In my dream, you and I were all reclining-at-banquet on Mt. Sinai. A heavenly voice was given to us, “Come up here, come up here! There are great banquet tables [triclinia] that are well spread with fine foods for you. You, your disciples, and your disciples’ students are invited to the top tier!” (Babylonian Talmud Hagiga 14b)
No longer is Mt. Sinai recalled as the place from which Moses brings down instruction for the construction of the altar, which was attended by his brother Aaron’s dynastic priesthood—which offered animal sacrifices to God. Instead, Rabbi Yohanan’s dream, fully realized in rabbinic Judaism, is of a Sinai where masters and their disciples in the study of Torah are invited to the Hellenistic banquet. There, they recline on the most prestigious couches at God’s triclinium. The almost casual Hellenization of Yohanan’s reported dream speaks volumes about the shift to Greco-Roman culture—even Mt. Sinai is now conceived of as a Roman banquet room! As the rabbis say in Pirke Avot (ch. 4): “Prepare yourself in the ante-chamber [Hebrew: prozdor, Greek: prothura], so that you may enter the banquet hall [triclinium].”
I have suggested here that rabbinic Judaism is a new religion, divorced and separate from the biblical, Israelite religion of the Temple cult that preceded it. Yet my discussion of the late biblical antecedents of Hellenism, added to the evidence I quoted earlier in this book about the possibility of synagogues’ existing before the destruction, should raise a flag of caution. In fact, the rabbinic obsession with Scripture, manifest in the rabbis’ interpretations of every detail of biblical law, including the minute facets of the moribund Temple and its procedures, makes it clear that rabbinic Judaism is not a wholly new religion, created ex nihilo, out of nothingness. This shift was already under way before the time of the rabbis. On one hand, there would be no wholesale assimilation to Hellenism with a loss of Jewish identity. On the other, ancient Jewish rituals were not abandoned. Rather, there would be a measured appropriation and adaptation of Greco-Roman culture that found its expression in post-70 CE Judaism.
The ways in which I have characterized Judaism, whether as utterly new or as a remix of an old tune, are fraught with ideological significance. What characterizes the new Judaism and separates it from other emerging ideologies? Is rabbinic Judaism just one more new religion, one more flavor of many Judaisms in the Late Antique world, there to take its place alongside Christianity and other Greco-Roman religions? Or is rabbinic Judaism the one and only authentic inheritor of biblical “Judaism,” genetically similar by virtue of both the performed commandments (mitzvot) and the constant justyfying of those mitzvot through tying them to their presumed Scriptural origins? Remember that in the period I am considering, rabbinic Judaism was not the major face of Judaism it would become for the millennium of its European ascendance, say from 940 to 1940 CE. It was only in that much later period that rabbis had the actual power to enforce their dicta. The first millennium of rabbinic Judaism resembled the Judaism we have now, in which each individual Jew chooses adherence to the commandments and how that adherence is manifested in daily behavior. To get to now, the rabbis then needed persistence, vision, and Roman Stoic stolidity to survive. The very virtues the rabbis adopted from Roman culture were among the forces that allowed Judaism to survive against oppressive odds.
The methods and biases of this book remain relevant to understanding the meaning of the journey we have taken together. However much I may see Greco-Roman culture as the context and content for rabbinic Judaism, there nevertheless remain strong ties to the biblical religion that birthed it. My bias may be as a Western university–trained scholar, but I am also a rabbi. I have been trying to keep a sense of the contexts of Judaism, particularly rabbinic Judaism, and its development within the Greco-Roman world. Early in this book I recounted a parable about a wily fox and a fish out of water. In 2005, the late author David Foster Wallace gave a commencement speech at Kenyon College. He opened with his own parable:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Aphrodite and the Rabbis is an attempt to answer both of the questions posed in Foster Wallace’s parable. As I have suggested, it is an examination of both content and context: both “How’s the water?” and “What the hell is water?” I hope I have convinced you of the extent to which the water the rabbis swam in was itself Greco-Roman culture.
The many varieties of Judaism may not all have been rabbinic, yet they shared customs, iconography, and common Hellenistic culture with the rabbis and with the other Jews in the empire. Whether it was the good relations they had with the neighbors whom they called God- or Heaven-fearers, or the overwhelming presence of the menorah as a Jewish symbol, Judaism was clearly identifiable from place to place. Pagans and Christians “knew it when they saw it.” They report about certain kinds of Sabbath observance, odd dietary customs, the palm frond and citron, the ram’s horn—all of these were identifiable as elements of Judaism, among the various Jewish communities as well as to non-Jewish observers. Today it might be called “dog-whistle,” this subtle array of symbols and customs that united Jews one to another. They were Romans, to be sure, but also simultaneously members of their own exclusive community. This exclusivism also helped serve as a survival mechanism.
The Jews, and the rabbis in particular, carried a great deal of ambivalence about the Roman culture in which they flourished (“what the hell is water?”). I wrote of how the rabbis equated Rome with the biblical Esau/Edom. This tribe was surely deemed to be “other,” yet anyone who reads the book of Genesis must acknowledge that Esau is Jacob/Israel’s fraternal twin brother. There is no better symbol of rabbinic equivocation toward Rome.
The rabbis also had a “founding narrative” of their rise following the destruction of Jerusalem by Rome. In almost every version of the oft-told story about Yohanan and Vespasian, the rabbi had to sneak out of besieged Jerusalem in a casket. This story line speaks to my discussion about the creation or reinvention of Judaism. In the very legend in which Yohanan is promised Yavneh, the first home of rabbinic Judaism, Rabbi Yohanan symbolically dies—he is carried out in a coffin—and is resurrected standing before Rome, embodied by Vespasian Caesar.
As the rabbis of Yavneh and beyond focused their gaze upon the Torah and its interpretation, they showed themselves heavily indebted to the broader culture in which they read the Book. I demonstrated how the rabbis adopted the standard exercises of the Roman rhetorical schools. The rabbis also turned to a longstanding pagan literary genre, the symposium, as the skeleton for the Passover Seder. Even today, the Passover Seder is a lovely marriage of the biblical with the Greco-Roman aspects of Judaism, a banquet of East meets West.
The reach of Rome was long, and it embraced Jewish communities from one end of the empire to the other. Jews remained distinctive through their common customs, such as Sabbath observance or food laws. Even so, in their minority status they were not all that different from other subgroups of the empire. Philosophers, for example, were distinctive by their garb and deportment, and often by their food habits, as well. Christians stood outside the empire for a long period of their development before becoming the empire itself. Geographical, racial, and ethnic subgroups made up the vast expanse of an empire that stretched from England in the west to Armenia and Media in the east. The one common denominator was the Greco-Roman Hellenism that became their patrimony. This was true for the Jews in the Roman Empire as well. Like every other subgroup, they, too, were Roman.
Even as one could distinguish between the rabbis and other Jews within the Jewish world—the rabbis themselves made this distinction—nevertheless they all shared a common Judaism that was heavily inflected by their common Hellenism. The details I have surveyed in this book have ma
de it clear that by and large, the water they swam in was very good. And when they were asked “What the hell is water?” the answer, surely, was that among the many tributaries that made up the empire—from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, from the Euphrates to the Caspian Sea—Judaism took its place within the Roman Empire as a Roman people and religion. Its transformation from the Jerusalem-centered Temple cult to a world religion was a reinvention, a resurrection if you will, accomplished through the vivifying waters of Greco-Roman culture.
What does this all mean for modern American Judaism? If the evidence has been weighed and I can conclude with reasonable assurance that Greco-Roman culture played a large hand in the invention of what we now call Judaism, does it make a difference? Should it matter to us?
I think it does, if for no other reason than to validate modern Judaism itself. Here, of course, bias looms large. If this book is but a defense of the lives we now live, if the Judaism I imagine in Late Antiquity is but a reflection back from the glasses I wear as a modern, if my gaze never truly penetrates through the lens to see the realities of Ancient Judaism, then I have failed in my task. It is for this reason that I have quoted so many texts and included illustrations not only from rabbinic literature but also from the other Jewish communities of the Roman Empire. I wanted to allow the testimony of antiquity its own voice to the extent possible. It is true that all of the evidence has been interpreted by me in support of the theory that Greco-Roman culture served as the midwife for the birth of Judaism as we know it. But still, the evidence is here to be read one way or another.
If the rabbis and other Jews took the best of their Roman culture and heartily imbibed Hellenistic civilization as they invented a Judaism to survive the destruction of the Jerusalem cult, then it can be an encouragement for us to do the same. Almost two centuries ago, the German-Jewish movement called Wissenschaft des Judentums, “the scientific study of Judaism,” appropriated Western methods and traditions. It created a Judaism that was consonant with the intellectual, university life of European culture. It allowed for the academic study of Judaism, German Jewish Reform, and other forms of modern Judaism. Even after World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust, acculturation to the West remained the norm with the emergence of American Judaism. Jewish leadership in modernity both observed and celebrated the choices rabbinic Jews made long ago in the Roman Empire.
Much as they swam in the waters of Greco-Roman culture, so we flourish in American society, transforming Judaism as we go. Jews are in very large measure university-educated, schooled in the culture of the Western world. Jews have imbibed those values as, for example, we welcome forms of women’s equality into our Jewish life. I, a rabbi, am comfortable living in the multifaith, pluralistic country that has given the Jewish community unprecedented opportunities. Jews today mediate among their heritage of European Jewry, the legacy of Talmudic, Greco-Roman Judaism, the history of biblical covenantal religion, and the ethos of liberal democracy. In this Jewish adaptation of the broader culture, the Jewish community stands as a direct inheritor of the Judaism of the Greco-Roman world. God willing, our legacy will be as rich and long-lasting as was theirs.
Earlier in this book I noted that when the Roman emperor arrived in a town, his advent was celebrated by citizens lining the streets to loudly greet him with shouts in Greek of Ho Kalos, “This one is The Good one!” This expression was accompanied by a gesture: pointing the index finger on the raised, outstretched right arm. This pointing was not considered impolite but, rather, the appropriate gesture acknowledging the emperor’s, the Good One’s, sovereignty.
From a colossus of the emperor Constantine—Capitoline Museums, Rome
The gesture was adopted by the rabbis as a way of acknowledging God’s rule, and it still is reflected in synagogues today when Jews point to the Torah as they sing, VeZot HaTorah, “This is the Torah which Moses put before the people Israel.” It is the demonstrative pronoun, the word “this,” in Hebrew feminine zot (or, in the masculine, zeh), that provokes the pointing. How appropriate that the very gesture by which Jews still acknowledge God and Torah is itself a legacy of Roman culture!
The Babylonian Talmud tractate Taanit ends with a reference to this custom of pointing to God. I quote it here as a closing benediction:
In the Future, the Blessed Holy One will host a circle-dance for the righteous in the Garden of Eden. God will sit in the middle of them. Each and every one will point to God with their finger, as it is said (Isa. 25:9), “On that day they shall say: This [zeh] is our God; we looked to God and God delivered us. This is the Lord to Whom we look, let us delight and rejoice in God’s deliverance.”
Timeline
356–323 BCEAlexander the Great; Greek conquest of the known world
384–322 BCEAristotle is Alexander’s tutor—beginnings of Hellenism
175–164 BCEAntiochus IV rules Judea; Maccabean revolt
146 BCERome conquers the Greeks
63 BCERoman general Pompey conquers Jerusalem
1 CEHillel and Shammai the Elders—forebears of rabbinic Judaism
30–33 CEJesus’s ministry and death
50–60 CESt. Paul active
66–70 CERoman Palestine rebels; Jerusalem Temple destroyed, 70 CE
70–120 CEBeginnings of rabbinic activity in Roman Palestine
115–117 CEJewish communities of the Roman Diaspora devastated by riots
132–135 CEBar Kokhba Jewish rebellion against Roman emperor Hadrian
200 CECompilation of the Mishnah
220–250 CERabbinic Tannaitic (early) works edited
224–651 CESasanian Empire in Iraq (Jewish Babylonia)
225 CEBeginnings of rabbinic Judaism in Babylonia
312 CERoman emperor Constantine converts to Christianity
325 CEChristianity declared a licit religion in Roman Empire
330 CEConstantinople founded
361–363 CEEmperor Julian attempts to revive “paganism,” tries to rebuild Jerusalem Temple
363 CEJulian killed in battle against Persia/Sasanians
375–425 CEEditing of Palestinian (“Jerusalem”) Talmud, rabbinic Midrash on Genesis, Leviticus, Lamentations, Song of Songs
410 CECity of Rome sacked by Visigoth king Alaric
450–550 CERedaction and compilation of Babylonian Talmud
570–632 CEMohammed flourishes
637–640 CEFall of Sasanian Empire
637 CEMuslim conquest of Jerusalem
Acknowledgments
My first reader and life editor is my wife, Sandra Edelman. She is the ideal reader for whom I write—smart, committed to her Jewish identity, willing to be educated. As my in-house counsel, she is not shy about telling me what to add, delete, or change. I also heartily thank my research assistant Madeline, whose bibliographic help, keen comments, and careful editing made the book so much richer. Sandy and Maddie read and reread an earlier draft of this work. My editor extraordinaire at St. Martin’s Press, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, pushed me to revise, and then re-revise, and then revise yet again. In every instance she was correct. Any readability this book may have is thanks to her. I am blessed to have her as an editor. Merci beaucoup as well to Laura Apperson, Alan Bradshaw, Clifford Thompson, Josh Evans, and the incredible crew at St. Martin’s for so ably seeing the book through press. To my champions at Levine, Greenberg, Rostan, I offer two decades worth of appreciation.
My gratitude is extended to Professors Lee I. Levine (Hebrew University), Seth Schwartz (Columbia), and Shaye J. D. Cohen (Harvard) for their comments on an early draft of chapter 3. My warm thanks to Prof. Steven Fine (Yeshiva University) for his careful reading of the bulk of the chapters of an earlier draft. His acute comments saved me from both errors and omissions. I deeply appreciate these professors’ collegiality
and comments. Any errors that remain are my responsibility.
Thanks to the Russell Berrie Foundation (Angelica Berrie and Ruth Salzman), the Institute of International Education (especially Borcsa Barnahazi), Rabbi Jack Bemporad, Prof. Adam Afterman, and the John Paul II Center at the Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum) in Rome, for my appointment there as Distinguished Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies in spring, 2014; and to Prof. Father James Puglisi and A. J. Boyd for their good care while I was in their house. Many of the photos in the book were shot during my time at the Angelicum.
I am grateful to Agnes Vajda and Noemi Csabay (both of the Institute of International Education) and Dr. Irle Goldman for being my catacomb companions, and to Dr. Laura Supino for twice now guiding me through the Jewish catacombs of Rome. Warm thanks to my old friend Dr. Joseph Sievers for setting both visits in motion and for his graciously hosting me as Master Visiting Professor of Jewish Studies at the Cardinal Bea Center of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome back in 2007.
My academic home for forty-five years has been the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS). Every page of this book displays my debt to my beloved teachers Professors Saul Lieberman and Elias Bickermann, requiescant in pace, who taught me about the Greco-Roman world, each in his own brilliant, earthy, inimitable fashion. My thanks, too, goes to current JTS Chancellor Arnold Eisen and JTS Provost Alan Cooper as well as my colleagues and students for their collegiality, support, and friendship.
My appreciation to Dr. Jacob Wisse of the Yeshiva University Museum for his graciousness in allowing me to photograph their replicas of the synagogues of Dura Europos and Beit Alpha. I am especially grateful to Steven Fine (yet again), Robin Jensen, and Alisa Doctoroff, who graciously and generously shared their own photos with me for this volume. I am most grateful to Nanette Stahl, Susan Matheson, and Megan Doyon of Yale University for making available a hard-to-get image of the Esther painting from the synagogue of Dura Europos. Special thanks to my long-time student Ben Bromberg Gaber, for his expert map-making. Thanks to Letty Cottin Pogrebin for a timely tweak to the subtitle of the book. And to my old friend and consummate reader Tom Cahill: grazie mille.
Aphrodite and the Rabbis Page 21