The Jews Among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire

Judith Lieu, John North, Tessa Rajak, Judith Lieu, John North, Tessa Rajak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135081959
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

In the period of Roman domination there were communities of Jews, some still in Palestine, some dispersed in and around the Roman Empire; they had to face at first the world-wide power of the pagan Romans and later on the emergence of Christianity as an Empire-wide religion. How they coped with these dramatic changes and how they influenced the new forms of religious life that emerged in this period provide the main themes of The Jews Among Pagans and Christians. Essays by the leading scholars in the field together with the introduction by the editors, offer new approaches to understanding the role of Judaism and the pattern of religious interaction characteristic of the period.

1
The Jewish Community and its Boundaries

Tessa Rajak

The Jewish Diaspora

After rejecting the theological animus, as well as the historical absurdity, in claims that Judaism effectively vanished when Christianity arose, we may still wonder whether the followers of a faith apparently organized around self-separation could really play a full part in any plural society. And yet we see the Jews doing just that in the post-70 era, as already before it. This discussion examines that seeming contradiction, suggesting reasons why it may in fact be inappropriate to speak of Diaspora Jews as separated from their neighbours by metaphorical high walls and, on the other hand, enquiring about the meaning and the limits of the types of interaction known to us.

In Acts, Peter offers the centurion Cornelius a grossly unfair representation of the Jews as forbidden by their religion 'to visit or associate with a man of another race' (Acts 10:28). Discounting the exaggeration, we may still be inclined to feel that there is an element of truth here. We may recall that pagan outsiders even more than Christian, saw Jews as misanthropic, self-sufficient, unwilling to share a table with any but their own kind or even to render basic human assistance (Stern 1974: 1980). This is indeed the regular, virtually automatic response of Roman writers to Jews, or to the thought of them, and before that of certain Hellenistic Greek writers. Take away the hostility, and here too there may remain a degree of verisimilitude. After all, Balaam had long ago prophesied for Israel a future as 'a people that dwells alone, that has not made itself one with the nations' (Numbers 23:9). And Philo's comment (Life of Moses I. 278) had explained this in terms of the distinctiveness of Jewish customs. Modern experience readily leads us to believe that the life-arrangements required by completely orthodox Judaism, as we today know it, presuppose an intensely communal existence and scarcely leave room for more than superficial mixing.

It is undeniable that the crystallization and the increasing influence of rabbinic Judaism constituted by far the most prominent development in Jewish life and thought over the first five centuries of the Christian era. From the inside, this is usually viewed as a supreme achievement (which it undoubtedly was, by any intellectual standards); from the outside, often with wilful ignorance, as a regrettable, even a culpable, narrowing. The fact, either way, cannot be forgotten; yet what it means for the communities under consideration is by no means self-evident.

The communities of Jews who lived in the cities of the Roman Empire were in no sense a marginal phenomenon. The first-century authors Philo and Josephus tell us that in their day there existed already a large and ubiquitous Jewish Diaspora. In some places its origins went back to long before Alexander the Great. We may perhaps distrust their exaggerations, as also the supposed citation from Strabo about the Jewish people (Josephus, Antiquities XIV 115) that 'it has already made its way into every city, and it is not easy to find any place in the habitable world which has not taken this race in and which it does not dominate'. Josephus appears to have picked up a nasty remark in Strabo (or else quoted from Strabo) and then attempted to turn it to his own purpose.¹ Josephus' statement in the Jewish War (II 462-3) that, at the war's outbreak in ad 66, every city in Syria had in it both Jews and Judaizers, has a somewhat greater claim on our attention. However, we do not have to rest on these subjective utterances to be confident that Jews were to be found in number in many of the cities of the eastern empire, and of course in Rome, and tentatively to suggest that they are likely to have spread around the west as well by the mid-first century ad. Inscriptions attest urban settlement; while we cannot say much about rural settlement, it has been suspected for Cyrenaica, where an inscription refers to the Jews of the region (Applebaum 1979), and is clearly demonstrated by papyri for Egyptian villages. There is no need to enter into discussion here about highly speculative figures.

Diaspora communities were grouped around the institution of the synagōgē, also called proseuchē, of which there would be more than one in a large city - eleven are attested for Rome in the catacomb epitaphs (Leon 1960). Inscriptions reveal synagogue officials to have been prominent figures. But the word synagōgē, which means assembly, unlike proseuchē, meaning prayer, carries an important ambiguity, and we cannot always tell whether a building is intended, or merely the particular community, viewed as an association, conventus, or synodos in Greek (Applebaum 1974: 490). Nor is it impossible for both implications to be carried at the same time. Thus, while we can readily say that the synagogue was central to Diaspora Judaism, we are in no position to say how far the religious life of individuals expressed itself through the synagogue. Furthermore, we have clear knowledge from inscriptions that synagogues might consist of more than just halls for the reading of the Law and the recital of prayers, and might, as at Macedonian Stobi (CIJ 694; Lifschitz 1967, no. 10; Hengel 1966) or in the Theodotus synagogue of pre-70 Jerusalem (CIJ 1404; Liftschitz 1967: 79; Levine 1987: 17), contain also dining-halls (Stobi had a triclinium) or hostelries or other communal facilities. Therefore, the labelling of an individual as belonging to a particular synagogue becomes even less easy to interpret.

If the role of synagogue affiliation and the demarcation there between the religious and the social are opaque to us, the practices and observances of Diaspora Jews in their daily lives are also hard to penetrate. But we can make an attempt to discern something of the implications of rabbinic Judaism for their world, and then to conclude whether it is indeed likely that the demands of that system will have cut them off from the life of the city around them.

Rabbinic Judaism

A rough and uncontroversial description of rabbinic Judaism must be the starting-point. Rabbinic Judaism is that form of religion which took shape after the failure of the first revolt against Rome and the destruction of the Temple in ad 70, and in some measure in response to those events; its foundations, however, had been earlier laid by the Pharisees. In Palestine, this replaced the sectarianism which had marked the period between the Maccabees and the destruction, even if the ideal unity that rabbinic literature likes sometimes to depict was not achieved. The emphasis of the rabbis was on study of the Torah (the Pentateuch) and its interpretation, in an ever-increasing body of oral doctrine, whose main thrust was towards norms of behaviour (halakhah), though its range was in fact much wider. The production of written texts began with the Mishnah, a summary of practice in commentary form which was composed in about ad 200, and was supplemented by the longer Tosefta, perhaps a generation later; the process reached its climax, though in no sense its conclusion, with the massive and heterogeneous compilation of the sixth century, known to us as the Babylonian Talmud. It is noteworthy that this was produced not in Palestine but in the Aramaic-speaking Diaspora. The institution of the synagogue, with its regular Torah readings, and (in Palestine) its Aramaic translation, had emerged already before 70; but it assumed a new importance in the absence of the Temple cult (which had drawn many pilgrims) and ensured that the sacred text was widely familiar. It is probably right to see the development of rabbinic Judaism, and perhaps also its beginnings, as in some way a response to the Christian challenge, a sharpening of self-definition (a fashionable term in this field); yet it is highly significant that no such purpose is made explicit: everything in the system is explained in its own terms, with ultimate recourse to divine requirements. Some see the concern of the rabbis with purity and with establishing correct action in every particular as the construction of a fortification against fatal erosion or undermining through compromise of essentials. 'The Rabbis', wrote Momigliano (1987: 401), 'humane and alert as they were, chose or were driven to create a new Jewish culture, which touched only the fringes of Greek culture.'

No less significant than the content of rabbinic Judaism, was the centralized authority structure, based first at Yavneh (or Jamnia), on the coast of Judaea, but later elsewhere; this may be described as a strengthened replacement of the focal point that Jerusalem had been. The rabbinic academy (beth midrash), the court of law associated with it,² the ordination of one another by the rabbis, who might also be spoken of as hakhamim or sages (Levine 1989: 141-2), and the prestige of these scholar-teachers as individuals and as a collective elite, were the components of rabbinic Judaism. The Patriarch (Nasi) was the leader of Palestinian Jewry (and perhaps of other Jews too) and in the eyes of the Roman government; he had supreme status by the beginning of the third century if not before, and he was always the upholder of rabbinic authority. Rabbis who were especially esteemed issued ordinances (takkanot) and prohibitions, but those were few at first. The evolution, elucidation and transmission of a much larger and more complex (even sometimes contradictory) network of halakhot (which we might call accepted rulings) was the main part of the rabbis' business. Practical rulings about the calendar (which determined the observance of the festivals and many other aspects of Jewish life) were among both the earliest and the most fundamental of the powers assumed by the central institutions. Jewish piety, as understood by the rabbis, rested on the fulfilment of a very large number of approved acts, mitzvot, of either a ritual or an ethical character; it was indispensable that these be performed in a spirit of love. They could account, in their totality, for all areas of an individual's life. All activities were seen as sanctified, but study was strongly promoted as a value in itself; one may detect an element of professional interest in the latter. This ever-growing system was generated by way of the spoken word. Large-scale literary formulation of principles was not undertaken until the Mishnah was completed (Strack 1931; Strack-Stemberger 1982; Safrai 1987).

We can discern that the authority of the rabbis did not establish itself immediately; naturally, however, the setbacks suffered by the earlier leaders were not preserved for the record by their successors. For all periods, it is a matter of uncertainty how much of the halakhah which the rabbis debated so enthusiastically was seen as theoretical. There were other limitations too. Those mitzvot which were to do with land-use (tithing, sabbatical year, etc.) were applicable only to the area regarded as being within the notional confines of the land of Israel. But even there, throughout the Mishnaic period and probably beyond, a whole section of the population, known as amei ha-aretz (literally, peoples of the land) appear to have ignored them, with no worse consequences than incurring the snobbish contempt or the abusive comments of the rabbinic class (Oppenheimer 1977; Levine 1989: 112-17). For the Galilee, it has been argued (Goodman 1983: 93-118) that, before the third century, the rabbis attempted to control the population only in matters of specifically religious observance, and not at all in practical matters, and that even in the first sphere they were largely unsuccessful. Although there was, on this view, universal observance of the basic requirements of Judaism - the sabbath, circumcision, the festivals, the regulations about sexual cleanness and uncleanness, and widespread practice of the basic dietary laws, that was something which occurred independently of the rabbis. And even that may be too strong a statement: it relies largely on the negative evidence of absence of complaint by Tannaitic (i.e. pre-Talmudic) rabbis on those cardinal issues. During the third and fourth centuries the situation must have changed somewhat, since Galilee became the heartland of Jewish settlement in Palestine, but it is unclear how this happened.

In the literature, attributions of doctrine or utterance to particular rabbis are often highly dubious (Neusner 1984); none the less, there has been enough investigation to reveal that, far from a unified view, there existed a spectrum of opinion among prominent rabbis on major questions, and this is visible in the case of approaches to the outside world, to association with Gentiles and to levels of permitted contact (Levine 1989: 83-97). The Mishnaic tractate on idolatry, Avodah Zarah, exposes a number of such divergences. Palestine, of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Note on transliteration
• Glossary of Jewish sources and terms
• Chronological guide to the Jewish Diaspora under Roman rule
• Map
• Introduction
• 1 The Jewish community and its boundaries
• 2 The pre-Christian Paul
• 3 Jewish proselytizing in the first century
• 4 History and theology in Christian views of Judaism
• 5 The Jews of the Graeco-Roman Diaspora between paganism and Christianity, AD 312-438
• 6 Syrian Christianity and Judaism
• 7 From Judaism to Christianity: The Syriac version of the Hebrew Bible
• 8 The development of religious pluralism
• Index