goodman, m.-judaism in the roman world (ancient judaism and early christianity)-brill (2007)

5/24/2018 Goodman, M.-judaism in the Roman World (Ancient Judaism and Early Christia...

http:///reader/full/goodman-m-judaism-in-the-roman-world-ancient-judaism-and-early-ch



Judaism in the Roman World



Ancient Judaism andEarly ChristianityArbeiten zur Geschichte des Antiken

Judentums und des Urchristentums

Edited by

Martin Hengel (Tbingen),Pieter W. van der Horst (Utrecht),

Martin Goodman (Oxford),Daniel R. Schwartz ( Jerusalem),

Cilliers Breytenbach (Berlin),Friedrich Avemarie (Marburg),

Seth Schwartz (New York)

VOLUME 66



Judaism in the Roman WorldCollected Essays

by

Martin Goodman

LEIDEN BOSTON2007



This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Goodman, Martin, 1953- Judaism in the Roman world : collected essays / by Martin Goodman. p. cm. (Ancient Judaism and early Christianity, ISSN 1871-6636 ; v. 67) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-90-04-15309-7 ISBN-10: 90-04-15309-8 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. JudaismHistoryPost-exilic period,586 B.C.-210 A.D. 2. JudaismHistoryTalmudic period, 10-425. I. Title. II. Series.

BM176.G63 2006 296.09'014dc22

2006049637

ISSN 1871-6636 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15309 7 ISBN-10: 90 04 15309 8

Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill,Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus NijhoffPublishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated,stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means,electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior

written permission from the publisher.

Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is grantedby Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to

The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive,

Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA.Fees are subject to change.



CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................ viiAcknowledgements .................................................................... ix

Chapter One Early Judaism ......................................... 1Chapter Two Identity and Authority in Ancient

Judaism ................................................... 21Chapter Three Josephus and Variety in First-CenturyJudaism ................................................... 33

Chapter Four The Temple in First-Century CEJudaism ................................................... 47

Chapter Five The Pilgrimage Economy of Jerusalemin the Second Temple Period .............. 59

Chapter Six Sacred Scripture and Defiling theHands ..................................................... 69

Chapter Seven Texts, Scribes and Power in RomanJudaea ..................................................... 79

Chapter Eight Jewish Proselytising in the FirstCentury ................................................... 91

Chapter Nine A Note on Josephus, the Pharisees andAncestral Tradition ................................ 117

Chapter Ten The Place of the Sadducees inFirst-Century Judaism ............................ 123

Chapter Eleven A Note on the Qumran Sectarians,the Essenes and Josephus ...................... 137

Chapter Twelve The Persecution of Paul by DiasporaJews ......................................................... 145

Chapter Thirteen Sadducees and Essenes After 70 CE ... 153Chapter Fourteen The Function of Minimin Early

Rabbinic Judaism ................................... 163Chapter Fifteen Modeling the Parting of the

Ways ...................................................... 175

Chapter Sixteen Kosher Olive Oil in Antiquity ............. 187



vi

Chapter Seventeen The Jewish Image of God in LateAntiquity ................................................. 205

Chapter Eighteen Sacred Space in Diaspora Judaism ...... 219Chapter Nineteen Jews and Judaism in the

Mediterranean Diaspora in theLate-Roman Period: the Limitations ofEvidence ................................................. 233

Index of Names and Subjects .................................................. 261Index of Ancient Literature ....................................................... 269



PREFACE

The studies reprinted here originally appeared in diverse publicationsbetween 1990 and 2006, and in many cases they are not easily avail-able. They were written for a variety of purposes, but they reflecta consistent approach in the study of Judaism from the late SecondTemple period to the end of antiquity and I hope that reissuing

them in a single volume may prove useful.It is largely by accident that I have written on so many aspectsof the religious lives of ancient Jews. I was trained as a Roman his-torian and came to the study of Jewish texts originally as a sourcefor social, cultural and administrative history; for such purposes, itwas necessary to analyse the religious milieu and meaning of thesetexts only to the extent that this clarified their value as evidence forother aspects of Jewish and Roman history. However, I discoveredearly in my teaching career that many colleagues simply assumed

that anyone who works on Jewish texts must be interested in reli-gious history for its own sake, and after a while I succumbed. Inany case, it proved impossible to give lectures on Roman Palestinewithout taking a view on numerous contentious issues in the studyof Judaism, and the provision of lectures for the Theology facultyin Oxford on Varieties of Judaism encouraged a re-examination ofreceived opinion on many aspects.

The studies reprinted here reflect these origins. They are not thework of a theologian: they deal with the religious lives of ancientJews rather than with religious ideas in the abstract. Those lives aresituated, explicitly or implicitly, against the background of the widerhistory of the Roman world. Throughout there is a strong concernto clarify the limitations of the surviving evidence for ancient Judaismand to encourage gentle scepticism about some of the later mythsabout Judaism in the early centuriesmyths which were createdalready by the end of antiquity, within the rabbinic and Christiantraditions, but which have in many cases survived to the present.

The texts of the essays are republished here unchanged from theiroriginal form except for the correction of a few misprints, since ref-erence to more recent discussions of the issues they raise would nothave changed the arguments and would have impaired the clarity


http:///reader/full/goodman-m-judaism-in-the-roman-world-ancient-judaism-and-early-chr

viii

of the presentation. But readers may find it helpful to know abouta few of the most significant later works relevant to the articles

written in the 1990s: for Chapter 2, Shaye Cohen, The Beginnings ofJewishness: boundaries, varieties, uncertainties(University of California Press,Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1999); for Chapter 7, ChristineSchams,Jewish Scribes in the Second-Temple Period(Sheffield AcademicPress, Sheffield 1998); for Chapter 8, Martin Goodman, Mission andConversion: Proselytising in the Religious History of the Roman Empire(OxfordUniversity, Press, Oxford, 1994); for Chapter 18, Steven Fine, ThisHoly Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue During the Greco-Roman Period

(University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 1998).Martin Goodman



ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Original publication details of these studies are as follows:

Early Judaism, in E.W. Nicholson (ed.), A Century of Theological and

Religious Studies in Britain 19022002 (British Academy, Oxford, 2003),13551.

Identity and authority in ancient Judaism, Judaism 39 (1990),192201.

Josephus and Variety in First Century Judaism, The Israel Academyof Science and Humanities. Proceedings. Vol. VII No. 6. Jerusalem, 2000,20113.

The Temple in First Century CE Judaism, in J. Day (ed.), Temple

and Worship in Biblical Israel(T. & T. Clark, London and New York,2005), 45968.

The pilgrimage economy of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period,in L. I. Levine, ed., Jerusalem: its sanctity and centrality to Judaism,Christianity and Islam(Continuum, New York, 1999), 6976.

Sacred scripture and defiling the hands ,Journal of Theological Studies41 (1990), 99107.

Texts, scribes and power in Roman Judaea, in A.K. Bowman andG. D. Woolf, eds., Literacy and Power in the Ancient World(CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, 1994), 99108.

Jewish proselytising in the first century A.D., in T. Rajak, J.M.Lieu and J. North (eds.),Jews among Pagans and Christians in the RomanEmpire(Methuen, London, 1992), 5378.



x

A note on Josephus, the Pharisees and ancestral tradition, JJS50(1999), 1720.

The place of the Sadducees in First-Century Judaism, in M. Gregory,S. Heschel and F. Udoh (eds.), Festschrift for E.P. Sanders (Universityof Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, Ind., 2006).

A note on the Qumran sectarians, the Essenes and Josephus, JJS46 (1995), 1616.

The persecution of Paul by diaspora Jews, in J. Pastor and M. Mor(eds.), The Beginnings of Christianity (Yad ben Zvi, Jerusalem, 2005),379387.

Sadducees and Essenes after 70 CE, in S.E. Porter, P. Joyce andD.E. Orton (eds.), Crossing the Boundaries. Essays in Biblical Interpretationin honour of Michael D. Goulder(Brill, Leiden, 1994), 34756.

The function of minim in early rabbinic Judaism, in H. Cancik,

H. Lichtenberger and P. Schfer (eds.), Geschichte-Tradition-Reflexion.(Festschrift fr Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburstag) ( J.C.B. Mohr (PaulSiebeck), Tbingen, 1996), vol. 1, 50110.

Modeling the Parting of the Ways, in A.H. Becker and A.Y. Reed,The Ways that Never Parted ( J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), Tbingen,2003), 11929.

Kosher olive oil in antiquity, in P.R. Davies and R.T. White (eds.),

A Tribute to Geza Vermes (Sheffield Academic Press, Sheffield, 1990),22745.

The Jewish Image of God in Late Antiquity, in R. Kalmin andS. Schwartz (eds.), Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian RomanEmpire(Peeters and JTS Press, Leuven, 2003), 13345.

Sacred Space in Diaspora Judaism, in B. Isaac and A. Oppenheimer(eds.), Studies on the Jewish Diaspora in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods(Te'udavolume 12; Tel Aviv University and Ramot Publishing, TelAviv, 1996), 116.



Jews and Judaism in the Mediterranean Diaspora in the late-Romanperiod: the limitations of evidence, in Carol Bakhos (ed.), Ancient

Judaism in its Hellenistic Context, (Brill, Leiden, 2005), 177203.

I am grateful to the publishers of each of these articles for permis-sion to republish them in this volume.

xi



CHAPTER ONE

EARLY JUDAISM

In a chapter dedicated to the discussion of changing scholarly perspec-tives during a century of endeavour, it is appropriate to begin withthe observation that any decision as to what to include under therubric of Early Judaism must itself be the product of a distinctiveperspective. I shall discuss in this chapter the work that has been doneon Judaism in the late Second Temple period and in late antiquitydown to the closure of the Talmudthat is, roughly from 200 BCEto c. 500 CE.Descriptions of this Judaism as early, though commonin British scholarship, is not universal. In the eyes of orthodox Jewswho trace the origins of Judaism to the giving of the Torah to Moseson Mt Sinai, the late Second Temple period lies a long way downthe continuous stream of halakha. In contrast, scholars who view

Second Temple Judaism as a prelude to Christianity and rabbinicJudaism after 70 CE as theologically insignificant may describe thelast days of the Temple as Sptjudentum. A well-meaning effort tomediate between these attitudes by describing this period as MiddleJudaism has not proven popular.1

It may justify my retention of the term Early Judaism for thischapter to note that I am thereby reflecting the mainstream per-spective of British scholars in Second Temple Judaism over the pastcentury, since most still come from a background in biblical studies,in which a sharp break between the Israelite religion of the FirstTemple and Judaism of the Second Temple is taken for granted.2

That late Second Temple Judaism is seen as early is testimonyto the appreciation among such scholars that there were to beauthentic later forms of Judaism from the early rabbis down to themodern day.

1G. Boccaccini, Middle Judaism: Jewish Thought, 300 BCE200 CE (Minneapolis,

Minn., 1991).2Note, for instance, the implications of the decision to begin the Cambridge Historyof Judaism with the Persian period (vol. 1, ed. L. Finkelstein and W.D. Davies,Cambridge, 1984). Vol. 2 (1989) of the Cambridge History covers the Hellenisticperiod; vol. 3 (1999), jointly edited by W.D. Davies, W. Horbury and John Sturdy,covers the early Roman period.



2

In contrast to Britain, in the world of scholarship outside the UnitedKingdom the main institutional changes influencing approaches to

early Judaism have been the creation of two new academic contextsfor such study, namely Jewish studies and religious studies. Neithercontext was known at the beginning of the twentieth century but thereare now numerous departments, courses, periodicals and academicposts dedicated to Jewish studies, particularly in the great centres inthe United States and Israel. Departments of religious studies havesimilarly been established in many universities in the United States,with Judaism of all periods studied in the context of other faithsand religion in general.

Academic study of Jewish culture began in nineteenth-centuryGermany as a form of affirmation of the place of Jews withinEuropean culture. These pioneers of the Wissenschaft des Judentumswereall themselves Jews and wrote for a Jewish readership. Almost all wereeither independent scholars or based in Jewish theological institutions.In the United Kingdom, University College London appointed a Jewas Goldsmid Professor of Hebrew in the mid-nineteenth century, andCambridge had a lecturer in rabbinics soon after, but it was only in

the twentieth century that Oxford established the Cowley Lecturer-ship in Post-biblical Hebrew and then, in 1939, the Readership inJewish Studies. In this respect British universities differed little fromother Western institutions, with the notable exception of the HebrewUniversity of Jerusalem, which had been established in the 1920s asa university for the Jewish people.

There was to be drastic change with the general expansion ofuniversity teaching in Western Europe and the United States in the1960s. This general expansion coincided, especially in the UnitedStates, with a demand for greater attention to be paid to study ofpreviously ignored social groups, in particular women and ethnicminorities. The incorporation of Jewish studies into the curricula ofmany American universities over the past forty years has owed muchto the search by American Jews for a Jewish identity, both in thecase of the students who take these courses and the donors throughwhose munificence academic posts have been established. Hence theiracademic concentration has generally been in the history of the Jews

in comparatively modern times. Nonetheless, study of early Judaism,particularly the story of the last days of the Second Temple and itsaftermath, has much contemporary resonance and exerts a stronghold on many students and teachers in these departments.



3

The United Kingdom has not witnessed a similar explosion inJewish studies in universities. Anglo-Jewry is among the larger popu-

lations of diaspora Jews but the size of the community is dwarfedby the number of Jews in the United States, even allowing forthe considerable difficulties inherent in establishing precise figureswhen the definition of Jewish identity is itself disputed. English Jewshave been less inclined than Jews in North America to stress theirJewishness as part of their identity, preferring instead a low profilewithin English society. There is only one university department inthe United Kingdom devoted to Hebrew and Jewish Studies, inUniversity College London. In recent years some universities haveestablished centres or programmes as a way to coordinate the teachingof staffalready in post with an interest in Jewish subjects but, withthe exception of the privately funded Oxford Centre for Hebrew andJewish Studies, the initiatives have been fuelled less by the interests ofdonors or potential students than by the desire of university authori-ties to make a gesture towards incorporation of a new academic fieldmade fashionable by its popularity in the United States.

The pattern for university teaching of religious studies is also set

in the United States, where to some extent it is the product of theinstitutionalised separation of church and state. Since state-funded uni-versities are forbidden to teach Christian theology, study of religionshas to be carried out in a more neutral fashion than is standard inthe divinity schools or in European universities, and this separationhas led quite naturally to study of religions other than Christianity,including Judaism. A similar pattern has begun to spread in theUnited Kingdom in recent years, but only slowly. For a long timethe Religions Department in the University of Lancaster provideda rare British example of the teaching of religions on the model ofdepartments in the United States. Much more common has beenthe accretion of religious studies to existing departments of Christiantheology, with the self-evident risk that non-Christian religions, studieddispassionately from the outside, would emerge as pale and formulaicin comparison with the Christian doctrines discussed with committedpassion by adherents from within the Christian tradition.

These institutional changes have affected in different ways the study

of Second Temple Judaism and the study of Judaism in the earlyrabbinic period. In 1900 most scholarship on Second Temple Jewswas written by New Testament scholars whose primary interest layin the background to Jesus. In 2000 this motivation remained strong



4

among many in the field and has, if anything, been increased overthe past quarter-century by awareness of the Jewishness of Jesus and

many aspects of the early church (see below). But there are also moreand more scholars from within Jewish studies who view this period ofJudaism in the light of the history of Judaism as a whole, and some(though few in the United Kingdom) who take the quite abundantevidence for the religion of Jews in this period as a starting point forwider explanations of the nature of religion as a whole. The centuryhas also seen incursions into this field by classicists aware that theJewish material, apart from its intrinsic interest, provides particularlyabundant insights into themes of change, acculturation and resistancewhich are prominent issues elsewhere in the Mediterranean world inthe late Hellenistic and early Roman imperial period.

The later period of early Judaism, from c. 70500 CE, has con-cerned classicists less, for the simple reason that too much of theevidence is in Hebrew or Aramaic. In 1900 most New Testamentscholars lost interest in the history of Judaism after the end ofthe first century CE: in terms of Christian theology, the historyof Judaism ceased to be a concern once the history of Israel was

safely in the hands of the church. The third/fourth edition of EmilSchrers Geschichte, published in 190111, took the story of Judaismto the defeat of Bar Kokhba in 135 CE, after which, he implied,nothing of any importance occurred.3The efforts of the pioneers ofthe Wissenschaft des Judentums to study early rabbinic Judaism as atheological system comparable to the great monuments of systematicChristian theology of the patristic period were continued for the mostpart only in Jewish theological seminaries and were largely ignored inthe universities. In this respect the position has much changed. First,the Jewish theological colleges of 1900 were almost entirely based inEurope and were destroyed in the Holocaust along with much of therest of European Jewry; those that survived, including Jews Collegein London (later renamed the London School of Jewish Studies),did not exert in later years the same influence in this field that theydid in the first thirty years of the twentieth century. Secondly, therehas been a concerted effort, mostly (but not only) in departments

3 E. Schrer, Geschichte des Jdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 3rd/4th edn.(Leipzig, 190111).



5

of religious studies in the United States, to build on the pioneeringefforts made by early twentieth-century scholars to subject rabbinic

materials to the same sort of critical scrutiny as other religioustexts, by the publication of translations of the texts into Europeanlanguages and the application to the texts of techniques originallyused to analyse other literatures.4The essentially pietistic approach tothese writings, which was almost universal in the Jewish seminariesin 1900, is still to be found in some current scholarship,5but manyrabbinic scholars in universities now come to the subject without thebenefit (and drawbacks) of previous immersion in a traditionalyeshivatraining in study of the Talmud, which is almost indispensable forreal familiarity with these very complex texts but brings with it atendency to ahistorical conflation. This lack of traditional trainingis itself a symptom of the deepening division between religious andsecular Jewish society, particularly in Israel, where those devoted toTalmud study often see no value at all in an academic approach tothe texts. The upheavals of the twentieth century produced a seriesof great scholars who, after a traditional training, left orthodoxybehind on their entry into the university world.6 Such transitions

are of course still possible, but they are increasingly rare. It is worthnoting how many of the leading Jewish scholars in this field in theUnited Kingdom have been migrs from elsewhere in Europe.

Change over the twentieth century has largely been a product ofa change of perspective: different sorts of scholars are tackling thefield, for different reasons. But this change has been fuelled by aseries of remarkable new finds over the course of the century, whichhave themselves led research in new directions.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the bulk of the newdocuments to have had such an impact were all found in Egypt,

4Earlier in the twentieth century, much of this work was carried out in Germanyby H. Albeck and others, but note, in particular, the voluminous studies in morerecent years by Jacob Neusner, in some of which, e.g. Torah from our Sages, Pirke

Avot: A New American Translation and Explanation(Dallas, Tex., 1984), the location ofthis approach in the United States is specifically stressed.

5For a current critique, see S. Schwartz and C. Hezser in M. Goodman (ed.),The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies(Oxford, 2002) pp. 79140.6For an illuminating and reflective description of this process in his own case,see the autobiography of David Halivni, The Book and the Sword: A Life of Learning inthe Shadow of Destruction(Boulder, Col., 1998). Halivni, a Holocaust survivor, teachesat Columbia University in New York.



6

preserved by the dry climate. Near the beginning of the twentiethcentury the most important finds were of material composed after

antiquity, which nonetheless had an importance for study of thisperiod also. These were the documents from the Cairo Geniza, ofwhich the bulk were brought from Egypt to Cambridge in the 1890s.These texts had all been deposited in the Cairo synagogue betweenthe ninth and twelfth centuries CE, and revolutionised study of themedieval Mediterranean world, but it seemed clear quite early intheir study that some of the texts were based on much older mate-rials, some of them from late antiquity. Already in 1910, Schechterpublished as Fragments of a Zadokite Workwhat turned out to be a latecopy of the Damascus Rule eventually to be found in Qumran.7

The same period of discovery around 1900 unearthed a greatnumber of papyrus documents from Egypt, which, although notreligious texts themselves, shed much new light on the religiouslives of Egyptian Jews. In the 1920s, Sir Arthur Cowley publishedthe Aramaic texts from Elephantine which revealed the distinctivereligious customs of a Jewish military garrison in Egypt from c. 610to c.390 BCE, shedding much light on the varied nature of Judaism

at the very end of the biblical period,8and over the course of thecentury plentiful Egyptian Jewish papyri from later periods down tothe upheavals in the Egyptian Jewish community in the early secondcentury ce, most of them unearthed in the course of excavations atthe beginning of the century, were published as they were deciphered,culminating in the magisterial corpus published by Tcherikover, Fuksand Stern,9with an appendix on the Egyptian Jewish inscriptionson stone by David Lewis.

Many of the Egyptian documents were concerned with the social,legal and political status of Jews rather than Judaism, but the samewas not true of the great cache of religious documents found in thecaves above Qumran by the Dead Sea in the late 1940s.10Here wasa mass of biblical texts, hymns, rules, prayers and psalms, hiddenfor safekeeping in antiquity and never recovered until accidentally

7S. Schechter,Documents of Jewish Sectaries, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1910).8

A.E. Cowley,Aramaic Papyri from the Fifth Century BC(Oxford, 1923). 9 V. Tcherikover, A. Fuks and M. Stern (eds.), Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum,3 vols. (Harvard, Mass., 195764).

10 See the influential translation by G. Vermes, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls inEnglish(London, 1997).



7

discovered by bedouin in 1947. Initial disputes over the dates whenthe documents were written were resolved in the 1990s by carbon-

14 dating of the leather and papyrus, so that no scholar doubts anylonger that they were written by Jews in the late Hellenistic or earlyRoman period.

Publication of the scrolls languished during the 1960s, 1970s and1980s, both because of the difficulty inherent in their deciphermentand because of the political volatility of the region where they werefound, which made it hard to put pressure on recalcitrant editors.Conspiracy theories about the reason for delay abounded in thepopular press but have proven groundless now that the final frag-ments have been made fully available both on CD-Rom and inthe official series of the Discoveries in the Judaean Desertpublished byOxford University Press.

The Qumran texts have generally been taken as evidence for thehistory of late Second Temple Judaism up to 70 CE. In contrast,the private legal documents found further south in the JudaeanDesert and in Jericho have had an important role in reassessments ofJudaism in the years following the destruction of the Temple. These

papyri, discovered partly by accident in the 1950s and partly throughcontrolled archaeological searches in the early 1960s (and, to a lesserextent, also since then),11contain marriage contracts, divorce deeds,records of debt and property transfers and other documents clearly ofgreat importance to the individuals who, apparently during the BarKokhba war of 1325, secreted them away in the caves where theywere found. Their significance for the history of Judaea lies in theeclectic systems of law apparently adopted by these Jews in centralareas of their personal lives, and the discrepancies between the lawthey used and that advocated in the rabbinic corpus.12

The enterprising and energetic approach exhibited in the searchfor documents in the Judaean Desert caves by Yigael Yadin in theearly 1960s has characterised Israeli archaeology more generally

11Most of the documents are now available inDiscoveries in the Judaean Desert, vols.2, 27 and 38; seeDJD39, published in 2002, for the definitive guide to publication

details of all these texts. For an account of the archaeological explorations of theearly 1960s, see Y. Yadin, The Finds from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters( Jerusalem, 1963).

12See H.M. Cotton, The Rabbis and the Documents, in M. Goodman (ed.),Jews in a Graeco-Roman World(Oxford, 1998), pp. 16779.



8

over the past fifty years. The main impulse to archaeologicalresearch (as in many other countries) has often been a desire to

bolster nationalistic claims in the new state, and Israelis continue tohave a fascination for the archaeology of the land, which outstripstheir general interest in the ancient past. But, whatever the motives,the increase in knowledge brought by the explosion of excavationsover half a century has been great. For the Second Temple period,most significant have been finds of, for instance, great numbers ofstoneware bowls in the excavations of Jerusalem.13For knowledge ofPalestine in the late-Roman period, the first excavations of the BethShearim necropolis in the 1930s, and the discovery in the 1920s ofa late-Roman synagogue floor at Beth Alpha depicting the signs ofthe zodiac, have had a huge impact (see below, pp. 1112).

Finally, the study of Judaism in the diaspora has been revolutionisedby new discoveries in the twentieth century. Before 1900 diasporaJudaism was known primarily through the voluminous treaties of Philoand the ambiguous evidence from the Jewish catacombs in Rome.Excavations in the early 1930s in Dura-Europos on the Euphrates bya team from Yale University unearthed a synagogue building precisely

dated to the mid-third century, when the building was covered withearth as part of the defensive measures taken by the city when itwas under siege.14 The earth covering protected an extraordinaryseries of frescoes depicting biblical scenes, opening up the possibilitythat such Jewish art was long established outside this one buildingwhich happened to survive. No other diaspora finds have had quitethe impact of the Dura-Europos synagogue, but identification as asynagogue of a huge late-Roman basilica in Sardis in the 1960s hasencouraged much speculation about the possible relationship of Jewsto the surrounding culture, particularly because the Sardis synagogueoccupied so prominent a position in the fourth-century city.15Lessspectacular new evidence has accumulated gradually over the centuryas inscriptions on stone have been unearthed and published. Firstcollected by J.B. Frey in the 1930s, the texts of these inscriptions

13N. Avigad,Discovering Jerusalem(Oxford, 1984).14 C.H. Kraeling, Excavations of Dura-Europos, Final Report VIII.I: The Synagogue

(1956, augmented 2nd edn., New York, 1979).15A.B. Seager and A.T. Kraabel, The Synagogue and the Jewish Community,

in G.M.A. Hanfmann, Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times(Cambridge, Mass., 1983),ch. 9. [See Chapter 19, below.]



9

have been re-edited and augmented in more recent editions,16andhave formed the basis of some major claims about the nature and

distribution of religious authority among Jews, particularly in thecontext of synagogues.17

The combination of different sorts of scholars approaching thesubject and the availability of this mass of new evidence has pro-duced quite new perspectives on much of early Judaism. Thesenew perspectives may be said to have some things in common. Allof them reflect increased uncertainty about aspects of Judaism thatscholars one hundred years ago thought they knew precisely. Muchprogress has consisted in the dismantling of such knowledge. So,for example, in 1900 much of the Jewish literature composed before70 CE was unhesitatingly ascribed to an Essene, Pharisee or Sadduceeauthor, on the flimsiest of grounds. It is difficult to imagine suchcertainty now.

An interest in these non-normative early Jewish texts was signalledearly in the twentieth century by R.H. Charles, through the publica-tion of a magisterial edition of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigraphaof the Old Testament, and the research on the Samaritans by Moses

Gaster.18Charless edition, which brought together the efforts of anumber of scholars who had spent the previous decades unearthingand editing a series of medieval manuscripts of these early texts,itself encouraged further similar research in the same area, mostly bybiblical scholars. Arguments for the significance of this material werereinforced when some of the pseudepigrapha, notably Jubilees andparts of I Enoch, were found in their original Hebrew and Aramaicforms among the Dead Sea Scrolls, thus confirming their early dateand Jewish authorship and providing an invaluable insight into the

16See especially W. Horbury and D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Greek and RomanEgypt (Cambridge, 1992); D. Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, 2 vols.(Cambridge, 19935).

17 See, for example, B. Brooten, Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue (Atlanta,Ga., 1982).

18 R.H. Charles (ed.), Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2 vols.(Oxford, 191213). Compare the more cautious comments of the editors of the

volume published in the 1980s, partly to replace Charles (H.F.D. Sparks (ed.),The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford, 1984)), and the more eclectic collection inJ.H. Charlesworth (ed.), Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2 vols. (London, 19835). ForGasters work, see M. Gaster, The Samaritans: Their History, Doctrines and Literature(Schweich, London, 1925).



10

extent and nature of any changes made to such texts in the processof transmission by Christian scribes and translation into Greek (and,

often, from Greek into other languages).19The Dead Sea Scrolls themselves of course have provided an

excellent insight into a particular brand of non-normative Judaism,and a huge literature has been devoted to study of the organisation,theology and history of the community responsible for the sectar-ian documents. British scholars were among the earliest to attemptsuch interpretation in the 1950s, with important work by ChaimRabin, Cecil Roth, Sir Godfrey Driver, J.L. Teicher, John Allegro,H.H. Rowley, and (most influentially) Geza Vermes.20Study of theScrolls has become almost a separate sub-discipline of study on earlyJudaism, with two specialist journals devoted to them and widespreadpublic interest in every revelation of their contents. Much of thisinterest (from scholars as much as the general public) has been inthe significance of the Scrolls for the history of early Christianity,and a recent analysis of the law to be found in the sectarian writingseven claimed to be rescuing the Scrolls for the study of Judaism.21

Some of the theories promulgated about the origins of the sect have

pushed to the edges of plausibility in a search to establish for thema greater significance than perhaps they have. In fact, the size andinfluence of the sect, and its relation to the other varieties of Judaismin the late Second Temple period, remain still disputed despite allthis effort.22 It is to be hoped that in due course, as their noveltywears off, the texts will take their rightful place along with the restof the evidence for Judaism in this era.

The main impulse to much of the study of non-normative Judaismin the diaspora has also been archaeological discovery, but in factits greatest exponent in the first half of the twentieth century, Erwin

19 Among such contributions, see M. Black, The Book of Enoch (Brill, 1985);M.A. Knibb, Translating the Bible: The Ethiopian Version of the Old Testament (Oxford,1999).

20 The bibliography on Dead Sea Scrolls research is huge. See among recentgeneral introductions, G. Vermes, An Introduction to the Complete Dead Sea Scrolls(London, 1999). For the site at Qumran, the best introduction is still the 1959series of Schweich Lectures: R. de Vaux, Archaeology and the Dead Sea Scrolls(Grand

Rapids, Mich., and Cambridge, 2002).21L.H. Schiffman, Reclaiming the Dead Sea Scrolls(Philadelphia, Pa., 1994).22See, for example, N. Golb, Who wrote the Dead Sea Scrolls? The Search for the Secret

of Qumran(London, 1995); M. Goodman, A Note on the Qumran Sectarians, theEssenes and Josephus,JJS46 (1995), 1616 [Chapter 11, below].



11

Goodenough, had already written an investigation into diasporaJudaism as expressed in Justin MartyrsDialogue with Trypho (one of

the earliest D.Phil. theses to be examined in Oxford, in 1921) whenhis view that Greek diaspora Judaism in late antiquity continuedto be radically different from the Judaism of the rabbis was appar-ently dramatically confirmed by the excavation of the Dura-Europossynagogue in the early 1930s. Goodenoughs own reconstruction ofa mystical Jewish theology to be ascertained by interpretation ofthe images used in Jewish art has not convinced many,23 but thegeneral principle that archaeology might provide insights into typesof late-Roman Judaism not known from the rabbinic texts continuesto have a powerful attraction. In particular, excavation in the 1960sof a large basilica in the centre of Sardis decorated with mosaicswhich exhibited Jewish iconography (see above, n. 15) has encour-aged speculation that in Asia Minor Jews practised a distinctive,self-confident synagogue-based Judaism quite different from that ofthe rabbis,24 but whether so much can really be validly deduced frommute archaeological remains is unclear. The history of synagogueexcavations within the land of Israel induces salutary caution. When

in the 1920s a charming, if somewhat rustic, mosaic carpet from asynagogue floor was unearthed in sixth-century Beth Alpha in theJezreel valley, the central motif of the mosaic, a depiction of thesigns of the zodiac with the sun-god at the centre of the circle, wasexplained as an alien intrusion into synagogue art: perhaps the Romanemperor had insisted on its incorporation.25Finds of further zodiacmosaics in conjunction with unambiguously Jewish symbols (menorah,lulav, incense shovels, shofar) at other Galilean synagogue sites overthe course of the twentieth century have made it abundantly clearthat the zodiac was a distinctively Jewish symbol.26Any argumentthat zodiacs provide evidence of non-rabbinic Judaism is weakened

23E.R. Goodenough,Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period, 13 vols. (New Yorkand Princeton, NJ, 195368).

24 See among recent studies, P. Trebilco, Jewish Communities in Asia Minor(Cambridge, 1991); J. Barclay, Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander toTrajan(Edinburgh, 1996).

25 For an early discussion, see the volume published by the Academy: E.L.Sukenik,Ancient Synagogues in Palestine and Greece(London, 1934).

26See now the comprehensive catalogue of the current state of scholarship onancient synagogues in L.I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogues: The First Thousand Years(New Haven, Conn., and London, 2000).



12

by the name of the donor of one of the finest mosaics, that in thefourth-century synagogue at Hammat Tiberias. This donor, a certain

Severus, described himself in Greek as a member of the householdof the illustrious patriarchs.27There is no room for doubt that thepatriarchs to whom he refers were the descendants of Rabbi JudahhaNasi, the compiler of the Mishnah, the central text of rabbinicJudaism. It is just possible that by the fourth century the patriarchshad drifted away from rabbinic Judaism,28but it is not very likely,since the Palestinian Talmud, in the form of an elucidation of, andcommentary on, Judah haNasis Mishnah, was probably the productof Galilean rabbis in precisely this region at precisely this period.To many scholars it now seems preferable to admit to the possibilitythat rabbinic Jews were more tolerant of acculturation into the widerRoman world than might be apparent from the texts they producedfor the consumption of insiders.

The final type of non-normative Judaism to be examined herebecause it evoked attention for the first time in the twentieth centuryhas been the study of mysticism. Credit for the emergence of thestudy of Jewish mysticism as a distinct field belongs almost entirely

to the Jerusalem scholar Gershom Scholem, whose insistence on tak-ing seriously texts which had been sidelined by the Wissenschaft desJudentumsas insufficiently rational to deserve study revealed a long-lasting strand of Judaism that stretched from late antiquity throughthe medieval kabbalah up to modern times.29Among the aspects ofScholems pioneering work most questioned in more recent years hasbeen precisely the extent of such continuity, in particular, the justifi-cation for asserting that the roots of the mystical texts preserved inmedieval hekhalot manuscripts lie in late antiquity.30A fruitful fieldof enquiry has been the relationship between such mystical tradi-tions preserved by the rabbis and the accounts of heavenly visionsfound in the Jewish apocalyptic traditions preserved by Christians.In the study of all such texts, there is still much disagreement as towhether they reflect mystical practices or only literary genres, and

27M. Dothan, Hammat Tiberias: The Ancient Synagogue( Jerusalem, 1984).28See most recently, S. Schwartz, Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 BCE to 640 CE(Princeton, NJ, 2001).29Most influential of Scholems many works in this area has been Major Trends

in Jewish Mysticism( Jerusalem, 1941).30See P. Schfer, Synopse zur Hekhalot-Literatur(Tbingen, 1981).



13

to what extent they represent deviant Judaism or a mystical aspectof the mainstream.31

The same logic that has prompted some to extreme scepticismabout the possibility of getting back from the evidence of medievalmanuscripts to learn something about late-antique mysticism hasalso been applied to more mainstream texts, in particular the bibles(Hebrew and Greek) used by Jews in late antiquity and the transmis-sion of rabbinic literature.

Discussions of the nature of the Hebrew biblical text in late antiq-uity have been transformed by the discovery of large numbers ofbiblical manuscripts at Qumran. In many cases these texts are closein wording to the text copied by the medieval masoretes, but somevariations are considerable, sometimes demonstrating the nature ofthe Hebrew text underlying the LXX translation, sometimes provid-ing readings previously wholly unknown. Arguments about the extentto which the biblical text was still fluid in the late Second Templeperiod are bedevilled by the difficulty of showing when a text is abiblical fragment or part of a biblical commentary or paraphrase.Many British bible scholars, such as Paul Kahle and James Barr, have

been much engaged in these discussions about the biblical texts.32Fragments of Greek biblical texts found at Qumran (in particular

the Psalms Scroll) have also had an impact on Septuagint studies. TheSeptuagint was an area of much interest to British scholars alreadyin 1900; the great Septuagint expert H.B. Swete was a foundingfellow of the Academy, and the tradition was carried on throughoutthe century by others, such as Sir Frederick Kenyon. The Qumrantexts provide evidence that some Jews were engaged in an exerciseto bring their Greek bible closer to the Hebrew already by the firstcentury CE and that the attitude expressed by Philo (Vita Mosis2.44),that the LXX had itself been divinely inspired, was presumably notshared by all other Jews.33

31See, for example, F.C. Burkitt, Jewish and Christian Apocalypses(London, 1914);C.C. Rowland, The Open Heaven: A Study of Apocalyptic Judaism and Early Christianity

(London, 1982).32For example, J. Barr, The Variable Spellings of the Hebrew Bible(Schweich Lectures,Oxford, 1989).

33See H.B. Swete, An Introduction to the Old Testament in Greek(Cambridge, 1900);H. St. J. Thackeray, The Septuagint and Jewish Worship(Schweich Lectures, London,



14

Both the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Geniza documentsstimulated in the second half of the twentieth century an upsurge in

interest by textual scholars such as Paul Kahle in the targumim, theAramaic translations of the Hebrew bible. Since the targumim oftenparaphrase the original text and add new material, their elucidationcan illuminate post-biblical Judaism.34

The revolution in the treatment of rabbinic texts has also in partbeen based on the history of the manuscripts. Scholars in the nine-teenth and early twentieth century succeeded in bringing to publicattention a number of rabbinic texts previously unknown, but publica-tion tended to be only of the readings of a single manuscript,35andneither in these cases, nor in the printing of the traditional rabbinictexts, was there any attempt to produce scholarly editions such as arestandard for the Greek and Latin literary texts of classical antiquity,nor have many such editions appeared over the past century. Thereis still no critical edition of the text of the Babylonian Talmud.Instead, scholars can now consult on CD-Rom readings from ahuge number of talmud manuscripts and are left to decide on theirown the significance of the many variants.36This lack of editions is

not simply a reflection of the magnitude of the task, given the sizeof many of the texts. Attempts in the 1980s to produce a scholarlyedition of the Palestinian Talmud revealed such wide discrepanciesbetween manuscripts that the team responsible resolved instead topublish the variant readings in synoptic form.37The extent of variationhas encouraged some scholars to doubt whether the whole notion ofan original text of such documents is valid. Whole sections of textsfound in the manuscripts of the Palestinian Talmud are also foundin the manuscripts of Genesis Rabba, and some have suggested thatrabbinic material circulated in late antiquity in units smaller than

1921; 2nd edn., London, 1923); F.G. Kenyon, Recent Developments in the TextualCriticism of the Greek Bible (Schweich Lectures, London, 1933); S.P. Brock, C.T.Frisch and S. Jellicoe, A Classified Bibliography of the Septuagint (Leiden, 1973), andN. Fernndez Marcos, The Septuagint in Context: Introduction to the Greek Version of the

Bible(Leiden, 2000).34P. Kahle, The Cairo Geniza(Schweich Lectures, London, 1947).35For example, W.H. Lowe (ed.), The Mishnah of the Palestinian Talmud(Cambridge,1883).36 Lieberman Institute: The Sol and Evelyn Henkind Talmud Text Databank with Search

Capability(1998).37P. Schfer et al. (eds.), Synopse zum Talmud Yerushalmi(Tbingen, 1991).



15

the composite medieval texts. Others have protested that such radi-cal scepticism is not justified in the case of all late-antique rabbinic

texts, and a few scholarly editions have begun to appear.38In the first half of the twentieth century a number of scholars,

most influentially the Harvard theologian George Foot Moore, triedto extract an overall theology from the rabbinic corpus.39The fewscholars in the United Kingdom to contribute in this area were mostlyexpatriate Jews based in Jews College, such as Adolf Bchler andArthur Marmorstein.40The middle of the twentieth century saw thepublication of a monumental study of the whole of rabbinic thoughtbased on a mass of diverse rabbinic sources,41 but this monumentwas not left unchallenged for long. Its publication was rapidly fol-lowed by a strong reaction against such conflation as ahistorical, andmost work on rabbinic theology in the second half of the twentiethcentury was less ambitious.42

A few scholars have applied form criticism in an attempt to findthe basic units of rabbinic reasoning43 and determine the historyof development of rabbinic law.44This latter approach has provedcompatible with redaction criticism. In its extreme form, this involves

the claim that it is impossible to generalise about rabbinic thoughtin any way beyond the Judaism of a particular text.45This extremeapproach has not been adopted by many, but interest in the finallayer of each text, including its process of redaction, is increasing.Among the most acute analysts has been Louis Jacobs, the leadinglight in Anglo-Jewish scholarship on halakhic rabbinic texts now for

38For the debate on the principles involved, see P. Schfer and Ch. MilikovskyinJJS37 (1986), 13952; 39 (1988), 20111; 40 (1989), 8994.

39G.F. Moore,Judaism in thefirst Centuries of the Christian era: The Age of the Tannaim(Cambridge, Mass., 192730).

40A. Bchler, Studies in Sin and Atonement in the Rabbinic Literature of the First Century(London, 1928); A. Marmorstein, The Old Rabbinic Doctrine of God, 2 vols. (London,192737).

41E.E. Urbach, The Sages: Their Concepts and Belief( Jerusalem, 1975).42See the strong criticism of Urbach in J. Neusner, The Rabbinic Traditions about

the Pharisees before 70, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1971).43See recently, A. Samely, Rabbinic Interpretation of Scripture in the Mishnah(Oxford,

2002).44

Most voluminously, J. Neusner, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Purities, 22parts (Leiden, 19747), and his equally detailed studies of the other branches ofMishnaic law.

45 J. Neusner, Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, 2nd edn. (Atlanta, Ga.,1988).



16

some three decades, and a prolific author of works on contemporaryas well as early Jewish thought. More general has been increasing

awareness that study of rabbinic texts should allow for the possibil-ity (indeed probability) of change between the tannaim (of the firsttwo centuries CE) and the amoraim (of the third to fifth centuries),and of different influences on the rabbis of Palestine and those ofBabylonia, not least in the development of traditions of midrashicexegesis of the biblical texts.46

The effects of the surrounding culture on early Judaism was ingeneral a continuing scholarly preoccupation in the twentieth cen-tury. The prime issue has been the extent to which Judaism wasinfluenced by Hellenism. In 1937 Elias Bickerman suggested in hisbook Der Gott der Makkaber that some Jews welcomed and inter-nalised a Greek interpretation of their ancestral religion, and thatthe revolt of the Maccabees in the 160s BCE should be seen asa reaction to such Hellenising.47 In 1974 Martin Hengel compiledevidence of many different kinds (including much archaeological andepigraphic material) to demonstrate that Judaism during the third andearly second century was as much a part of wider Hellenistic

culture as other regions which had been conquered by Alexanderthe Great.48 The evidence is incontrovertible and has effectivelyended the distinction, common in the nineteenth century, betweenHellenised diaspora Judaism and the Semitic Judaism of the home-land, but its significance, as assembled by Hengel, has been muchdebated, with challenges both to the notion that this spread of Greekculture provides a religious explanation of the Maccabean revolt,49

and to the general assumption that the use of Greek artefacts andlanguage will necessarily have had an effect on the religious outlookof Palestinian Jews.50Research into the impact of Greek culture onthe rabbis has been less intensive, and most scholars have been less

46 L. Jacobs, Structure and Form in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge, 1991); onmidrash, see, for example, G. Vermes, Scripture and Tradition in Judaism: HaggadicStudies(Leiden, 1961; 2nd edn., Leiden, 1973).

47E.J. Bickerman,Der Gott der Makkaber(Berlin, 1937).48M. Hengel,Judaism and Hellenism, Eng. trans. (London, 1974).49Fergus Millar, The Background to the Maccabean Revolution, JJS29 (1978),

121.50M. Goodman, Epilogue, in J.J. Collins and G.E. Sterling (eds.), Hellenism in

the Land of Israel(2001), pp. 3025.



17

inclined to suggest that the adoption of Greek terms and ideas arelikely to have had any deep effect on rabbinic Judaism,51although

the synagogue art of late-Roman Palestine has itself sometimes beenseen as evidence of Hellenisation.52

In other respects too, study of early Judaism has been illuminedby research into the realia of Jewish life. In the last years of thenineteenth century, Sir George Adam Smith published his histori-cal geography of the Holy Land53and Emil Schrer in a series ofeditions his monumental history of the Jews in the time of JesusChrist.54Schrers study, and that of Joachim Jeremias published in1969, were somewhat schematic, in the tradition of nineteenth-cen-tury German classical scholarship, but they laid the foundation forfuture research, and the revised English Schrer, published between1973 and 1987, remains a standard resource for scholarship.55Thefirst really imaginative reconstruction of the nature of their religiouslife for late Second Temple Jews was the synthetic study by E.P.Sanders, published asJudaism: Practice and Belief.56Here, for the firsttime, is an attempt to empathise with the Jews who saw the Templein its last days as the centre of their religious lives. It is symptomatic

of the accretion of detailed and often recondite scholarly disputesabout some of the more important issues about the Pharisees andthe nature of the purity laws that Sanders felt it necessary to hiveoffsuch issues into a whole second volume, published in fact beforethe synthetic account.57

For Schrer and Jeremias interest in the nature of first-centuryJudaism was explicitly as the background for the life of Jesus, andHengel and Sanders also entered the field originally as New Testamentscholars, and retain a strong interest in the history of early Christianity.Realisation during the second half of the twentieth century thatearly Christians are best understood with a full appreciation of the

51S. Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 2nd edn. (New York, 1962).52See Sukenik,Ancient Synagogues.53George Adam Smith, The Historical Geography of the Holy Land(London, 1894).54 Originally published as E. Schrer, Lehrbuch der neutestamentlichen Zeitgeschichte

(Leipzig, 1874).55

J. Jeremias,Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, Eng. trans. (London, 1969); E. Schrer,rev. G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Black and M. Goodman, The History of the JewishPeople in the Age of Jesus Christ, 3 vols. (Edinburgh, 197387).

56E.P. Sanders,Judaism: Practice and Belief, 63 BCE66 CE(London, 1992).57E.P. Sanders,Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah(London, 1990).



18

Jewish background has been a catalyst for much further research,especially into the relation of specific New Testament texts to the

Jewish writings of the period. Such links were already being madebefore the twentieth century, but new since the 1970s has been theattempt to integrate the religion of Jesus and less frequently Paulinto the general picture of Judaism itself. That Jesus was a Jew tobe understood fully within his Jewish environment was the claim ofthe highly influential study by Geza Vermes,Jesus the Jew.58Despitewidespread acknowledgement of the rationale behind the approachthis implies, integration has in fact been sporadic, hindered in partby the great edifice of New Testament scholarship, which discour-ages straightforward use of the New Testament evidence. In veryrecent years some scholars have suggested that integration of Jewishand Christian history should go still further, and that the parting ofthe ways between Judaism and Christianity should not be seen ashaving occurred until the time of Constantine.59This reassessmentof the history of the two traditions is based on a radical refusal toview Jewish and Christian material primarily through the lens oflater Judaism and Church history, but it flies in the face of much

evidence that rabbinic Jews and mainstream Christians in fact definedthemselves, at least in part, by what they were not, this being, bydefinition, a prime concern of patristic heresiologists and (of lessobvious importance, given the rare use of the word) of the rabbiswho invented the term minut to describe the wrong opinions of allthose Jews whose religious ideas did not agree with theirs.60

Where does this leave current study of early Judaism? It is fair tosay that more regular attention is being paid to its elucidation thanin any previous period, and with more awareness of the possibleextent of variety. Where British scholarship may be thought to havea special role to play may be in the continuing strength of classicalstudies within the United Kingdom and the increasing readiness ofclassicists, encouraged by the example of polymaths such as ArnaldoMomigliano, to accept Jewish studies as pertinent to the wider clas-

58G. Vermes,Jesus the Jew: A Historians Reading of the Gospels(London, 1973).59D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism

(Stanford, Calif., 1999).60 M. Goodman, The Function of Minim in early Rabbinic Judaism, in H.Cankik, H. Lichtenberger and P. Schfer (eds.), Geschichte-Tradition-Reflexion: Festschrift

fr Martin Hengel zum 70. Geburtstag (Tbingen, 1996), vol. 1, pp. 50110 [Chapter14 below].



19

sical world.61Classical scholars have played a major role in puttingthe Jewish evidence properly into the context of the Greek and

Roman world. Too much remains disputed for syntheses of currentknowledge to retain authority for long. It is not unreasonable to hopethat when new syntheses are produced at the end of the twenty-firstcentury, both British scholars and the British Academy will be seento have played a significant part.

61See A. Momigliano,Alien Wisdom: The limits of Hellenization(Cambridge, 1975);J. Reynolds and R. Tannenbaum, Jews and God-Fearers at Aphrodisias (Cambridge,1987); F. Millar, The Roman Near East, 31 BCAD 337 (Cambridge, Mass., 1993);T. Rajak, The Jewish Dialogue with Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction(Leiden, 2000).



CHAPTER TWO

IDENTITY AND AUTHORITY IN ANCIENT JUDAISM

The modern debate on Who is a Jew? has become heated, notleast because it involves a conflict of authority between differentjurisdictions, each of which claim the right to define or assign Jewishidentity. It is the purpose of this article to document a parallel phe-nomenon in the period of the Second Temple, the Mishnah andthe Talmuda phenomenon which, as far as I know, has been leftunconsidered in the voluminous recent scholarship on Jewish identityin antiquity. How did anyone in the ancient world knowthat he orshe was Jewish? Or, to put it another way, who decided who wasa Jew? In what context was such a decision made? To anticipatethe conclusion: if it can be shown that a variety of such decisions,and the uncertainties that they undoubtedly engendered, were com-

mon two thousand years ago, we may throw modern dilemmas intoperspective.In the ensuing pages it will emerge that there were at least five

main ways of establishing the Jewishness of an individual in antiquity.Sometimes, his affirmation that he was a Jew might suffice, at leastto his own satisfaction. Alternatively, some central Jewish authoritymight take to itself the right to define status. Local Jewish com-munities might decree which among their number really belongedto them. Local gentiles might arrogate the task to themselves. Orthe gentile state might select Jews from the general population forits own purposes. Some combination of these possibilities was alsolikely enoughand, in the case of most Jews, all sources of authoritydoubtless agreed on their Jewishness. The question of authority willhave arisen mostly in discussions or assumptions about the status ofthose who might be seen by some as on the fringes of the community,when different definitions by the various perceived authorities mayhave clashed. In what follows, illustrations of each of these sources

of authority for defining Jewishness will be examined in turn.Not surprisingly, the role of a strong central authority in definingJewish status is clearly attested in this period only in the land of Israelitself. The actions of Hasmonaean High Priests in the conversion of



22

Idumaeans (in the 120s BCE) and Ituraeans (in c. 104 BCE) presup-posed that such unilateral action, involving the forced circumcision

of males, could turn gentiles into Jews. In other respects, too, theTemple authorities at all times had to make decisions about whowas Jewish. So, for instance, some types of offerings could probablybe offered up by the priests only if they had been brought by anIsraelite. More drastically, gentiles were excluded from the innercourts of the Temple on pain of death, a prohibition backed upby force, as Josephus recorded, and as surviving fragments of theTemple inscription warning against infringements confirm.1For thepreservation of the purity of the Temple, mistakes could not becountenanced.

However autocratic they may have been within the sanctuary,those who controlled the Temple never had the capacity, outsideits confines, to impose very widely their idea of who was a Jew.Those adherents of the faith who never brought an offering to theTemple would never subject their status to scrutiny. This categorywill have included most such adherents who lived in the diasporaand who, despite the Biblical requirement of thrice-yearly pilgrimages,

never went to Jerusalem. There is good evidence that the priests inJerusalem could notand probably did not usually try toimposetheir will on the diaspora. So, for instance, a rival Jewish temple whichoffered cultic ceremonies similar to the Jerusalem shrine flourishedat Leontopolis in Egypt, apparently without serious challenge, fromc.160 BCE, until it was closed down by the Romans in 73 CE asa possible centre of disaffection ( Josephus,Jewish War7.42036).

At any rate, any role played by the Jerusalem priests in decidingon Jewish status came to an abrupt end with the destruction of theTemple sanctuary and the city in 70 CE. Late rabbinic reconstruc-tions of Jewish history affirm an immediate, successful assumption ofauthority by groups of learned sages led first by Yoanan b. Zakkai,then by the descendants of Hillel and others. Such a reconstructiondoes not accord fully with the evidence of the earliest compilationsof rabbinic teaching. In the Mishnah, which reached its present form(more or less) in about 200 CE, and the Tosefta, which probablydates to c. 250 CE, it is taken for granted that the rabbis oper-

ate even in the Holy Land among Jews who do not take seriously

1 J.B. Frey, ed., Corpus Inscriptionum IudaicarumII (1952), no. 1400, pp. 32830.



23

many of the religious matters which were of great concern to therabbis themselves. Many of such Jews, particularly those of doubt-

ful status as Jews, among those termed ammei ha-arzby the Sages,presumably would not have taken kindly to attempts by the rabbis toimpose their criteria for Jewish status on the rest of the population.I have, indeed, suggested elsewhere that the discussions to be foundin early rabbinic legal texts about social relations between Jews andgentiles may, when they are not purely theoretical, reflect the Sagesattitudes to those who defined themselves as Jews but by criteriawhich the Sages did not accept. In favour of this hypothesis (whichremains unprovable) is the mass of legislation about gentile-Jewishrelations in rabbinic texts from Galilee. Without such an hypothesisit is difficult to explain the rabbis concern with the practicalities ofsocial and commercial dealings with gentiles, for near-contemporarypagan and Christian sources describe the area of Galilee as inhabitedexclusively by Jews.2

In the diaspora and in remote villages in the land of Israel itcould have been more feasible to leave questions of status to thelocal communal authorities. Jews, in theory, needed to know quite

often whether those with whom they came into social contact wereJewish or gentile. As Tacitus remarked (Histories 5.5), Jews wereseparate in their meals and their beds. The question was acutewhen marriage was proposed, for Jews believedthat they married onlyother Jewseven if, in practice, there were exceptions. Similarly, ifJews believed that gentiles handling their food or wine could polluteit, it ought to have been imposible to leave the status of associatesin doubt.

And, yet, the impression is that, up to the end of the first centuryCE, it was doubt that prevailed. Josephus (Jewish War7.41) wroteof gentiles in Syrian Antioch whom the Jews had in a certain waymade a part of their community; it is quite unclear whether eitherJosephus or the Antiochene Jews thought of these adherents as Jewsor as friendly gentiles. In another passage, which is theologicallyincomprehensible (at least to me), Josephus affirms (Antiquities14.403)that the Idumaeans, whose ancestors had been forcibly circumcisedin the second century BCE (see above), were now half-Jews.

2 M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee, AD 132212 (1983), pp.4153.



24

References to friendly gentiles in texts of the first century CE orearlier are so ambiguous or untrustworthy that the very existence

of a categoryof gentile godfearers has been attacked as a figmentof modern scholarship.3

Where there was only one synagogue and one set of Jewishauthorities in a city, ad hoc decisions on such matters might bringsome clarity, but, in bigger cities such as Rome, where at least tenindividual synagogues whose names are attested on inscriptions seemto have been independently organized, a conflict of jurisdiction wasall too likely. In any case, for those gentiles, like the royal family ofAdiabene, whose conversion to Judaism took place in a context whereno Jewish community yet existed (see Josephus,Antiquities20.1753),some other authority for confirmation of their Jewish status musthave been sought.

The story of the Adiabeneans seems to imply the possibility, atleast, that, in some sense, an individual could decide for himselfor herself whether he or she was Jewish. Proselytes were seen asthose who brought themselves to the Jewish nation or faith or God;the word proselyte is derived from the Greek word proserchesthai,

which means to approach or to come to. Types of proselytesdescribed as gerim gerurim, who were attacked by rabbis in texts ofthe third century CE and later as not genuine converts, are believedby some scholars to have been precisely such self-made proselytes,which would suggest, of course, that such people existed (but that,for those rabbis, at least, an affirmation of faith did not suffice tomake one Jewish). But difficulties in interpreting this term, whichcan also be understood quite differently, preclude too much relianceon this argument.4

It might seem that the role of gentileauthorities in the definitionof Jewishness should have been negligible. So, doubtless, it was,in areas where there was a Jewish majority or state, as in Judaeabefore 70 CE, but there were occasions when outsiders may havehad some role to play.

Thus, for instance, the Greek cities of Asia Minor, largely underpressure from Julius Caesar, who wished to ensure the loyalty of

3 A.T. Kraabel, The Disappearance of the Godfearers, Numen 28 (1981):11326.

4 Against the standard understanding of gerim gerurim, see E. Bammel, Judaica:Kleine SchriftenI (1986), pp. 13439.



25

the Jews to his side during the Roman civil war against Pompey,offered various privileges to the Jews in their midst in the mid-first

century BCE. They must have drawn up some criteria or list toclarify which inhabitants of the city should benefit: according tothe decrees preserved by Josephus in his Antiquities, Jews in theseplaces were granted, among other benefits, a special exemption frommilitary service and from appearing in law courts on the Sabbath.It is not clear how a law suit could be temporarily postponed byan unexpected appeal by one of the parties to his privilege of notanswering charges on Saturdays. Perhaps the court simply took theappellants word, or had a hearing on the question. Perhaps localJewish leaders provided the civic magistrates with the names ofmembers of the Jewish community. Perhaps some other means wasused. We do not know.

There was, in theory, much greater potential for the definitions ofJewishness that were imposed by the Roman stateto have an effect onJewish self-awareness, if only because here, at least, was an authoritywhich could impose its will on the great majority of Jews and which,at various times, needed to know precisely who was Jewish. On the

one hand, after 70 CE Rome extorted a special poll tax which onlyJews, and all Jews in the Roman Empire, were required to pay. Theeffects of this tax, known as the fiscus Judaicus (literally, the Jewishtreasury), will be discussed further below. On the other hand, thesons of Jews were specifically exempted, from the mid second cen-tury CE on, from the ban on circumcision which was introduced bythe emperor Hadrian. Around the time of the Bar Kochba revolt,Hadrian equated circumcision with castration, as barbarous practicesunworthy of his enlightened rule, but his successor, Antoninus Pius,felt impelled to mollify Jewish feelings by permitting the continua-tion of this ancestral custom, while insisting that any non-Jew whoindulged in the practice would incur the death penalty. There isgood evidence that people other than Jews (Samaritans, and someArabs and Egyptians, for example) had previously been in the habitof circumcising boys, and that these non-Jews were effectively pre-vented from doing so in the future. Before he imposed the ultimatesentence on an offending circumciser, a Roman judge must have

had ways of knowing with some certainty that the culprit beforehim was definitely not a Jew.But a concern of this kind by the Roman state to make clear

who was a Jew is not attested or, indeed, plausible, before the last



26

years of the first century CE. In the rest of this discussion I shallexplore the hypothesis that the ambiguities about status, which, as

has been shown, were tolerated with (to us) surprising ease untilthen, gave way after that date to a new Jewish awareness of a needfor greater clarity; and that this new awareness was precipitated, asso often in Jewish history, by the attitude of the outside worldinthis case, the Roman state.

The immediate factor which led to change was the reform by theemperor Nerva of the exaction of the special Jewish poll tax, the

fiscus Judaicus. As was noted above, this tax was imposed on Jewsafter 70 CE by the emperor Vespasian, after the suppression ofthe great revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.The levy was intended both as a punishment for rebellion and as ameans of raising money for rebuilding the temple of Jupiter on theCapitol in Rome. The temple had burned down in the civil warwhich accompanied Vespasians seizure of the purple, and the transferto Jupiter of funds which had previously been paid by Jews to theJerusalem Temple was a deliberate symbol of the Jews defeat. Fromthe start, the tax was collected assiduously, and tax receipts, written

on pieces of broken pottery, which have survived in the sands ofEgypt, attest that both men and women were required to pay. Astate official was specially appointed to supervise collection and, atthe local level, designated bureaucrats drew up lists of those liable.

Vespasian and his subordinates evidently assumed that thedefinition of a Jew was not a problem. For Romans up to andincluding Vespasians lifetime, the Jews were a peoplewho followedpeculiar religious customs: to Cicero, for instance, Jews (like Syrians)were a nation born to be slaves (De Prov. Cons. 5.10), while thephilosopher, Seneca (On Superstition, in Augustine, City of God 6.11)described Jews as an accursed race with foolish customs. Thesame standard description of Jews was also presupposed by Josephus,when he wrote about the imposition of the same Jewish tax in hisJewish War(7.218), which was published in the late seventies or earlyeighties CE: On the Jews, wherever they might be, he imposed atax, ordering each of them to pay two drachmas every year to theCapitol. But Josephus, as we have already seen, was at least aware

of the possibility of proselytism, although he did not use the term,whereas, in gentile sources, it appears that the ethnic definition wasthe onlyconcept that they had of a Jew. As far as I can tell, thereis no unequivocal evidence that any gentile writer before this time



27

was even aware of the notion that a non-Jew could become a Jewsimply by a change of religious allegiance. Silence in this case can

be seen as significant. For Greeks and Romans, who had their owndistinctive ideas about the function of citizenship in their society andthe ways that it could be cautiously extended by the community,Jewish acceptance of outsiders into the body politic simply on thegrounds of their adoption of Jewish religious customs was very strange.Furthermore, this silence about proselytes contrasts both with a gooddeal of amused or angry comment in contemporary sources about thespread of Jewishpracticesamong the pagan populationthe sabbathwas particularly popularand with the vehemence and frequency ofthe polemic against conversion to Judaism in Latin literature of theearly second century CE, after the institution of the proselyte hadbecome widely known, for reasons to be examined below.

Such gentile certainties about Jewish identity were shattered throughthe actions of Domitian, Vespasians younger son, who becameemperor in 81 CE. According to his biographer, the Roman writerSuetonius, whose Lives of the Caesarswas published in the first halfof the second century, Domitian exacted the Jewish tax in a fash-

ion which struck contemporaries as particularly harsh. The passage(Domitian 12.2) is worth quoting in full:

Besides other taxes, that on the Jews was levied with the utmostvigour, and those were prosecuted who without publicly acknowledg-ing that faith yet lived as Jews, as well as those who concealed theirorigin and did not pay the tribute levied upon their people. I recallbeing present in my youth when a man ninety years old was inspectedbefore the procurator and a very crowded court to see whether hewas circumcised.

People were evidently compelled to pay to thefiscuseven if they liveda Jewish life only in secretor if they simply, by whatever means,concealed the fact that they had been born Jewish.

The identity of these unfortunates can be surmised with someconfidence. They were not gentiles or proselytes, for we are toldby the later historian, Cassius Dio (67.14.13), that non-Jews whodrifted into Jewish ways were condemned by Domitian either todeath or to deprivation of their property. The charge brought against

such gentiles (including the consul for the year 95 CE and theconsuls wife, who was a relative of the emperor) was atheismthatis, refusal to worship pagan gods out of devotion to Judaismwhichmay provide further confirmation that the category of a Jewish



28

proselyte was not yet known to the Roman state. It can be assumedthat Domitian could not impose a tax on such gentiles for behavior

which he himself categorised as illegal in Roman law. The peoplemost at issue must, therefore, have been ethnic or born Jews whono longer followed their religion. Hence the plight of the old manwhose humiliation was witnessed by the biographer Suetonius, quotedabove. His circumcision was the one sign of his origin that he couldnot easily efface.

It seems that the suffering of such apostates aroused considerableresentment at Rome and it is not hard to see why. Romans werecharacteristically tolerant of people from other ethnic origins so longas they assimilated into Roman culture. Many who were born as Jewsdid precisely that. Most such are now untraceable in the historicalrecord, for they cannot be distinguished from other citizens of theempire, but, since numerous Jews were brought to the capital cityas slaves and received Roman citizenship on acquiring freedom, it islikely that a good proportion of the citys population was descended,directly or indirectly, from ethnic Jews. How many of these werecompelled by Domitian to pay to the fiscus Judaicus is impossible

to discover. It would be good to know whether Domitian requiredboth or only one parent to be Jewish to justify ascribing to thema Jewish origin, but there is no evidence. However, the career ofone impressive individual which is comparatively well recorded mayillustrate the sort of apostate Jew who was subjected to the humili-ation of the tax. Tiberius Iulius Alexander came from a leadingwealthy Jewish family in Alexandria and was a nephew of the greatJewish philosopher, Philo. As Josephus noted (Antiquities20.100), hedid not stand by the practices of his people. Appointed governorof Judaea and, later, prefect of Egypt, he helped the Romans tocapture Jerusalem in 70 CE and enjoyed high favour with the newdynasty. Men like him would not take kindly to being identified withthe defeated and despised nation of the Jews.

The depth of the resentment is evidenced by the actions of thenew emperor, Nerva, when Domitian was murdered in 96 CE. Nervahad connived at, perhaps had a hand in organizing, the assassination.His own right to supreme power was nebulous, and he initiated a

series of measures designed to win popularity in Rome. One suchmeasure tackled the problem of the Jewish tax. Coins were issuedproclaiming FISCI IUDAICI CALUMNIA SUBLATAthe mali-cious accusation with regard to the Jewish tax has been removed.



29

The tax itself continued to be collectedit was still being raised inthe mid-third centurybut it was hoped that it would no longer

cause such opposition.An important reform thenbut consisting of what? The liter-ary sources do not state, but it is a reasonable hypothesis that themain thrust was to correct the abuses which had occurred underDomitian. From then on, only those Jews who continued openly intheir ancestral practices were liable to the tax: that is, the definitionof a Jew was by religion, not race.5

One result of this reformand confirmation of its naturewasthat the Roman state, and Romans in general, rapidly became awareof the Jewish concept of a proselyte. For writers of the early secondcentury CE, one of the most objectionable aspects of Jews, on a parwith their social isolation, circumcision, and alleged proclivity to lust,was not that the Jews themselves should continue with their peculiarcustomsthese were at least partially justified in Roman eyes bytheir antiquitybut that pagans should forsake the old gods in orderto become Jews. The Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, quoted by Arrian(Discourses2.9.20), said in a discourse delivered in c. 108 CE that

whenever we see a man halting between two faiths, we are in the habitof saying, He is not a Jew, he is only acting the part. But whenhe adopts the attitude of mind of the man who has been baptized[sic] and has made his choice, then he both is a Jew in fact and isalso called one.

With greater contempt the satirist Juvenal (Satires14.97102) casti-gated proselytes who

worship nothing but the clouds and the divinity of the heavens, and

see no difference between eating swines flesh . . . and that of man, andin time they take to circumcision. Having been wont to flout the lawsof Rome, they learn and practise and revere the Jewish law, and allthat Moses handed down in his secret tome . . .

The historian Tacitus was most hostile of all in the description of theJews with which he prefaced his account of the siege of Jerusalemof 70 CE He wrote of

5 I have discussed this more fully in Nerva, the Fiscus Judaicus and JewishIdentity,Journal of Roman Studies79 (1989), 4044.



30

those who are converted to their [i.e. the Jews] ways [that] the earli-est lesson they receive is to despise the gods, to disown their country,and to regard their parents, children and brothers as of little account(Hist.5.5).

How did Jews react to this new Roman definition of Jewishness asa religion to which one could convert and from which one couldapostatise? The defection of those ethnic Jews who had drifted awayfrom the community must have appeared offensively blatant whenit was advertised by public refusal to pay the tax. By contrast, theloyalty of gentiles who chose willingly to define themselves as Jewsdespite the tax burden must have looked impressive. At any rate,Jews in the Roman empire would no longer remain in as muchdoubt as the Jews of Antioch in the sixties CE about which of theethnic gentiles who frequented their community reckoned that theybelonged fully within it. Those who had accreted to the synagoguecould be presumed to think of themsel