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This chapter will look at three momentous centuries of Jewish life in the Roman Empire. The story of the Jews from the Herodian kings until the rise of Constantine is made up of many strands connecting several centers. It is an era that encompasses a disproportionate amount of political and social upheaval, violence, and religious evolution. Judea/Palestine with its geographical, historical, and cultural imperatives is the setting for an era marked by the rise, fall, and transformation of a series of empires: it opens with final gasps of the Ptolemaic Empire under Cleopatra VII, the messy demise of the Roman Republic, and the occasional incursions of unrealized Parthian ambition.¹ The bulk of the period maps the explosion into history of the Roman Empire. At its end, in the fourth century, Rome refigures itself, portentously for Jews, as a Christian Empire—Christianity comes into being in this period, as does what we now recognize as »normative« or rabbinic Judaism.²

Jewish national and political history is bound to the particular destiny that is geography. The territory that Jews understood to be their God-given homeland stretched from the Negev to the Golan Heights—a small but strategically vital spit of land. Bound on the west with a largely port-free Mediterranean coast and to the east by mostly impassable desert, the land of Judea³ was at once the trade bridge connecting Mesopotamia and Egypt, and a strategic buffer zone between empires. As the bottle-neck of a series of lucrative trade routes, the inhabitants of this land had always to weigh their politics against the relative strengths and motivations of much larger neighbors. Strategic alliances might catapult Jews to positions of power, autonomy, and even expansion; unwise alliances could spell devastation. Indeed, other people’s empires have been determinative for the history of Judaism since its inception; and Jewish history cannot be told apart from the history of the dominant societies within which Jews were nearly always a minority or a subject people.

Beyond economics and military pressure, a third factor having an impact upon the history of Judaism came from the »soft« power of culture. Politically dominant neighboring or colonizing powers such as Persia, Syria, Greece, and Rome, often determined the vocabularies that the conquered used to define themselves: languages, materials, conceptual paradigms, aesthetics, and more. Jews were always part of these cultures: adapting, absorbing, and rejecting pieces of them in order to build their own distinctive identity.

Even in the political cauldron of the Hellenized East, the predominant reality that Judaism had to navigate politically, and with which all forms of Judaism had in some ways to engage conceptually, was Rome. The story of the Jews from the Herods until the rise of Constantine is incomprehensible outside of the context of Rome. As was shown in the previous chapter, Romans were as instrumental to the rise and success of the Hasmoneans (both actively as allies and passively in their weakening of the Seleucid hold on the region) as they were to the collapse of that dynasty under Pompey. Roman ambitions fueled Herod’s success, and so helped bankroll his massive expansion of the Jerusalem Temple. Less than a century later, Rome would raze that same Temple to the ground and enslave thousands of Jews. The Roman Empire was the soil from which both the rabbinic and Christian movements would grow.

In this chapter we will look at the rise of Judea as a Roman client kingdom under Herod the Great and the loss of Jewish political autonomy under the procurators, culminating in two devastating wars against Rome. It will trace the various Jewish responses to the loss of the Jerusalem Temple, the priestly aristocracy, and the cult, the most enduring of which finds it voice in rabbinic Judaism. It will also look at the fate of the Jewish diaspora, parts of which fared poorly in this era. The centuries-old, wealthy, religiously vibrant, and literarily productive Jewish community of Alexandria was destroyed early in the 2nd century—along with several other thriving diaspora communities—when a wave of revolts in Jewish Mediterranean communities failed to defeat Trajan’s forces. Yet Jews continue to live and fare well in Rome, Antioch, and elsewhere. In Palestine, scholars are divided about the nature of the relationship between rabbinic Judaism and the Roman world.⁴ While clearly deeply embedded in a Roman cultural sphere, rabbinic literature signals on a range of levels a different set of strategies for relating to the imperial environment than those we find reflected in the texts emerging from Greek-speaking Jewish worlds. By the end of this era, the Jewish sect we might label the Jesus movement takes root among predominantly Greek speaking populations, and as it grows and divorces itself from »Judaism« (and vice versa), the two religions reify around a set of defining and interrelated attributes that adhere and inhere even still.