by Simon Schama
In the years since the Dura synagogue was discovered in 1933, nothing like it has come to light, which is to say no other place where painted Judaism was so stunningly realised. But that’s not the end of the story of profusely decorated ancient synagogues. The abundant picturing, which was evidently part of Jewish expectations of how their places of gathering and worship would look, was merely transferred to a different, and more durable medium – mosaic – both in the diaspora and, more profusely, in the very heart of the rabbinic remaking of Judaism: Palestine itself and especially Galilee where Judah I, the ‘nasi’ patriarch, presided over the ‘Sanhedrin’, or assembly.
Not right away. There was a period – no more than a century – following Hadrian’s cultural annihilation of Judaea when new synagogues were not built. This, however, did not make the period a Judaic dark age. Many if not most modern Jews grow up with a tragically overdetermined view of the two centuries following the destruction of the Temple: a Jewish ground zero, the vast mass of them deported, enslaved; a pathetic remnant furtively hanging on in Palestine; the Jews of the diaspora huddling together in austere cells to pray and study what was left to them.
This was not what happened. The Hadrianic laws banning Torah study, circumcision, Sabbath observance and the like were all repealed in the reign of his successor Antoninus Pius who began his rule in 138, just three years after the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt. A tradition has the learned emperor and the Jewish nasi meeting and even becoming friends, a relationship sustained into the reigns of Severus and Caracalla. And it is certainly true that the bargain struck between Yohanan ben Zakkai and Vespasian – that Jews would conduct themselves as loyal subjects of Rome in return for the unmolested protection of their ancestral religion – was reaffirmed. The status quo ante Jewish revolts, with Judaism recognised as a religio licita, a lawful religion, and Jews given a high degree of legal and local self-governance, was restored. Only the ban on entering and residing in Jerusalem, save for the annual lamentation on the 9th of Ab, the date of the Temple’s destruction, was preserved.
Synagogues outside Judaea – especially in Galilee and on the plain of Jezreel, as well as on the coast which had been built earlier – were not pulled down. Others in the wide diaspora that extended the length and breadth of the Mediterranean (the Book of Acts in the New Testament is a virtual gazetteer of Jewish communities from Corinth and Ephesus to Lydia and Iconium in Asia Minor) flourished and even assumed grandiose proportions. Many had vestibules and courtyards with fountains at their centre – the association between their playing waters and Paradise deliberately incorporated into synagogue design. The colonnaded synagogue built at Sardis (in today’s Turkey), probably in the fourth century in what had been the palaestra, the gymnastic centre of the town, would become in successive expansions one of the most magnificent of the entire Jewish world: a full eighty metres long, complete with a spacious atrium vestibule, mosaic floors, a step-terraced seating area at the back facing the Torah shrine niche, and a stone reading table with lions and eagles!3
It is true, however, that the greatest and most enduring edifice of Judaism created in this period was built of words not stones. Mishnah came before mosaic. The sages of this time took the opportunity offered by the permanent destruction of the Temple elite to redefine Judaism, and appoint themselves its codifiers and judges. With breathtaking audacity, set out in one of the books of the Mishnah, Avot – occurring, oddly and abruptly, within a larger book dealing with rules of equity in damages – the sages (known later as tannaim) redefined what ‘Torah’ was. When they wrote that ‘Moses received the law at Sinai’ they did not mean merely the 613 written commandments, but an indeterminate and unspecified body of oral wisdom whose custodians they had eventually become. Avot is entirely devoted to this genealogy of collective self-authorisation. From Moses this version of ‘Torah’ is passed to Joshua, then to ‘the elders and prophets’, followed by ‘the men of the great assembly’ (whatever that was – perhaps the Great Sanhedrin, possibly not), and so on down to the per-Hasmonean high priest ‘Simon the Just’, thence through many generations of teachers, a long chain of names, some famous like Hillel and Rabban Gamaliel, the son of Judah the Patriarch, and Yohanan ben Zakkai of Yavne, others unfamiliar to even the most learned such as ‘Nittai the Arbelite’ and ‘Aqabiah ben Mehallel’.
The obscure sages (and for that matter the famous ones as well) mark their place in this descending ladder of wisdom through epigrammatic (and sometimes gnomic) utterances, the pirkei avot. Simon the Righteous begins movingly: ‘He would say: “On three things does the world stand: on the Torah, and on the Temple service and on deeds of loving kindness.”’ Others follow with shameless promotion of their own brethren: ‘Yose b Yoezer of Seredah says: “Let your house be a gathering place for sages. And wallow in the dust of their feet and drink in their words with gusto.”’ Hillel’s words have become famous for the moving union of human self-consciousness and enigmatically unanswerable philosophical suggestiveness: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when I am for myself what am I? And if not now when?’ Shammai (as usual) is given not much more than fortune-cookie platitudes: ‘Make your learning of Torah a fixed obligation. Say little and do much. Greet everybody cheerfully.’ Rabbi Levitas of Yavne says: ‘Be exceedingly humble, for the hope of humanity is the worm.’ And so on.
None of these utterances have any discernible connection with those that precede or follow them in the text. Aside from the famous names we have little clue about historical chronology other than an internal one. In the tenth century, Jacob ben Nissim ibn Shahim in Kairouan, now Tunisia, asked the leading Babylonian gaon, Sherira of Pumbedita, who were the writers of the Mishnah and got back the line of sages: tannaim (the Mishnah writers), amoraim (the teachers and elaborators of it), two or three generations later – approximately fourth and fifth centuries – the completers of the Talmud, and finally the sevoraim and then stammaim, in the following two centuries.
But lineage of the Mishnah sages is scarcely a genealogy, and it is certainly not history. As far as the inheritors are concerned, Jewish history – of the kind narrated in Kings and Chronicles, in Esther and the apocryphal Maccabees – comes to an end with the destruction of the Temple. History is no longer the business of the Jews, except as the abrasive edges of the empires they rub up against, regimes that can be checked against the descriptions given in Daniel and elsewhere, indicators of the ticking of the messianic timetable. Even as the sages are creating it, the Mishnah is designed to be not so much unhistorical as supra-historical, something to float free above wars and empires and states. By becoming liberated from historical eventuality and lodging instead in memory and oral tradition, the Mishnah – and the Talmud that grows up around it like a great coral reef of commentary, biblical exegesis and interpretation, endlessly and organically ramifying into a vast hypertext – will live as long as it takes for the Messiah to come, for Jerusalem to be returned and the Temple rebuilt. And perhaps even longer than that.
What, then, is the alternative to history? Law, but in the form of an exhaustive encyclopedic guide to living as a Torah-abiding Jew from circumcision to burial. Nothing is too trivial for the remit of the Mishnah. Should you want to know the precise specifications of the shoe which had to be removed by a widow if she wanted to let her brother-in-law off the otherwise bounden duty to marry her, the Mishnah will leave you in no doubt. Only a heeled leather sandal capable of walking at least four cubits will do. A felt sock? Not a chance. Worried that a dog has consumed carrion (including nibbling a human corpse) before dying from his lethally disgusting meal while stretched out across your threshold? You should be. Mishnah insists that the aforesaid threshold is ritually defiled and in urgent need of purification. Perhaps you’re fond of pickled cucumbers (what Jew isn’t?) and you panic when you discover that you are out of supplies, but since it’s not that much effort, think a little bit of surreptitious pickling on a slow Sabbath afternoon can’t get up the Almighty’
s nose. Woe betide you, O illicit pickler! This counts as work and is thus forbidden. On the other hand, a little light brining, just some salt water you happen to have on hand and which might, you know, somehow, mysteriously, accidentally, get splashed on the previously cut cuke, is just fine. But whatever you do and however much you’re tempted, never, ever break the seal of a jar to satisfy your craving for a dried fig.
The Mishnah can strike the unwary reader as an orgy of the picayune. Yet packed inside its immensity – which claimed (unpersuasively) to be no more than a helpfully subject-indexed elaboration of the original 613 commandments, together with explanations of the cryptic and resolutions of the apparently contradictory (and because Deuteronomy had a certain way with Leviticus there are plenty of contradictions: locusts not kosher in the former, kosher in the latter, for instance) – the writers offer judgements on deeply serious ethical matters. It is the Mishnah which delivers – without appeal, and vexingly often without any clue as to how the judgements were arrived at – the first, self-consciously, decisively Jewish way of everyday living. There is something counter-intuitively powerful about the wiring established between quotidian habit and connection with the Almighty. From minutiae comes sanctification down to the last shoe and the locust which might be trodden underneath. The Mishnah resists the possibility separating the realms of the sacred and the humdrum: holiness pervades all; and the least action, the least creature, the least custom is to be considered in the light of the righteousness of divinity. Though dealing with small things, this is no small thing. It bestows a kind of radiance on the world itself, not through abstract nostrums but from the actual, concrete matter from which a day, a week, a life is made. For Jews, the mistake made by Paul and all those who followed his way of thinking was their imagining the Torah to be a mere inventory of obligations, and one moreover laid down by an un-elect, when as they are unwound in the Mishnah scroll (for that was the way it would have been read) they are the beginning of meditations.
Even this was not enough for the Mishnah writers. For while they pretend to do nothing more than elaborate the law, they end up, of course, remaking it. This ambitious self-authorisation is communicated by the Hebrew in which it is written, which as a linguistic form strives for a kind of sonorous modern classicism. Knowing that the daily language of the people to whom it was addressed was either Aramaic or Greek (and occasionally Latin), it is self-conscious about moving the idiom out of scripture and into the world of social judgement. Accordingly, the Hebrew is flexibly multivocal: judicious and even laconic for its arbitrating utterances and pronouncements of law; more relaxed and informal for the rich and almost chatty narratives of debates and disputes among the rabbis – the aggadah. You can take or leave aggadic opinion, siding on this page with Rabbi Gamaliel II and on that page with Rabbi Eliezer as if in a disputatious boxing match; but at other times, unequivocal judgements are given – as if in response to formal questions to the rabbi. The resulting halakha has the force of law. ‘He who steals wood and makes it into utensils [or] steals wool and makes it into clothing pays compensation with the value of the wood (or the wool) at the time of the theft.’ No more arguments; that’s that. The Mishnah has spoken.4 Sheqet. Zip it. And like that issue of the equity of compensation or the nature of offences for which judicial damages must be paid, the Mishnah is not all finicky small claims and hair-splitting distinctions. In the case of the grounds by which a man is or is not duty-bound to marry his widowed sister-in-law, immense burdens of right hang on the judgement; as they do on guidance as to how someone might be properly buried should the death occur far from home, as it so often must have done.
So the great bulk of the Mishnah is an intensely practical, social text, but not only that. While it invokes chapter and verse of the Bible surprisingly sparingly, and even less often offers a midrash interpretation of a particular scripture, in its aggadic excursions and lovely ramblings it often resembles the biblical and Apocryphal Wisdom Books. ‘Yose b Yohanan of Jerusalem says, “Let your house be wide open; seat the poor at your table.”’ So far so good, the rabbi sounding not altogether unlike that other famously pithy rabbi, Jesus of Nazareth. But then he adds, in un-Jesus-style, ‘And don’t talk too much with women.’5 Some of the counsel is not much more, but no less, than early (and uncannily wise) practical psychology: ‘R Simeon b Eleazar says, “Do not try to make amends with your fellow when he is angry, or comfort him when the corpse of his beloved is lying before him . . . or seek to find absolution for him at the moment when he takes a vow, or attempt to see him when he is humiliated.”’ It is evident that the Mishnah writers go well beyond their own self-described remit of merely adumbrating the Torah and wrestling with its contradictions and obscurities. Little or none of that social advice about doing right by your fellow man (and, occasionally, woman), taking into careful account his claims to both justice and consideration, has been prompted by any specific text of the Torah. But this and ethical precepts like it, in often stunning superabundance, somehow knit together in the Mishnah to make a whole fabric of moral assurance. Wisdom and comfort and even clarity seem to come both from the spontaneous process of a conversation with the sages, even one in which they are caught in constant mutual interruption and contradiction (a good sign with Jews), and from the mouths of real people, not quasi-celestial, oracular seers. In a way not always true of St Paul or John the Evangelist, say, you listen to the sages and you can imagine them eating soup or picking dirt from their fingernails.
How real, though, is the Jewish world the Mishnah inhabits? In many ways, not at all. It was written and organised by a circumscribed rabbinical elite, men dreaming of what they imagined the perfect Temple-centred Jewish world had once been, and could yet again be if their people were given a temple of words, laws and instructions that would repair the damage of fallen masonry and the extinction of the sacrificial fire. The tamid could be relit, made to be as constant as its Hebrew name, just by reiterating its remembered practices. Hence the bizarre amount of space given to precise regulations governing the sprinkling of blood of sacrificed animals – something of no possible practical interest at all to post-Temple generations. The logic was that, should the Messiah suddenly appear and the miracle of the Temple restoration be accomplished, everything ought to be good to go as it once was. But there is almost certainly another important aspect to the immense inventory of procedures and rituals that no longer have any practical purpose. Memory, if not God, does indeed lie in such apparently gratuitous details. The excessiveness of Mishnaic recollection is not unlike that of people desperately trying to summon the substance of a vanished beloved in their memory by recapturing minute, apparently insignificant details of dress or gait. From those details a whole person somehow reassembles itself. At its core, the Mishnah is a thousand-page act of yearning.
Yet for all its idealism, its dream-world obsessions, the Mishnah does dwell in the here and now, amid actual, argumentative, sceptical, often intolerant, captious Jews. Indirectly, from the inventory of habits not to be countenanced, it gives us one of the most vivid social portraits of what second-century Jews living in the late imperial Roman world were actually like. Do not, says the Mishnah, use the Temple Mount as a short cut (which makes it clear that many must have done); do not sleep or chatter in sacred premises – standard practice. On the Sabbath do not, O women, go out gussied up in woollen or linen ribbons or with bands around your head, or a tiara in the ‘golden city’ style (seen in mosaics), or with nose rings, or head bangles ‘when not sown on with hairnet’ (don’t ask). Men, do not go to your Sabbath synagogue in nail-studded sandals or – speaking to the many Jews who as at Dura might have been soldiers again – wearing helmets, cuirasses and greaves. Although none of these violations of Sabbath decorum was so serious as to require a ‘sin offering’, if on the other hand a woman carries a spice box, a perfume flask or a pin in a snail-form (also of course the shape of the inner ear), then Rabbi Meir at least thought that was a punishable offence. Not a good ide
a to recycle a menstrually stained cloth for your Shabbat dress (as if). Forgo ankle chains and garters as they are both ‘susceptible to uncleanness’.6
And there is something else, quite beside the ‘Manual for Living Jewish’ aspect of the huge text, that hovers over it like an immense spectre and that is, paradoxically, the phantom of the Temple itself. The Mishnah was written by men who could not possibly have known the real thing directly, though their grandparents and perhaps even their parents might have done. But they write sometimes as though it still endures as the central fact of Jewish life. Much of the book is devoted to staggeringly abstruse issues of animal sacrifice and cereal offerings as if the routine of the Temple were still happening. What blemishes rule out an animal for the sacrifice? An ox with an undescended testicle, for a start. (Yes, the Mishnah also gives fail-safe instructions on how to find out.) What human blemishes disqualify men from serving in the Temple? Men with heads shaped like turnips, for sure. Also the flat-nosed (which would have ruled me out); men with cauliflower ears (the Mishnah says sponges, which is somehow more exactly picturesque); and even – this is a bit rough – the bald. What is bald? ‘Any who do not have a row of hair from ear to ear’. So the Mishnah conjures up a line of anxious comb-overs queuing for Levite auditions as if the Roman destruction had never happened! More sweetly it pretends to recall the ‘ten wonders that were done for our fathers in the Temple’: women never miscarried; the meat for sacrifice never went off; a fly never made an appearance in the slaughterhouse; a high priest never suffered nocturnal emission on the eve of the Day of Atonement (I should hope not); the rain never put out the altar fire; no wind ever blew away its smoke; no pair of loaves for the shewbread table was ever disqualified; when a jammed crowd of people stand there is little room but when they prostrate themselves they have plenty; neither snake nor scorpion ever bit anyone in Jerusalem; and the biggest miracle of all at pilgrimage time – the accommodation shortage was never a problem. ‘No one ever said to his fellow, “This place is too crowded for me to stay in Jerusalem.”’7