JEWS AND PERSIANS

Jews and Persians had coexisted in Mesopotamia, mostly peaceably, for some 750 years before the Sasanian dynasty took over from the Arcasids in 224 C.E. They would continue to do so for more than another four centuries, including the entire amoraic period (220-500 C.E.). As the late third-century R. Huna put it, the Babylonian “exiles” were at ease in Babylonia, as the other exiles - those in the Roman world - were not (B. Menahot 110a). The Persian emperor wanted it that way. Jews were a significant minority in a vital province; Mesopotamia was both the breadbasket of the empire and the province most vulnerable to Roman invasion; unlike Christians, who might become a fifth column once Christianity became a tolerated religion in 313 C.E., the Jews would support the regime if they were left alone.

At the same time, the official religion of the Persian Empire, Zoroastrianism, was comfortable and even familiar to the Jews, with its theological doctrines of creation by the benevolent and omniscient Ohrmazd, the fight against evil, reward and punishment, heaven and hell, judgment, creation, the coming of three pivotal “messianic” figures, the ultimate defeat of evil, the resurrection of the dead, and the renewal of creation. This was true of its ethical system as well, with its emphasis on right thought, speech, and action, and its ritual system, with its stress on the avoidance of idolatry, its hatred of sorcery, “wasting of seed,” and contact with menstruant women and dead bodies.

Classical rabbinic literature was produced within rabbinic educational institutions, by the sages who taught and studied there, for the purpose of educating those who attended them. This much seems clear, though unfortunately, just about all specific historical details of this process are uncertain. Until recently, the consensus of scholars regarding the nature of the rabbinic schools of Late Antiquity was anachronistic. Throughout the Gaonic Period (ca. 700-1100 c.e.), rabbis studied in academies (yeshivot), which continued to be the dominant form of rabbinic organization during the Middle Ages and to the present day. The term yeshivah indeed appears in the Mishnah and subsequent rabbinic works, and a few talmudic passages portray the rabbis in establishments that look like the Gaonic academy. Scholars therefore assumed that rabbis had founded academies in very early times, certainly in the tannaitic era and even during the Second Temple Period. However, the word yeshivah simply means “sitting” or “session,” from the root y-sh-b, “to sit.” That a rabbinic source describes the rabbis meeting in a session/ sitting (yeshivah) to study Torah does not necessarily tell us anything about the forum in which they “sat.” In principle, the rabbis could have held sessions in private homes, synagogues, courts, or anywhere they happened to be. In later times, the rabbis met in an academy, and thus the term came to refer not only to the study session but to the academy in which the session was held. But in earlier times, the nature of such sessions is an open question that can be answered only after careful study of the sources and their portrayals of rabbinic meetings.

The discussion of legal issues and the creation and application of legal rulings was one of the main activities of both rabbis and Roman legal experts in Late Antiquity. In the course of this process, rabbis and jurists often dealt with similar topics, encountered similar problems, presented similar answers, and used similar literary forms to transmit their traditions to later generations. It is tempting to argue that such similarities concerning the form and/or content of their teachings point to direct influence of one set of scholars on the other. This is a temptation we should resist. Such tempting parallels need to be understood against the background of the rabbis' participation in a Late Antique cultural context dominated by Greco-Roman culture.

A comparative legal approach is interested in both similarities and differences in legal theory and practice. Similarities may point to shared social structures and moral concerns. Although rabbis and Roman jurists shared the Late Antique cultural context, their legal teachings were also based on their particular cultural heritages, the Hebrew Bible and ancient Roman legal traditions, respectively. When examining differences, legal scholars' indebtedness to these earlier bodies of material have to be taken into consideration as well.

ALL THAT WRITING – AND NO WRITERS? THE PUZZLE OF RABBINIC AUTHORSHIP

Rabbinic literature of Late Antiquity certainly had its audience. But can it be said to have had authors? From the perspective of the rabbinic tradition itself, the axiomatic answer is, of course, “no.” A half millennium of tradition, the Mishnah tells us, links the moment at which “Moses received Torah from Sinai” to the teachings of the Men of the Great Assembly who, in the shadow of Persian hegemony, “said three things: be cautious in judgment, raise up many disciples, and build a fence for the Torah”

(M. Avot 1:1). In the rabbinic view, formulations of collective rabbinic wisdom, such as those ascribed to the Men of the Great Assembly, are “said,” “received” or “heard,” and “transmitted.” But they are not “authored.” Not any more than a rhythmic refrain, stemming out of seventeenth-century West African tribal dance, that - transplanted with its enslaved bearers to the cotton fields of the American South - adopts the musical scale of Scotch-Irish reels and emerges in 1938 as a chord progression supporting this recorded confession of a Robert Johnson:

Judaism in Late Antiquity encompassed a wide variety of ritual forms and ideological expressions rooted in the diversity of particular Jewish communities. Such eclecticism characterizes even apparently unified movements such as that of the rabbinic sages. Although we tend to associate rabbinic Judaism with the scholastic emphasis on the study of Torah and the observance of halakhah, there are distinct streams of Judaism in the rabbinic milieu that concentrate on visions of and communications with God and the heavenly retinue. Judaism, like other religions of the Greco-Roman world, encompassed within it not only legal, philosophical, and ritual traditions but also esoteric tendencies in which magical and visionary practices were put to use for the needs of individuals. Among the most unusual of these are the traditions in which human beings are said to travel to heaven and gaze at the figure of God on the divine throne or encounter angels and other supernatural beings, who endow them with extraordinary wisdom and memory. Evidence for these ideas can be found within the rabbinic canon and in a corpus of texts related in complex ways to the Talmuds and midrashim. This chapter will assess the evidence for visionary and mystical phenomena in rabbinic culture with an eye to understanding them in the context of the development of rabbinic Judaism, as well as the broader Greco-Roman religious environment.

It is impossible to draw any simple causal connections between the characteristics of the various rabbinic corpora and the political environments in which they were produced. There is no way to argue convincingly, for example, that the structure (as opposed to some of the content) of the Mishnah and Tosefta reflect in some discernible way the conditions of the High Roman imperial East, or that the Bavli owes its compendious, generically composite, character to the conditions of the Sasanian west.

One reason for this is the state of our knowledge: Even in the case of the Palestinian documents, whose Roman political context is in fact quite well known (Sasanian history, by contrast, is very poorly understood), we are nearly completely ignorant of the circumstances in which the texts were produced. Rabbinic literature itself identifies the editors of some of the texts but - apart from the fact that these identifications are questionable - it reports next to nothing about the ways the editors worked (we may contrast the abundant contemporary information about the production of the Theodosian Code). In the cases of some of the midrash collections and the Bavli, even the approximate dating of redaction is highly controversial, and the datings of the other corpora are perhaps not as controversial as they should be.

There are more profound reasons for our inconclusiveness: The relation between any literary artifact and the political, cultural, and social circumstances in which it was produced can only ever be oblique and complex, in any case certainly resistant to comprehensive description. But our inability to provide a full account does not absolve us from the responsibility for attempting a partial one.

At the very conclusion of his monumental Antiquities of the Jews, the noted Jewish historian Josephus, sensing that what he had just achieved was the exception, rather than the rule, among Jewish intellectuals of his day, indulges in a measure of self-adulation. Singularly among the learned men of his day, he claims, he alone has succeeded in bridging the gulf between Greek learning, apparently a sine qua non for the historiographical achievement embodied in the Antiquities, and a curriculum that was far more revered among his Jewish compatriots: “For our people . . . give credit for wisdom to those alone who have an exact knowledge of the law and who have the capability of interpreting the holy writings.” This hierarchy of Jewish knowledge, he seems to be saying, relegated historiographical undertakings of the Hellenistic-Roman model to a somewhat neglected status, and while he does not chastise his fellow Jews for this neglect, one might conclude that those who did devote themselves to the study of the law and its interpretation felt no pangs of remorse for not embracing a pursuit of the past in the critical manner of their Greco-Roman counterparts.

Indeed, the variegated corpus of rabbinic literature did not preserve any work that might point to an effort on the part of the rabbis at producing a systematic and critical study of the past. To be sure, the biblical past was at the center of much of their deliberations, but this “past” was for them already laid out in its fullest detail, thereby providing the basis for an ongoing search of its religious significance, and hardly requiring any compilation and examination of sources in a Thucydidean-type search for “truth” and “accuracy.”

The study of the cultural constructions of gender in rabbinic literature is a relatively young field, certainly compared to other literatures. Although already in the seventies Jewish feminist critics joined their colleagues in different religious contexts to critique the encrusted patriarchal traditions of Judaism, serious analyses of the workings of gender in the literature produced by the Late Antique rabbis began only in the nineties of the past century. Influenced by Michel Foucault's work as well as academic feminist theory, scholars started to move beyond the somewhat one-dimensional analytic and critical categories of “sexism,” “misogyny,” and “patriarchy” that had inspired the earlier feminist critics. Now, Jewish “sexuality” as encoded by rabbinic texts came to have a history and cultural context (Daniel Boyarin, Michael Satlow), as did the Jewish “body,” both male and female (Boyarin, Charlotte Fonrobert). Rabbinic “work” (that is, descriptions of productive labor and laborers) became gendered (Miriam Peskowitz), as did rabbinic thinking about “space” (Cynthia Baker).

Moreover, as gender - defined here as knowledge about sexual difference - has evolved as an analytic category, rabbinic texts have come to be viewed as riddled with tensions and ruptures in gender perspectives. This lends a new dynamic quality to the rabbinic literature. No longer do these texts merely reflect the gender economy of the supposed sociohistoric reality from which they emerge, but they have come to be viewed as actively engaging the various gender possibilities in their cultural universe, favoring some, rejecting others, which however may leave traces within a text.

The great doxographer of the Sophists, Philostratus, relates the following legend about one of his heroes

Those familiar with the Babylonian Talmud will be reminded of the following anecdote:

In the last several decades, the quantity and variety of ancient Jewish literature that displays interpretive engagement with the Hebrew Bible has vastly increased, in large measure thanks to the ongoing publication of and scholarship on the Dead Sea Scrolls. While we might think of the Dead Sea Scrolls as representing the textual activity of a relatively small and short-lived sectarian community, the value of these discoveries have had much broader implications for the history of the texts of what was to become the Hebrew Bible and for their interpretation beyond the boundaries of this one community or movement and its time. The many biblical texts found among the Dead Sea Scrolls open a window onto the evolving state of scriptures in Jewish society more broadly, as does the discovery of many texts that would not find their way into the Jewish scriptural canon, yet which are not specifically “sectarian” and, therefore, can be assumed (and in some cases known) to have circulated much more broadly in Second Temple Jewish society and beyond. Thus, it is not just the quantity of texts of scriptural interpretation that has increased but the very parameters of what is understood to constitute the varieties of scriptural interpretation. Texts long known prior to the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (generally transmitted through Christian channels and often in later Christian translations) are now appreciated as early works of Jewish scriptural interpretation, whereas previously, their value was thought to lie elsewhere (as history, philosophy, eschatology, etc.). In effect, a scholarly field of study of biblical interpretation has been created where either none previously existed or it only existed in the shadows of other scholarly preoccupations.

In the rabbinic communities of Late Antiquity, the study of texts was framed as not only a process of mastering information but also an intrinsic element in the development of the disciple's character. The student was to shape desires and impulses through the guidance of teachers, and the teacher's role, in turn, was to convey, represent, and embody the models of inspiring sages from the past. The material was performed in a context of teaching and learning - spoken, heard, read, and written - where its internalization and creative appropriation could be a key element in the transformation of a student into a cultivated member of the rabbinic movement. Most all of rabbinic literature has ethical or moral dimensions, but some texts reveal a particular focus upon ideal comportment and internal states of mind and sentiment.

A prominent feature of rabbinic ethical literature is that it is not only descriptive but also prescriptive. The sources portray the workings of emotions and desires as well as the details of sagacious behavior, and they also address the reader directly and convey values. Studying the textual sources that are central to the formation of rabbinic character, then, requires us to attend closely to the genres and styles of expression in the literature. This essay will begin with an overview of key themes in rabbinic ethics, but the bulk of the discussion concerns various forms of rabbinic instruction imbedded in the literature. After summarizing features of the distinctly ethical anthologies, I will present exemplary cases illustrating a few of the many ways that ethical teaching emerges and develops through maxims, exegesis, parables, and narratives.

Oral teaching and transmission of literary compositions of various degrees of textual fluidity played a prominent role in the shaping of rabbinic culture. Throughout the period leading up to the emergence of the rabbinic movement, both scribal and oral technologies were used in complementary fashion to transmit Jewish tradition. In certain ways, the rabbis were typical of their day in their reliance on oral transmissional techniques. It is noteworthy, however, that though other Jewish groups in antiquity had developed bodies of oral tradition, only the rabbis attributed significance to the fact that they transmitted tradition orally. They alone claimed that the traditional teachings under their guardianship originated in an oral revelation, which had, ever since, been transmitted exclusively by word of mouth. The rabbis highlighted the oral aspect of their teachings by calling it “Oral Torah.” For the rabbis, then, oral instruction was not merely a technology of transmission. Through the concept of Oral Torah (and its partner concept, Written Torah), technologies of transmission took on ideological coloration. This article seeks an understanding of what was at stake for the rabbis when they highlighted the oral, as opposed to written, modes of transmission used in the conveyance of their teachings.

As the rabbis understood the matter, God's revelation to Moses at Mt. Sinai had two components. The written revelation, or Written Torah, had a fixed literary form and was handed down in the formof the twenty two books of the biblical canon. The oral revelation, or Oral Torah, was an interpretive supplement to the written scriptures.

The Babylonian Talmud (Hebr. Talmud Bavli) is without doubt the most prominent text of rabbinic Judaism's traditional literature. Indeed, the simple phrase “the Talmud says” often stands as a kind of shorthand for any teaching found anywhere in the vast rabbinic corpus surviving from Late Antiquity. Among Jews, of course, the Talmud has been revered, studied, and commented upon over and over again for more than a millennium. But preoccupation - even obsession - with the Talmud has extended at times beyond the borders of traditional rabbinic communities as well. Christian theologians and historians have on occasion viewed the Talmud, much more than the Hebrew Bible itself, as encapsulating the spiritual and intellectual core of Judaism.

This interest has not always had benign results; it has, at times, turned the Talmud into a target of polemics and even violence. Repeated burnings of the Talmud and its associated writings by Christian authorities in medieval Europe were meant to destroy the intellectual sustenance of Judaism. In modern times, the Talmud has become a target even of Jews: Many secularized Jews of the post-Enlightenment period ridiculed its “primitive” religious worldview; reformers of Judaism sought to move behind it, as it were, to restore the Bible (or certain interpretations of it) as the normative source of Jewish belief; while Zionist Jews, concerned with restoring a vital Jewish culture in the ancient Jewish homeland, belittled the “diasporic” culture of “sterile” learning embodied by the Babylonian Talmud.

Group identity is a social and cultural construct that may be defined as a group's subjective sense of itself as being different from other groups. Since ancient times, the identity of Israel has been explored and constructed in opposition to gentile, or alien, others. But the self-other dyad is by no means stable or constant. Dramatic changes in the political and cultural conditions of Jewish life in Antiquity led inevitably to revision and renegotiation of the self-other dichotomy. Moreover, the self-other dichotomy can be differently constructed by different elements within a single ethnic or religious group, leading to internal conflict over the self-definition and boundaries of that group. These tensions may contribute to the formation of distinct sects espousing different views on the group's identity and the nature of the boundaries that serve to demarcate and preserve that identity. Identity construction is thus a complex task, as a group defines itself not only in contrast to other groups (“external others”) but also in contrast to members of its group that would contest the group's identity or construct it in a different way (“internal others”).

In rabbinic literature, reference is made to non-Israelites (gentiles of various descriptions). These “external others” often appear in rabbinic literature as mirror opposites of Israelites, and so sharpen the rabbis' definition of Israel. However, insofar as this literature explores and develops a definition of the rabbi as the ideal Jew, reference is made to non-rabbinic Jews (of various descriptions). These “internal others” often appear in rabbinic literature as mirror opposites of the rabbisand so sharpen the rabbis' definition of their own class.