Aphrodite and the Rabbis Read online

  Because I want to learn the lessons of history, I must ask: Do those ancient Jews look like me because they were like me? Do I see the rabbis on their rounds as unique and particular to their own day and age—mediating between the Roman overlords and the remnants of their Israelite religion and culture? Or do I see them as being like so many American Jews, getting along, assimilating as much as necessary and then some, running a risk of disappearing into the larger culture? Or can I try to see them as they perhaps saw themselves, making their way in a world where it seemed that God might have abandoned them and their Holy City, yet nevertheless desperately trying to find a way to hold on and keep the faith?

  If this book places the rabbis and the Judaism they invented into their own historic Roman context, it is worth a moment to set this book itself in context as a product of twenty-first-century American Judaism. This modern perspective of American Judaism as a flourishing minority religion in the broader Christian culture is what makes the ancient story seem so familiar. But it runs the risk of our misunderstanding the milieu of the rabbis in the Roman Empire. Allow me to explain by means of another fox fable. This one is from Aesop:

  There once was a fox walking by the riverside. That fox had caught a fish and was preparing to eat it when he gazed into the river and caught a glimpse of his reflection. Thinking he had seen another fox with a fish in its mouth, he opened his jaws to snatch away that fox’s prize. Of course, no sooner had he opened his jaws than the fish he had already caught leapt back into the water and swam away.

  The moral to the story is that what he wanted in his greed he could not have, and further; he lost what he already had.

  The moral to Aesop’s fox fable also is found in the Babylonian Talmud (Sota 9a), and it offers a lesson to heed. Writing the story of the invention of Judaism during the Roman Empire, I run the danger of seeing only my own reflection as an American Jew. So, caveat lector, as the Romans used to say—“read with care” and with the knowledge that my biases as writer and yours as reader may cause us to see things in the rabbis and the Romans that reflect us all only too well. We may marvel at how much they were just like us. How readily the rabbis invented a Judaism that allowed Jews to have the best of both worlds—the Judaism of their ancestors, albeit somewhat transformed, and the best of Roman (read: Western) culture, with but slight adjustment. This should give us a few moments’ pause. Has my presentation simply reinforced what we all already think about our own circumstance?

  I hope to tell the story straightforwardly. Yet I am limited not only by my current situation and the confines of my limited vision, but also by the reliability of my sources. As for methods, I seek to narrate the moments of Judaism’s birth, as though it were the goddess Venus rising from the sea, or the divine Athena leaping from the head of Zeus. You see my problem—it is fairly easy to turn to Roman myths to narrate Jewish events, which underscores the point I am trying to make. I already read the history of the early rabbis through the lens of Greco-Roman culture.

  Most of the stories I discuss were composed orally in the rabbinic circles of the first five centuries CE in Roman Palestine. Of course, all of these texts understandably have a decidedly pro-rabbi bias. These traditions are the very ingredients that helped to bake the cake of Judaism. But it is precisely the religious bias of these texts that makes them unreliable as historical documents. To state it as baldly as possible: None of the narratives of the rabbis in this period are about history. They are about law, lore, folk cures, religious practice, ethics, belief—each of which all but precludes us from knowing “what really happened.” Yet the very legal and literary qualities of the rabbinic library allow us to compare these works to Roman literature and see the strong affinities between them.

  Still other stories I quote are pagan Roman, Greek, and Christian. Each of these may have its own prejudiced view of Judaism. For many, their biases will be self-evident. It is sufficient to remember that they view Judaism as “them,” not “us.” But in all of these cases, my ability to compare rabbinic texts to non-Jewish texts allows me to show the broader context of Roman culture.

  I make use of some nontextual materials as well. Here, folks often get excited because art and archeology, artifacts, seem to be historical facts. But art and architecture are also a form of text that need to be read and analyzed, and often are subject to heated debate and interpretation. The past is a cipher and I do not necessarily hold the decoder. So I gather provisional information, array the pieces of the puzzle, rejoice when they seem to fit together, and try my best to get a view of the broader Roman context and hope that it is “true.”

  As we look at that big picture, we note that there in the corner, concealed in the details, sits our much-fabled fox. That sly animal is a potent symbol for the nexus of Roman and early Jewish culture. Just as Roman moralists trotted out the fox, as it were, for a rhetorical flourish or to make their point, so too did rabbis know when to deploy that sly fellow for maximum effect. A marvelous example of the power of the fox fable may be found in the fifth-century Midrash on Leviticus, where we are told (in folksy Aramaic):

  Shimeon son of Rabbi [Judah the Patriarch] made a wedding feast for his son. He invited all of the rabbis, but neglected to invite Bar Kappara; who went and wrote [graffiti?] on the gate of the banquet hall: “After rejoicing comes death; so what’s the point of rejoicing?”

  Shimeon asked, “Who did this to me? Is there someone we didn’t invite?” They told him that he had neglected Bar Kappara. He said, “We’d better invite him now, lest he become an enemy.” So he threw a second banquet, inviting all of the rabbis, this time including Bar Kappara.

  When each course of the banquet was brought out to the guests, Bar Kappara stood and entertained them with three hundred fox fables. The guests were so entranced that they didn’t touch their food and it grew cold—until each dish was returned to the kitchen untouched. (Lev. Rabbah 28:2)

  Too bad we no longer have the obviously compelling fables Bar Kappara told to distract the wedding guests from their dinners. This delicious example of rabbinic cattiness (or should I say foxiness?) hinges on the popularity of Hellenistic fox fables. The moral of this story could well be: revenge is a dish best served cold. If I may add two tasting notes to this tale: First, Bar Kappara is the son of an early rabbi, Rabbi Elazar HaKappar. Elazar has the distinction of being one of the very few rabbis whose name is preserved in an ancient inscription. Second, the groom in this story is the grandson of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch, editor of the Mishnah. The rabbis lived in a cozy world where they all went to the same schools and lived, as it were, in the same zip codes.

  This tale of fox fables makes it clear that the rabbis were comfortable in both Hebrew and Aramaic. But the story also uses the Greek and Latin term for banquet dishes, neatly transliterated into Hebrew characters. In fact, there are thousands of loanwords from Greek and Latin found in the literature of the rabbis. That is a huge penetration of culture, on a par with the ubiquity of American English terms found throughout the world today.

  I conclude with one final fox fable about Jacob and Esau, the eponymous ancestors of the Jews and Romans. In the biblical book of Genesis (ch. 32–33), when Jacob confronted his brother, Esau, after having cheated and then fled from him two decades earlier, he feared the reunion. In his panic, Jacob divided his sons into camps, fore and aft, in anticipation of a violent reception. Yet when he finally met his brother, he was greeted with a kiss and a forgiving welcome. Still, Esau is the rabbis’ symbol of all that is bad about Rome, so they cannot even read his reception of Jacob positively. The rabbis say if Esau kisses you, you should count your teeth afterward. Yet even the rabbis cannot ignore the fact that Esau is Jacob/Israel’s twin brother. Perhaps that is why, above all else, they chose Esau as the symbol of Rome.

  In the commentary to the passage in Genesis 33:1, which recounts the reunion of the brothers, Midrash Genesis Rabbah (78:7) teaches,

&n
bsp; Once the lion was angry with all the animals. They asked one another, “Who will go and reconcile with him?”

  The fox said, “I will lead the way, for I know three hundred fox fables which can assuage him.”

  All the animals said, “Let’s go [agomen]!”

  They walked a bit and he stopped. The animals asked the fox, “Why have you halted?” He confessed, “I have forgotten a hundred fables.”

  They said, “No matter, two hundred fables are a blessing.” They walked a bit and the fox stopped again. The animals asked the fox, “Why have you halted?” He confessed, “I have forgotten another hundred fables.”

  They said, “No matter, even one hundred fables are a blessing.”

  When they arrived at the lion’s lair the fox cried, “I’ve forgotten them all! Every man for himself!”

  I should note that when the animals in the fable say “let’s go,” they do so in Greek, neatly transliterated into Hebrew letters. In the Hebrew Bible’s narrative, Jacob begins with bravado, yet by the time he reaches Esau he has essentially told his sons, “Every man for himself!”

  In the rabbis’ own story, they are Jacob. They approach Esau, Rome, with caution. They understand very well that the fox fable, or, if you will, Roman rhetoric, is the way to approach the Roman other and to show that we are one and the same, twin brothers who share a lineage. Over time, we have forgotten some, even much, of the common language of Greco-Roman culture that marked Judaism as part of the Hellenistic household. In the immediate centuries following the destruction of Jerusalem, as again today, it seemed that Judaism resembled the fox’s “every man for himself.”

  And in a way, it is also “every man for himself” as we evaluate the stories in this book and how I present them as evidence of how the Jews adapted Roman culture to create Judaism. Then and now, our shared heritage of Hellenism remains a source of self-identity. Looking back, we can discern the path by which the rabbis chose to take the best that the Roman world offered them and see how they reshaped it so that Judaism could survive. Knowing that this synthesis between the Temple cult and Hellenism created a vibrant Judaism that survived two millennia is heartening. Reflecting on that dual history reveals who we are. At this inflection point in Jewish history, it may also help us discern the truth of who we yet might become.

  Chapter III

  Judaisms of the Oikoumene: Who Were the Jews in the Roman World?

  Judaisms of the OY what?” Oikoumene is a Greek word, but one that has currency in English in the term “ecumenical.” In Late Antiquity, the oikoumene was the Hellenistic world, the lands of the Greco-Roman Empire. In the Jewish-Roman world, this included all of the varieties of Judaism found throughout the Roman Empire—what Solomon Schechter a century ago quaintly called “catholic Israel”—hence Judaisms. While it is true that in this book I essentially equate “Judaism” with the Judaism of the rabbis, I want to put that particular Judaism into the context of the many other, more or less Hellenized varieties of nonrabbinic Judaisms throughout the empire in our period.

  This penchant for equating all “Judaism” with the Judaism of the rabbis is due to the success of rabbinic Judaism as the dominant mode of Jewish expression, perhaps as early as the end of Late Antiquity and onward through modernity. In recent decades, thanks in part to archeological and manuscript discoveries, other Judaisms have begun to be recovered by historians, so that rabbinic Judaism can now be placed in a much broader context. In America, declining synagogue membership has been complemented by a rise in other expressions of Jewish culture, resulting in a greater interest and ease in speaking of Judaism in multiple forms.

  In truth, there have always been varieties of Judaism, even when the Jerusalem Temple dominated Israelite religious practice in the Ancient Near East. Jews nostalgically recall a time when the priests served God in Jerusalem and, encouraged by the exclusivist strictures of the biblical book of Deuteronomy, recall that Temple as the omphalos te¯s ge¯s. This Greek phrase implies that the Temple was the center of the universe, but literally translated it means “belly button of the world.” In the rabbinic imagination, if one were to unhinge that belly button, primordial chaos would engulf the world.

  But the Hebrew Bible reluctantly acknowledges that even when the Jerusalem Temple was first built, there were rival altars and sanctuaries. When King Solomon’s Temple was destroyed, in 586 BCE, and Jews were exiled to Babylonia (modern Iraq), some remnant of the Judean community remained in the Holy Land. They called themselves Samaritans, which means “the preservers or guardians,” and they built a sanctuary to replace the destroyed First Temple. Their own Temple was built in Samaria (modern Nablus), on Mt. Gerizim. This mountain is mentioned in the biblical book of Deuteronomy as the site of the blessings and imprecations that Moses commanded the Levites to offer at the Israelites’ entrance into the Promised Land. The Samaritans persisted as a distinct group throughout the Israelite exile and became a rival form of Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Even when the Second Temple was built, they persisted. In fact, the Samaritans remain on Mt. Gerizim to this very day, still performing biblically enjoined sacrifices!

  There were yet other sanctuaries that sought to rival the Jerusalem Temple. Egypt was one place where non-Jerusalem practices flourished. There was a Temple on the Nile Island of Elephantine that dates back to the biblical period. There are small archeological traces at the site, as well as records preserved on papyrus. The Elephantine papyri offer evidence of a community living as part of the military outpost on that Nubian island as early as the fifth century BCE. There also was a Jewish Temple complex at Leontopolis in the Nile delta region of Heliopolis, the site of the biblical city of On. That Temple persisted for two to three hundred years and seems to have been destroyed about the same time as the Second Temple in Jerusalem, which is to say ca. 70 CE. In other words, throughout the “Second Temple period,” there were Egyptian Jewish centers to rival Jerusalem and its priesthood.

  Alexandria was also home to a large community of Jews. The Egyptian city was founded in the fourth century BCE by Alexander the Great, and the Jews there thrived under Hellenistic rule. The most famous product of that community may well have been the third-century BCE Greek translation of the Torah, called the Septuagint. The mythic story of that translation says that the Jewish residents of Alexandria reached out to the Jerusalem Temple authorities for assistance in the translation project. By the first century BCE, Alexandria had a highly Hellenized Jewish population, though they maintained their own separate Jewish political structure. The city produced the famous turn-of-the-millennium Jewish philosopher Philo, who wrote an allegorical commentary on the Torah, attempting to reconcile it with Hellenism. The multivolume work is a fascinating peek into the mind of a highly educated Jewish leader. Philo relied wholly on the Septuagint Greek translation, as he apparently had poor command of Hebrew.

  Philo’s nephew, Tiberius Julius Alexander (love that nice Jewish name), was sufficiently assimilated to Hellenism that he abandoned his roots in the Jewish community entirely. Perhaps he found his uncle’s writings and disquisitions, or the Alexandrian community itself, just too boring—some things never change. In any case, the first-century CE Jewish historian Josephus reports that Tiberius Julius Alexander demonstrated his loyalty to Rome by commanding army troops who first acted against the Alexandrian Jewish community and then besieged Jerusalem in the years 66–70 CE! While Uncle Philo saw the relationship between Judaism and Hellenism as a “both/and,” his nephew saw it as a stark “either/or,” in which Judaism lost the battle.

  The Jewish community of Alexandria persisted into the second century, when it suffered severely in the anti-Jewish rioting of 115–117 CE, sometimes referred to as the Great War of the Diaspora. In that period, riots broke out throughout many of the Mediterranean and North African Jewish communities. Pagan locals’ resentment of the special privileges that many of the Jewish communities rec
eived from Rome resulted in vicious pogroms that decimated the Jewish-Roman world. This may have been a mortal blow to the existence of a separate Jewish community in Alexandria. Nevertheless, the reputation of that ancient Jewish community persisted, so that in the early third century the rabbis could imagine nostalgically:

  Rabbi Yehudah said, “Anyone who did not behold the double-columned [diplostaton] synagogue of Alexandria of Egypt never really appreciated the greatness of the Jews. It was a basilica that had columns [stoa] within columns. There were times when it held double the number that left Egypt [=1,200,000!]. There were seventy-one golden thrones [kathedra], one for each of the elders . . . and there was a dais [bema] of wood in the center and the director of the congregation stood there with a cloth [soudarion] in hand. When they prayed he would wave the cloth so they could reply “amen” to each and every blessing, and then the next one further down would wave his cloth so the rest could respond, “amen.”

  They did not sit mixed, but by guilds: the goldsmiths sat together, as did the silversmiths, the weavers, the bronze workers and iron workers. Why? So that strangers [ksenoi] who came could be accepted by those who shared their craft, and they would thus find employment. (Tosefta Sukkah 4:6)

  This is a rabbinic fantasy; but the story they tell of the synagogue of Alexandria is instructive. To begin with, they use seven Greek loanwords (in italics above) in two short paragraphs. The rabbis contemplate a synagogue so large that it could hold over a million Jews, or, as they put it, “double the number that left Egypt.” There is a delicious irony here: the rabbis imagine such huge numbers in Egypt, all those centuries after the biblical Exodus. The synagogue architecture they project onto Alexandria, a basilica building with diplo-stoa, or two sets of columns, was exactly the kind of Greco-Roman architecture that the rabbis saw in synagogues throughout the Land of Israel in their own times. And, like modern Orthodox synagogues of today, they apparently did not use microphones on Shabbat.