. The themes we chose are close to our own interests as two subjective scholars, and do not in any way cover the field; they only demonstrate the possibilities and richness. One volume could never do the larger subject justice. We have instead tried to gather new, innovative scholarship that we hope will provoke further conversation and interest among sc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Maps
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Maps
• CHAPTER ONE: Introduction
• PART I: WHERE JEWS LIVE
• PART II: LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES
• PART III: IDENTITIES AND ETHNICITIES
• PART IV: BODIES AND GENDERS
• PART V: SPACES
• Index
• End User License Agreement