Aphrodite and the Rabbis

by Burton L. Visotzky

  Were there other Hellenistic Jewish communities in the predestruction period? Yes, indeed. In the very epicenter of Hellenism, Athens, there is evidence of an ancient synagogue. St. Paul visited and preached there, as is mentioned in Acts 17:16–17. By the way, the New Testament is often a good source for information about early Jewish communities, especially because Paul worked and wrote his famous Epistles in the 50s, a generation before Jerusalem’s destruction. Five centuries later, the rabbis took notice of the Athenians, making them the butt of rabbinic humor. Here is an example:

  An Athenian came to Jerusalem where he met a child. He gave him some coins and said to him, “Go bring me figs and grapes.” The child bought the fruits and replied to the Athenian, “Thank you, you with your money and I with my legs.”

  So the man said to him, “Take and share it.” The child took the bruised fruit for himself and set the good before the stranger.

  The man exclaimed, “Well done! Rightly do they say that the people of Jerusalem are very clever. Since this child was aware that the money was mine, he gave me the better and took the bad.”

  The child thereupon replied, “Come, now, let’s throw dice. If I throw and win, then I take your share; but if you win you take my share.” And so it happened that the child took the best fruit for himself. (Lam. Rabbah 1:6)

  Clearly the rabbis were tired of hearing about the wise men of Athens. Fellows like Plato and Socrates were smart but, in rabbinic eyes, were no match for a savvy Jewish kid from Jerusalem. If the church father Tertullian asked, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”—the rabbis of this story have a witty riposte.

  The other axis of the Greco-Roman world was the great city of Rome herself. Jews were certainly there from the first century BCE. They are mentioned in the New Testament, and there are historical texts speaking of expulsions of Jews from Rome under the emperor Tiberius (14–37 CE) and again under Claudius (41–54 CE). Between their reigns, the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria traveled to Rome in 39–40 CE on an embassy to the crazy emperor Gaius Caligula. Philo describes the Jewish community across the River Tiber in Rome as “citizens who had been emancipated . . . liberated by their owners and not forced to violate their native institutions.” Philo goes on to remark that the Jews of Rome have “houses of prayer” where they “meet on sacred Sabbaths to receive training in their ancestral philosophy.” Further, he reports, “they collect money for sacred purposes from their first fruits and send them to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices.” A decade or so later, St. Paul wrote his famous Epistle to the Romans, addressing it to portions of the Jewish community.

  Although there have been no archaeological remains of synagogue buildings found in Rome proper, there are ruins of a synagogue at the old port of Rome: Ostia Antica. What survives is minimal, but enough for scholars to guess that the synagogue was there from the first through the fourth or fifth centuries. The most notable Jewish feature is a column—technically an architrave—with an incised menorah, a ram’s horn (shofar), and the biblically enjoined palm frond and citron (lulav and etrog—used for the holiday of Sukkot). These symbols are regularly found in synagogues across the Roman Empire from this period.

  Among the vast array of funerary inscriptions (approximately six hundred) in the Jewish catacombs underneath Rome itself, there are references to a dozen other synagogues. These may not all have existed simultaneously, as the catacombs date from the second through the fourth or fifth centuries CE. In addition to inscriptions, the Roman Jewish catacombs have yielded wall frescos, sarcophagi, lamps, gold glassware, and other artifacts.

  Ostia Antica synagogue

  Catacomb inscription with Menorah, ram’s horn, palm frond, and citron

  The catacombs, not surprisingly, produce a rich picture of at least one essential aspect of the Roman Jewish community: their attitudes toward death, burial, and life in the hereafter (or lack thereof). The inscriptions also list names of the deceased and, in many cases, their ages at death. Virtually all of the inscriptions are in Latin and Greek.

  In the pre-70 era, when the Temple still stood, there were already a fair variety of expressions of Judaism. The Greek works of Philo and Josephus teach us in particular about three differing sects of Judaism, enumerated by them as Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes. I have spoken a bit about Philo of Alexandria already. Josephus was a different kind of bird entirely. All of the works by Josephus are preserved in Greek, but it is clear that he himself was a native Hebrew and Aramaic speaker; and his own Greek was less than polished. He had a secretary to style edit for him. Josephus has left us a kind of commentary on the Torah (as did Philo, but his was allegorical). Josephus called his work archeology in Greek—probably best translated as “Antiquities.” Josephus also left an account of the War against Rome from 66 to 70. He began the war as a priest in Jerusalem, then abandoned his Jewish brethren to side with Rome and ended his days as a hanger-on in the palace of Titus, the emperor who destroyed the Temple. That such a man left a self-serving autobiography comes as no shock. Yet historians of the period must make do with what contemporaneous sources as there are, no matter how tendentious.

  A close reading of these two Jewish, first-century Greek writers, combined with some other literary records, shows us that the Essenes are probably more than one group, depending upon location and era. Philo distinguishes between the Essenes and the Therapeutae. These latter seem to have been a group of Jewish ascetics in the Alexandria region. Philo notes that the Essenes were an exclusively male community, while the Therapeutae admitted women; yet both sects practiced forms of sexual abstinence. I note that these guys were Jews. Josephus and Philo each describe the Essenes as dining exclusively within the confines and purity strictures of their own community. They also practiced other forms of asceticism as well as fervid devotion to their leadership. To the extent that the Essenes are identified with the Jewish separatists from Qumran described in the Dead Sea Scrolls (a point still debated among scholars), these Jews also actively rejected the Jerusalem Temple and declared its priesthood corrupt and unacceptable. What is common among all three of these subgroupings—Essenes, Therapeutae, and the Dead Sea covenanters—is their membership in an “outsider” community by individual choice rather than by birth.

  The Dead Sea Scroll community lived in isolation for a number of generations. Although they were but a short journey from Jerusalem, they rejected urban life and Temple ritual; but they may have performed their own sacrifices at one time. They adopted a very rigorous set of purity and food laws, and their Sabbath observances were most stringent. The surviving manuscripts reveal an apocalyptic mentality that imagined the end of days upon them and the war of the sons of Light (them) v. the sons of Darkness (everyone else, but especially Romans and other Jews) already begun. In short, these pre-70 CE anti-Temple groups saw themselves as the sole possessors of truth and the only authentic Jews of their day.

  The Sadducees were depicted across ancient sources in a very different light. Hailing from priestly family backgrounds, they wielded power in part by cooperating with the Roman authorities. They are often described as the Jerusalem Temple establishment. Josephus and the New Testament draw sharp theological contrasts between the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Sadducees are described as rejecting the notion of bodily resurrection—a tenet embraced by early Christianity as well as Pharisaic and, later, rabbinic Jews. Further, the Sadducees are depicted as rejecting the validity of received tradition in favor of the written Torah law. Historians even today describe the Sadducees as the “patrician” upper class of Jewish society. Whether this is a fact of late Second Temple history or a fancy of twentieth-century Marxist historiography, it does have support from New Testament descriptions of the Sadducean sect. The Sadducees are also described as arguing with the Pharisees over the minutiae of purity rules, even as they sat together on the ruling council of the Jerusalem Sanhedrin. That term Sanhedrin is used in the New Testament and t
hroughout rabbinic sources (transliterated into Hebrew characters), and it is borrowed from the name of a Greco-Roman ruling council.

  Not all of the Temple priests were necessarily Sadducees. The historian Josephus, himself from a priestly family, writes in his autobiography that after trying out each of the major sects, he chose to affiliate with the Pharisees. Perhaps we should understand the New Testament’s claim that the Pharisees were eager to seek converts in this light: that they sought other Jews to join their sect (like certain Hasidic groups do today). In addition, it seems clear that in the Late Second Temple period there were priests who remained unaffiliated with any of the variously identified sects. Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple, certain priests or priestly groups may have even continued to hold sway over some segments of the Jewish population in the South of Palestine, as well as in the Galilee.

  The Pharisees for their part are described by Josephus as urban, yet maintaining the loyalties of the villagers. They promoted fidelity to the teachings their ancestors handed down, in addition to those laws actually written in the Torah. Josephus explicitly likens Pharisees to the Greco-Roman Stoic philosophers. Most modern historians see the Pharisees as the forebears of the rabbinic movement. But recently, some Jewish historians have exercised caution at too easily identifying the Pharisees as the spiritual ancestors of the rabbis.

  In the New Testament, the Pharisees are depicted as the opposition to Jesus. As such, the name Pharisee continued to be used as a term of opprobrium into the twentieth century. Later Jewish sources offer a view of the Pharisees as a liberal and inclusive group of Jews who claimed access to nonscriptural traditions, yet were nonetheless punctilious regarding food and Sabbath laws, purities, and tithing. I emphasize these various groups in order to display the bewildering varieties of Judaism that existed even before the central Jerusalem shrine was destroyed.

  One final group of Jews in the Land of Israel were the revolutionaries who fueled the insurrection of 66–70 CE. Not all of those who arose in opposition to Rome can be collapsed into one general category. As is common even today among such revolutionary groups, the narcissism of petty differences loomed large. The various revolutionary groups included Zealots, Sicarii, and Biryoni, but we have no clear information regarding them. As the rabbis of the Palestinian Talmud (j. Sanhedrin 10:5) later noted, “The Jews were not exiled from Jerusalem until there were twenty-four sects” dividing one Jew from another.

  When the Roman legions destroyed the Jerusalem Temple and razed the city in 70 CE, Judaism in the Land of Israel, as well as throughout the Diaspora, changed in profound and lasting ways. During the years of the rebellion (66–70 CE), groups such as the Zealots and Sicarii were killed off by the Roman armies. The separatists at Qumran on the shore of the Dead Sea vanished from the historical record. The neat division Josephus had offered of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes ceased to be meaningful. The priesthood could no longer serve in Jerusalem. Those Mediterranean communities that had sent funds and offerings to Jerusalem could no longer do so. A long process of rebuilding—even reinventing—Judaism ensued, renegotiating relationships with Gentile neighbors, the Roman Empire, and the nascent Christian community.

  It was precisely at this moment in time that something new came to the fore: Judaism. This was a Hellenistic religion in which canon—the formation of a community around a shared work of literature (itself a Hellenistic concept)—became the basis for a common Judaism across the Empire. It is not coincidence that Philo and Josephus, each publishing his work in Greek, felt the need to explicate the Greek translation of the Jewish Scripture. Indeed, the translation and their very commentaries helped shape that canon and fix it into the form it retains today: the Bible.

  A common core of Jewish practice was more or less shared by Jewish communities across the vast breadth of the Roman world; yet it may have been no more than a patina. It seems that almost all groups that identified as Jewish shared Greek as one of the languages they employed. They each had particular food laws (although not necessarily all the same ones), they lit lamps for a Sabbath meal on Friday nights, they refrained from labors of various sorts on Saturdays and on various holidays already mentioned in the Bible, and they had some physical communal institution where they gathered. This amalgam is a fair amount of the common Judaism by which non-Jews across the Roman Empire might identify Jews as “other.” But if these few rituals and customs separated the Jews, it was their shared Hellenism that united them with one another, as well as with the pagans of the empire.

  What made Judaism into what it continues to be to this very day were the rabbis’ interpretations of the Jewish written canon, as well as the oral laws and customs that they claimed had been part of God’s revelation to the Jews since Moses stood at Sinai. Indeed, the very emphasis on the revelation at Sinai as the signal event forming Jewish identity was itself a Roman-era novelty. During the biblical era the exodus from Egypt was the seminal event of Israelite history. Only after the Temple was destroyed and Judaism reconstituted around the Book did it become necessary to shift emphasis to Sinai.

  Before I discuss the rabbis and their affinities for things Greco-Roman, I want to survey what we know of the emerging Jewish world after the destruction of the Temple in 70, as I promised at the outset of this chapter. At the western edge of what is now Europe, the church father St. Irenaeus lived in the Roman town of Lugdunum, Gaul (now Lyon, France), during the late second century. In his writing against Christian heresies, Irenaeus kvetches about the Jews of western Europe, decrying their interpretations as false and their refusal to recognize Christ as the very essence of heretical behavior. But whether these were actual Jews he was railing against, or merely Jews who served him as straw men in his rhetoric against Christian heresies, is unclear. We do not know much else about these Jews, so it is instructive to read what later rabbinic works say about them and their imagined love-hate relationship with the priesthood of the Jerusalem Temple back when it still stood. It is equally unclear to me whether the rabbis themselves knew actual Jews from Spain and France or whether they, too, mention them symbolically as Jews at the far end of the known world. The rabbis of fifth-century Galilee may, in fact, be projecting onto their Western European brethren their own ambivalences about the long-destroyed Temple.

  “When a person offers a grain offering to God, it shall be of fine flour . . . that he shall bring to Aaron’s sons, the priests; who shall take a handful of the fine flour. . . .” (Lev. 2:1–2) Rabbi Hiyya taught. . . . See them come all the way from Gaul [France] and Spain and other lands nearby. Then they see the priest [kohen] grab a mere handful of the grain-flour offering for the altar and eat the rest himself. They will say, “Oy for me who took all this trouble to make pilgrimage so that this guy gets to eat!”

  They assuage him by saying, “If the priest who took but two steps between the courtyard and the altar merited to eat—you who took all this trouble to come so far, how much the more so will you be rewarded!” (Lev. Rabbah 3:6)

  It’s as though the pilgrims express their pique: “I came all this way and that fat kohen waddles over and eats my offering!?” I don’t know whether the rabbis’ consolation is any solace, but it doesn’t matter. They are speaking of these pious pilgrims as an act of biblical interpretation that reflects their own concerns about how the sacrificial system worked. They look back four hundred years to a Temple long gone. The narrator of this tale speculates on what the pilgrims may have felt. As a result, we cannot learn about the actual history of the Jews of France and Spain then.

  Sardis, on the other hand, was a major city of Asia Minor, and there is no doubting that Jews flourished there. Today, the site contains only the archeological dig. When my wife and I visited there a few years ago, we found that the synagogue was the largest building in town, smack in the center of the city next to the gymnasium. It is about the size of a football field, with a decorated niche for the Torah, and has a double entryw
ay, so there is a huge main room and a smaller courtyard. The synagogue boasts mosaic pavement floors, a huge urn in the courtyard (perhaps for ritual washing?), and plaques on the walls with geometric decorations.

  Geometric decorations often are found in pre-70 synagogues, which scholars attribute to reluctance on the part of synagogue officials or donors to depict living beings. This is taken to be an interpretation of the second of the Ten Commandments, against graven images. Later in this book we’ll look at post-70 synagogue art and see that there was little to no hesitation about pictorial representation of animals, humans, even God. The Jews of Sardis certainly did not seem to worry about the strictures of the Second Commandment. The synagogue at Sardis is replete with animal designs on the mosaic floors, which probably date from the third to the fourth centuries. Here, too, we find an elaborately carved menorah, but this one has an inscription with the name Socrates in Greek—likely the name of the donor, not the philosopher. There are other menorahs in evidence at the Sardis synagogue. At the front of the synagogue there is a large carved marble table—perhaps for public reading of the Torah. Curiously, the legs of the table are carved with bas reliefs of Roman eagles. These may be original to the synagogue, or perhaps they were reused from some other building project. Statues of lions flank both sides of the table.

  Sardis synagogue

  The inscriptions recovered from Sardis Jewry have been little discussed. One, in Hebrew, is limited to the word “Shalom.” Another, set in mosaic, refers in Greek to a “priest and teacher of wisdom.” This may have been the congregation’s religious leader, but he was not a rabbi we know of from the Talmud. Elsewhere in town, biblical Hebrew names are found written in Greek in inscriptions, which often identify the one named simply as “citizen of Sardis.” It is tempting to interpret the accoutrements of the synagogue, such as the table and the urn, or amphora, through the rabbinic lens of Torah reading and ritual purity. But as the Gershwin brothers taught us, “It ain’t necessarily so.”