Tannaitic culinary and commensal regulations prescribe social practices that enact and maintain a distinct Jewish identity. Non-Jews are understood to eat different foods in a different manner, resulting in different bodies.

The Tannaim build their Jewish identity via three food practices. First, they understand the ingestion of certain foods to be symbolic, or metonymic, of Self/Other. Concomitantly, a person is embodied by the consumption of – or abstinence from – metonymic food items. As we shall see, this phenomenon is not unique to tannaitic Judaism. One recent example of embodiment through ingestion is the renaming of “French fries” as “freedom fries” in the U.S. House of Representatives' cafeteria from 2003 through 2006. In this instance, differing views on policy toward Iraq led to a desire among some U.S. Representatives to rename a food item, lest by ingesting “French” food, one would become, in some way, “French.” Tannaitic texts reflect this same notion, wherein consuming – or abstaining from – certain metonymic foodstuffs is understood to be an act of embodiment; it is a practice that creates an “Us” and a “Them.”

Another “Other” that tannaitic commensal practices establish in part is the category of women. A woman is not the “normative” Tanna, who is in general, “a male, property owning, rabbi or rabbinic disciple.” As the actions and participants surrounding the tannaitic table become increasingly regulated, this observation comes into greater focus.

In this chapter, I divide the tannaitic data into two groups: (1) texts pertaining to women preparing food and (2) texts pertaining to women at the table. Each group illustrates differently how tannaitic commensality practices enact and maintain a distinct Jewish male identity. From texts legislating the preparation of food by women, we encounter the literary role that women play in the tannaitic corpus. In these pericopae, women are often not “real” women; they are literary foils, serving a discursive purpose. As characters in a drama, they are introduced only to elucidate the social and legal effects of certain culinary and commensal practices on tannaitic men.

On July 11, 1883, Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, Ohio hosted a banquet to celebrate the ordination of the college's first class of Reform rabbis. The menu for this gourmet feast, later (in)famously known as the “Terefah [nonkosher] Banquet” and greatly mythologized, included four biblically forbidden foods (clams, crabs, shrimp, and frogs). Over a series of elaborate courses, each accompanied with its own wine or spirit, the diners who partook of this feast – and those who stormed out – each made a statement about Reform Judaism's stance on the traditional Jewish dietary laws and, by extension, on its theology in general. The intra- and interdenominational consternation inspired, in part, by the “Terefah Banquet” eventually contributed to the bifurcation of American Judaism that we still see today. More than simply consuming calories, it would appear that the “Terefah Banquet” was about staking a claim on a new Jewish identity.

However, the use of a meal to create social distinctions and to enact and maintain distinct communities is far from a modern phenomenon, both in Judaism and cross-culturally. The early rabbinic (tannaitic) corpus is replete with legislation concerning what and with whom one should or should not eat. The authors of these texts (singular: Tanna; plural: Tannaim) build on earlier precedents and introduce innovative practices regulating commensal interactions. In short, the food on one's plate serves as a social symbol (or sign) that communicates group association and disassociation.

Human beings are omnivores. Unable to survive on a single species of plant or animal, we must turn to a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, and protein sources to acquire all the nutrients necessary for survival. In this search for protein, carbohydrates, vitamins, and minerals, human beings look for variety; at the same time, they attempt to avoid danger. For example, although a dish might taste better (and be more nutritious) with a variety of mushrooms, this benefit must be weighed against the potential that one of those mushrooms could be poisonous. This phenomenon is often referred to as either the “omnivore's paradox” or, more famously, “the omnivore's dilemma.”

In the ancient Mediterranean (and, in fact, in all places and time periods prior to the invention of modern refrigeration and transportation), human beings relied on the food sources that were either available in their immediate environment or that preserved well enough to travel. Although this study is focused primarily on tannaitic discourse on culinary and commensal regulations, it is important to contextualize this prescriptive rhetoric within its historical milieu.

‘Pagan monotheism’ appears to be a paradox. Whereas paganism is intuitively seen as essentially polytheistic, the term ‘monotheism’ directs one's mind immediately to Christianity, Judaism and Islam, and not to the religions of Greece and Rome. The tension arising from the yoking of what seem to be two mutually exclusive terms expresses itself in three closely related problems. First, monotheism can be an ideologically loaded term, conveying the superiority of the Judaeo-Christian tradition for which it was coined. Consequently its application to Graeco-Roman religion may seriously hamper our understanding of this different religious tradition. Second, ‘pagan monotheism’ focuses on ideas about the godhead. It thus implies a theological and philosophical approach that may not be suited for the religions of antiquity, as these are often seen as essentially ritualistic. Third, as ‘pagan monotheism’ runs counter to our intuitive understanding of Greek and Roman religion, it raises the issue of the change that ‘paganism’ underwent in order to be able to accommodate monotheistic ideas.

The publication of the collection of essays on pagan monotheism in late antiquity by M. Frede and P. Athanassiadi in 1999 provided new impetus to the discussions about paganism and monotheism. Many of them end in a stalemate, with the critics of pagan monotheism dismissing the concept as inadequate while its supporters emphasise its importance. In this paper, which will discuss the three problems indicated, I hope to contribute to a fuller awareness of the issues involved when using the term ‘pagan monotheism’, and, if possible, to overcome the deadlock between supporters and critics.

PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS

My own earlier study of the cult of Theos Hypsistos, published in Athanassiadi and Frede (1999), was an attempt to ascertain whether any form of monotheistic worship could be identified apart from Judaism and Christianity in the Roman and late Roman worlds. The material central to the analysis was the corpus of almost 300 inscriptions, mostly votive dedications, addressed to Theos Hypsistos (180 texts), Zeus Hypsistos (88 texts), or simply Hypsistos (24 texts), dated between the second century bc and the early fourth century ad, which had been identified at find-spots across the east Mediterranean basin, around the Black Sea, in Egypt and in the Near East. Since that study was written, evidence has continued to accrue. By my reckoning, which is certainly not exhaustive, new discoveries have increased the figures for the three groups to 220, 121 and 34 texts respectively, a total of 375. I present a catalogue of these additional texts, geographically organised, as an appendix to this paper, and will cite them as appropriate by the numbers A1 etc., retaining the simple numerals 1 etc. for the items listed in my earlier study. The majority of the new discoveries fit within the pattern of those that were previously known, although some of this evidence prompts further substantial analysis. More important than these finds have been the responses of other scholars, which have called not only the main hypothesis but also my basic approach into question.

DEFINING MONOTHEISM

A fact of crucial importance for the history which many of us share is that in late antiquity a large part of the population of the Roman Empire, perhaps even the majority, but in any case the dominant part of the population, converted to Christianity, and Christianity became the official religion of the Empire. Part of becoming a Christian, put in modern terms, is to become a monotheist, that is, roughly speaking, a person who believes in just one god, namely in God with a capital ‘G’, unless, of course, one already was a monotheist. But at least the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Roman Empire had been, again in modern terms, polytheists, that is, again roughly speaking, persons who believe in a plurality of gods. Given the importance of the fact that Christianity within the relatively short time of a few centuries came to be the dominant religion within the Empire, replacing, and for the most part eliminating, the various forms of paganism, one would like to know how this came about. Obviously there are answers to this from a religious perspective. But, since we are dealing with a remarkable historical phenomenon, we might want to understand how this came about in purely historical terms. From this perspective the change is bound to present itself as a highly complex matter.

RECENT DEBATE AND THE SILENCE OF HISTORIANS

My title refers to Die Mosaische Unterscheidung oder der Preis des Monotheismus, the most prominent of Jan Assmann's publications, which have been at the centre of a debate about monotheism among contemporary theologians. Assmann proposed a structural division between primary and secondary forms of religion which broadly conforms to the divide between polytheism and monotheism. The decisive factor in the emergence of secondary religious forms was not the decision to honour one rather than many gods, but to distinguish true from false doctrine. The choice of truth necessarily entailed the rejection of falsehood; thus the secondary religion was exclusive, not inclusive, and intolerant of error and religious deviation. The price for the identification and pursuit of religious truth was paid in hostility to and the repression of false gods, heresy and religious ideas that deviated from the true religion. Violence and hatred were therefore inevitable partners of secondary, monotheistic, religion. It is likely that widespread discussions of Assmann's thesis will continue, not without inevitable repetition of the ensuing arguments. This paper does not intend to side with Assmann's critics and praise monotheism for its integrative and peaceful characteristics, nor will it defend his views with new or old arguments. Rather, my reflections proceed from the comment recently made by a historian: ‘the screaming muteness of the historians and scholars of the social sciences’.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON MONOGAMY AND MONOTHEISM

If I avoid using the term monotheism in my paper in connection with religious trends in the Roman East, it is because I take the word to mean what it says – the exclusive worship of a single god – exactly as monogamy means the state of being married to a single person at a time. Admittedly, monogamy has never prevented humans from having sex with other partners as well, hoping that the one and only would not find out about it – a soft monogamy as it were. It is only with a similar tolerance towards human weakness that we might accept as monotheism the situation in which an individual accepts the existence of a single god, but nevertheless worships many others, either because he thinks it would do no harm, or ‘just in case’. But I wonder whether it really helps us understand the religions of the Roman Empire if we modify the term monotheism beyond recognition through the addition of attributes, such as soft, pagan, inclusive, hierarchical, affective or whatever.

By saying this I do not deny the sporadic existence of genuine monotheistic ideas in intellectual circles. I also do not deny the existence of monotheistic tendencies. But I do find the term pagan monotheism misleading in as much as it reduces the quest for the divine in the imperial period to a question of quantity, whereas the textual evidence for this period shows that we are primarily dealing with a question of quality.