Imperialism and Jewish Society by Schwartz Seth;

Author:Schwartz, Seth;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2013-12-10T16:00:00+00:00

FIVE

THE RABBIS AND URBAN CULTURE

WE HAVE ALREADY SEEN that the rabbis shared a territory with Greco-Roman urbanity.1 They, too, were concentrated and exercised what influence they had, primarily in the “Jewish” cities of Palestine and the larger villages of Lower Galilee, and secondarily in proximate cities like Joppa, Caesarea Maritima, Akko-Ptolemais, Tyre, Sidon, Beth-Shean-Scythopolis, Bostra, and Naveh, in Batanaea. They were scarcely to be found at all in unurbanized and relatively unhellenized Upper Galilee and Golan, at least in the second, third, and early fourth centuries.2 The rabbis, whose conviction that they constituted the true leadership of the Jewish people made them not sectarian but expansionist, probably gravitated to cities because there they had access to networks of trade, money, communications, patronage, and political power.

But Greco-Roman urban culture and its rural offshoots, permeated as it was with pagan religiosity, constituted a serious problem for the rabbis. This point requires special emphasis because so much of the best scholarship in the years since the publication of Saul Lieberman’s Greek in Jewish Palestine has argued for the normalcy of the rabbis in the context of the high imperial East.3 What this scholarship has demonstrated is that the rabbis were influenced by their environment. How, indeed, could they not have been? And why should they have refrained from imitating attractive or effective features of philosophical or rhetorical schools, for example? And why should we marvel if individual rabbis—the most famous, perhaps the only available, example is R. Abbahu of Caesarea—were relatively well integrated in some respects into the life of their cities, given that the integrative pressures exerted on them, as would-be elites, were fairly strong?

But the rabbis were emphatically not normal elites or subelites of the eastern part of the Roman Empire. All the efforts of scholars over the last 150 years to detect significant similarities in social role and status between rabbis and sophists, philosophers, iurisprudentes, or other easily recognizable high imperial types have only highlighted the fact that the rabbis were not sophists, philosophers, or iurisprudentes. One reason these parallels (and one could easily think of others that have never been suggested: certain types of pagan priests and Roman senators, for example) have not proved convincing is that the rabbis combined elements of all of these functions in a way that no one else in the Greco-Roman world did, except, mutatis mutandis, Christian bishops. This, in turn, is because the rabbis were unique in deriving their selfunderstanding from the Torah, which in their view was the repository of everything worthwhile. Although in reality their wisdom may sometimes have had a Stoic or Cynical tinge, their legislation may have owed something to Roman civil law, and their miracles (or miracle stories) resembled those performed by (or told about) such figures as Apollonius of Tyana, as far as the rabbis themselves were concerned, the source of all wisdom, law, and numinosity was the Torah alone. In this way they closely resembled their predecessors in the Second Temple period and rabbinic colleagues in

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