I am not particularly concerned with the historical reality regarding whether an emperor made a donation of a menorah, or wore broken sandals on Yom Kippur, or even flashed Rabbi Judah the Patriarch. What is of interest to me here is the ease with which the rabbis retail these stories with nary an objection that a Roman emperor could have affinities for Judaism and devotion to our holy Rabbi. Part of this is, of course, attributable to Jewish chauvinism. “Whom among us does not love Jews?” they seem to say. But there has been a shift in the rhetoric about the emperors who symbolize Rome that may be attributable to the passage of time. During the rebellions against the empire and their aftermaths, rabbis told stories that were negative or, perhaps, neutral. They indulged in parody and put-down. But two generations following Bar Kokhba, by the turn of the third century, when the Pax Romana reached even Palestine, and with Judah, the popular Jewish patriarch, having good relations with Rome, the tone shifted toward the positive. It seems that after many years, Jacob/Israel reconciled with his martial brother Esau/Edom, who was Rome.
In the Roman Empire of that period, the Second Sophistic flourished. It was a movement that celebrated Greek education and literature and had a strong impact on the East, where Greek remained the lingua franca. The rabbis recognized that Roman instruction held some distinct benefits for them and for their movement. They increasingly adopted Roman traditions—in particular, Roman rhetoric. An education in rhetoric was the key to advancement in the Roman Empire. The Jews embraced a rhetorical education then as they have embraced education ever since to open the doors to success in the broader world.
Chapter V
Rabbis Learn the Three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Roman Rhetoric
There’s an old joke about the comedians’ convention that took place in the Catskills back in the 1950s. All the great stand-up artists were there, eating their way to heart attacks, so long as they didn’t “die” on stage. Every night a different comic would provide dinner entertainment while his colleagues fressed. They’d sidle up to the microphone and snap off a series of numbers, such as “seventeen, six, forty-two, twenty.” Mouths full to overflowing, the house roared their appreciation. A newcomer watched the scene with confusion. “I don’t get it,” he said to his buddy. “These guys recite a list of numbers and everybody laughs. What? Are they all playing the numbers?”
His more experienced colleague explained, “Naw, but these guys come here every year and they’ve heard every joke in the book. To save time, each joke has its own number. When they hear a stand-up comic run the numbers, they all remember the jokes and laugh. That’s it.”
The newcomer was astonished and determined to have his turn at the microphone. He trotted on stage and practically crooned into the mic: “Two, seven, nine, forty-four.” The house was absolutely silent. Panicked, he tried again, “Six, fourteen, fifty-seven, three.” The audience began booing. He left the stage before they started throwing things.
“OK, I still don’t get it. The first guy said a bunch of numbers and they laughed their tuchesses off. I get up there and die on stage. What’s the difference?”
His friend patiently explained, “It’s how you tell it.”
This could as easily be a joke about ancient Rome as the Catskills. In antiquity, everyone who was anyone learned rhetoric. That means that everyone knew the same set of anecdotes and stories about characters from Roman history. Everyone could trot out a well-known bon mot. What made you a successful rhetor in the Roman world was how you’d tell it.
This type of Greek education had a significant place within the Jewish community. In the Roman East, rhetoric depended on knowledge of Greek language and the Greek classics. Those legends were the source of the rhetorical equivalent of Borscht-belt jokes and stories. So it is surprising to read an early rabbinic text listing Greek—and, as we will see, Greek rhetoric—among the things Jews disdained after the three disastrous wars with Rome between 65 and 135 CE. It’s from the Mishnah, that compendium of Jewish laws compiled by Rebbi Judah the Patriarch in approximately 200 CE. Rebbi Judah is looking back upon Jewish reactions to these so-called wars, referred to by the Greek loanword polemus (think: polemics).
During the war [polemus] of Vespasian they decreed a prohibition against grooms wearing wedding crowns and against using the tambourine.
During the war of [the provincial governor, General Lusius] Quietus (the so-called War of the Diaspora) they decreed a prohibition against bridal crowns and that a man should not teach his son Greek.
During the last war (the Bar Kokhba rebellion against Hadrian) they decreed a prohibition that brides no longer be carried through the city on a palanquin; but our rabbis permitted a bride to be carried through the city on a palanquin. (m. Sotah 9:17, following the text of the Cambridge manuscript)
I do not wish to minimize the damage inflicted by Rome upon the Jewish people in these military engagements: thousands were killed and exiled from their homes. Jews were banned from Jerusalem. The Jewish community was essentially helpless to respond in any significant way. This is what their reaction looked like seventy years after the final of those battles: Jews “got even” with Rome by not using tambourines! No more bridal crowns! Really? And fuggidaboud riding on a palanquin. Of course the rabbis, those good guys, they really knew how to make a girl happy. They rescinded that prohibition and permitted brides to ride palanquins. Who was it in the Jewish community, referred to as “they,” who did the forbidding until “our rabbis” came along and said the equivalent of, “Oh let the poor girl have a happy wedding day. After all, haven’t we suffered enough?” I have no idea who “they” are. I am suspicious that the rabbis of this Mishnah have set up a straw man intent on prohibiting things, so that our dear rabbis can come along and once more permit them. Yay rabbis!
A palanquin is the equivalent of those open-top stretch limos from which prom goers wave their arms and torsos, all the while snapping selfies. The scandalized Jewish community of Late Antiquity apparently prohibited palanquins in the aftermath of all that death and destruction. Who knows, it could lead to mixed dancing or some other horrific form of levity. The response seems so feeble it’s risible. It’s as though modern Jews decided to forbid wedding caterers to serve mini-frankfurters to punish Germany for World War II. So there!
My jaundiced reading of this text is pertinent here because of the line almost hidden away in the middle section of the Mishnah, right after the business about bridal crowns: “that a man should not teach his son Greek.” Oh? Did “they” really prohibit teaching Greek? How then might the eager Jewish young urban professionals find a leg up in the Roman East? Greek was essential for their career advancement. Learning Greek for the Jews of the Roman Empire was functionally equivalent to learning English for immigrants to America.
The same tractate of the Babylonian Talmud where the problematic Mishnah we just read is found also records a countertradition (Sotah 49b) attributed to Rebbi’s father that says,
There were a thousand students in my father’s house, five hundred of whom learned Torah and five hundred of whom learned Greek wisdom.
A few words later, the Talmud qualifies this tradition by commenting that “the house of Rabban Gamaliel is different, because they had close relations with the [Roman] imperial government.” Within rabbinic culture there was a pecking order among the members of the so-called rabbinic class of Palestine by political and socioeconomic criteria. Those who were wealthier were generally more acculturated to Greco-Roman society. Those who held political office were, of necessity, engaged in Roman politics and Greek and Latin culture. The more urbanized classes of Jews—and these surely included a significant proportion, likely the majority, of the rabbis—were more likely to see themselves as citizens of the Roman Empire and behave accordingly. What exactly did those yuppie students learn in the patriarch’s house or school? The Greek wisdom referred to, in fact, meant Roman rhetoric. The rabbis and other Je
ws of Roman Palestine were given the basic grammar and rhetorical education that would be expected of any functionally literate citizen of the empire.
Libanius was the most famous teacher of rhetoric (after Aristotle, of course). He lived in the fourth century CE in Antioch, on the River Orontes, in what is today eastern Turkey. Libanius held forth at his school of rhetoric during the heyday of rabbinic Judaism that unfolded in the Galilee, just to his south. Among his students over the years, Libanius could count hundreds of pagans and even some Christians who would grow up to become bishops of the church. We briefly met Libanius on our quick tour of Antioch. There, I pointed out that among his few Jewish students was the son of the Jewish patriarch of Palestine, who was either Rebbi’s grandson or great-grandson. Rhetoric was what one needed to learn if one was to advance in the world. Much as parents try to send their kids to Ivy League schools today, those who were ambitious to advance them in the bureaucracy of the Roman world sent their children to study rhetoric with Libanius.
In Antioch they learned the basics: grammar, reading and writing, fluency in Greek, and the ability to quote the works of Homer and the other Greco-Roman classics by memory. This education was a sine qua non for anyone who wanted to work in imperial offices or as an attorney. Students studied with Libanius from one to three years, some perhaps as long as five or six years. Above all, they were trained to be sophists: young men who could speak extemporaneously, holding their audiences spellbound. They employed their skills in legal forensics; that is, interpreting and, even more importantly, arguing the law on behalf of clients. The most basic tool of their education was their ability to produce the appropriate exemplary story at the right moment and to tell it in a fresh way, at length or briefly, as their case required. “Six, fourteen, fifty-seven, three.” See? Now it’s funny!
These anecdotes (in Greek: chreia) are often called “pronouncement stories,” as the main character says something memorable. They constituted the basic repertoire of every student schooled in rhetoric. We know this from ancient rhetorical texts. Students’ rhetorical practice slates have survived in many places across the Mediterranean basin, including its eastern shores. These student copybooks conform to the formal training manuals that also survive. Teaching rhetoric was an art honed for almost a thousand years. All the evidence teaches us the importance of the chreia.
The anecdote we recounted in chapter three about Alexander the Great in Cartagena qualifies as a chreia, as it ends with the pronouncement, “I, Alexander of Macedon, was a foolish king until I came to Cartagena and learned sound counsel from its women.” Here’s a chreia about Alexander the Great from Libanius’s textbook for his students: “Alexander, upon being asked by someone where he kept his treasures, pointed to his friends.” Maybe that’s why they called him “the Great.” In Libanius’s still-existent textbook, the rhetorical exercise is given, and then he demonstrates how to tell it first briefly, then in paraphrase, then as demonstration of a cause, in a comparison, as an example for others, as testimony from ancient authority, and, finally as a brief epilogue. The training in rhetoric was painstaking and thorough.
Another short example of a chreia comes from Libanius’s personal correspondence. He sent a letter to his relative Aristaenetus in the year 393 CE, hand-delivered by one of his students. The letter opens, “The bearer is both Pelagius’s son and mine; for the former begat him, while I taught him to love rhetoric.” This saying is striking, as it makes the teacher a second father to his pupil. I compare it to a Mishnah (ca. 200 CE) that teaches, “His father brought him into this world, while his rabbi, who taught him wisdom, brings him to the world to come.” In this rabbinic encomium, the rabbi is even more important than the father; for it is the rabbi who teaches wisdom or Torah, and so brings him salvation.
Around the same time as the Mishnah, early in the third century CE, a Greek philosopher named Diogenes Laertius quoted Aristotle (fourth century BCE): “Teachers who educated children deserved, he said, more honor than parents who merely gave them birth; for bare life is furnished by the one, while the other ensures a good life.” Libanius was borrowing his rhetorical trope from Diogenes Laertius and not the Mishnah. Yet the Mishnah’s rhetorical elevation of the teacher is exactly the same as that attributed to Aristotle.
Diogenes Laertius also tells us the tale of an earlier Diogenes, this one a founder of cynic philosophy, who lived at the same time as Aristotle. Among Diogenes the Cynic’s observations, we are told the following chreia:
When visiting Megara, Diogenes looked at their sheep, whose valuable wool was protected by leather jackets; yet the Megarans’ children ran around naked. Diogenes remarked, “It is better to be a Megaran’s lamb than his son.”
This chreia has three notable points. First, in the story Diogenes is a foreigner, who has come from afar to comment upon what he sees. Second, he has a witty remark about the folks he sees. Finally, there are those crazy sheep dressed in leather vests.
Student bearing letter—Archeological Museum of Milan
Forty-five years ago the scholar Henry Fischel pointed out that these three motifs also can be found in a story about the renowned Jewish sage Hillel:
This law was forgotten by the elders of Betayra. Once upon a time the 14th of Nissan (when the paschal sacrifice takes place) fell on Shabbat and they did not know whether the performance of the paschal sacrifice overrode Sabbath prohibitions or not. They said, “There is a Babylonian named Hillel who served his teachers Shammaya and Avtalyon. He may know whether the paschal sacrifice overrides Sabbath prohibitions or not. Perhaps he will be of help” . . .
They asked him, “What shall we do, for people have not brought their knives with them to perform the sacrifice (and are forbidden from carrying them on Shabbat)?”
He said to them, “I heard this law but I have forgotten it. But leave it to the Jews; if they are not prophets, they are the children of prophets.”
Indeed, everyone whose paschal offering was a sheep tucked the knife into its wool and everyone whose paschal offering was a goat tied his knife between the goat’s horns. That way the paschal offerings carried the knives themselves. When Hillel saw this he remembered the law and said, “This is what I heard from Shammaya and Avtalyon.” (Palestinian Talmud Pesahim 6:1, 33a)
This very Jewish telling of the chreia is set in the first century, when the Temple still stood and the Jews were bringing their Passover sacrifices. A legal ruling is called for, and Hillel the Babylonian is consulted and makes a pronouncement about what he sees. He memorably plays on the words of the prophet Amos—a sheep breeder—who said, “I am not a prophet, nor am I the son of a prophet” (Amos 7:14). So we have a foreigner who comments wittily about the people he observes, while the sheep cavort. This is an impressive rabbinic retelling of an ancient chreia.
The rabbis had their own cycles of chreia, as well. Hillel is a popular character in many of the chreia of the rabbis. In the Midrash we read,
Hillel was once walking with his disciples. When he went to take leave they asked him, “Master, where are you going?”
Hillel replied, “I am going to do a kindness for the guest in my home.”
They asked, “Do you have guests every day?”
Hillel said, “Is not my lonely soul a guest in my body? For one day it is here and on the morrow it departs.” (Lev. Rabbah 34:3)
One of the most famous of all rabbinic stories is a chreia involving Hillel:
Once a gentile came to Shammai and said, “Convert me on the condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I stand on one foot.” Shammai pushed him away with the builder’s cubit that he was holding.
He came to Hillel who converted him, saying, “What is hateful to you, do not to your fellow. This is the entire Torah. The rest is commentary. Go, study.” (Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a)
This tale is one of a series of Hillel anecdotes collected on the Talmudic fol
io just quoted. In each, Shammai the Elder plays the curmudgeon, a foil to the warm embrace of Hillel. The punch line of this particular chreia is the negative form of the Golden Rule—a platitude that was omnipresent in the Greco-Roman world, attributed to Seneca (a contemporary of Hillel) and to Jesus (another contemporary of Hillel), among others. I love the way the story makes the Golden Rule so rabbinic-sounding by insisting that there must also be commentary and that the newly minted convert now must go study. All of these details are predictable, especially in an academic setting. What seems unique to our tale is the clever challenge, “while I stand on one foot.” Yet even this is a Greco-Roman commonplace. In the first century, the Greek essayist Plutarch (Sayings of the Spartans #18) reports this chreia:
A man who was visiting Sparta stood for a long time upon one foot, and said to a Spartan, “I do not think that you, sir, could stand upon one foot as long as that.”
The Spartan interrupted and said, “No, but there isn’t a goose that couldn’t do that.”
I suppose we should be grateful that the rabbis’ version of the chreia resisted imagining a goose standing on one foot on its way to being sacrificed in the Jerusalem Temple as a side dish for the paschal lamb. The chreia form we are dealing with is quintessentially Greco-Roman, as clear a staple of Greco-Roman culture as talking baseball would be among American males. The only difference with the rabbis’ examples is local color and Jewish law. In fact, if you think about it, the joke about the Jewish comedians in the Catskills is also a chreia.
One of the longest-running performances of Roman culture is found in a type of Greco-Roman literature called the symposium. Literally, the sym-posium is a cocktail party. Sym is Greek for “together,” as in sym-pathy (having fellow feeling). Posium is from the Greek word meaning “to drink.” It is related to the English word potable. So a symposium is a cocktail party, specifically a literary cocktail party. I have no doubt that cocktail parties were regularly held in the ancient world, just as they are today. But the symposium is a cocktail party where the chatter is decidedly bookish. Maybe we can still find parties like that near Columbia or Harvard. But in the Roman world, the point was to write a story about a bunch of famous people at a cocktail party. Whether or not they were actually there is not important. The point was to show them drinking a few cups of wine, nibbling crudités, and all the while cleverly quoting the classics. Indeed, it would be fair to refer to the symposium as a literary genre, which dates as early as Plato’s Symposium in the fourth century BCE, all the way to Macrobius’s Saturnalia in the early fifth century CE—contemporary with the Jerusalem Talmud. For 750 years, Greeks and Romans reveled in the literature presumably quoted, the speeches supposedly made, the drinks quaffed, and the scandals whispered during the symposia.
Aphrodite and the Rabbis Page 9