Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 89

The second century is thin on primary sources in Hebrew or Aramaic, and it is difficult to know what most Jews were thinking and doing in this post-war period in Judea/Palaestina. Seth Schwartz argues that the majority assimilated into an increasingly Hellenized landscape, becoming unremarkable Roman provincials who wore their Judaism lightly.⁵¹ A small group of Jews however, the earliest rabbis (rabbi = my teacher, master), was wrestling with the problem of how to understand Judaism without a temple, and how to live and thrive as Jews under foreign domination. At the turn of third century these Jewish intellectual elites emerge on the scene as the creators of an extraordinary document known as the Mishnah (ca. 200 CE). The Mishnah will become, alongside Scripture itself, the core articulation of the movement, the basis of both the Jerusalem and Babylonian Talmuds, and the deep architecture of rabbinic Judaism—what to this day is thought of as normative Judaism.⁵²

Rabbinic Judaism grew out of the sun-bleached landscape of the Roman Empire, and this imperial context was formative. Rabbinic Judaism sets Rome at the center of its own creation myth. A few rabbinic sources say that the movement was authorized by none other than Vespasian himself. According to one well-known version, while Vespasian was besieging Jerusalem during the Jewish War, one Yohanan ben Zakkai, having failed to moderate the Zealot factions controlling the city, escaped and beseeched the soon-to-be emperor to grant him and his fellows a quiet vineyard in a place called Yavneh, in which he could »teach his disciples, establish a house of prayer, and perform all the commandments.«⁵³

Rabbinic Judaism, thus, bears deep scars left by the tumultuous history that preceded it. While the story of the founding of Yavneh may not be historically accurate,⁵⁴ it tells us a great deal about how the rabbis imagine themselves. Unlike the Zealots in Jerusalem, or the more proximate Bar Kokhbah insurgents, the movement signals from the start that is not in the bloody business of rebellion. Yohanan ben Zakkai requests permission to found something akin to an academy, where obedience to Jewish law, as well as Jewish institutions, can peacefully coexist with obedience to Roman law.

This posture is reflected throughout the sources produced by the first generations of rabbis known as the tannaim.⁵⁵ Apocalyptic thought, eschatological anticipation, and messianic hopes, had proven, as we saw above, devastating for Jews. The rabbis create a vibrant thought system that rejects apocalyptic thinking, domesticates and softens messianic expectations, and grounds Jewish meaning in halakhah—the proper understanding of and conformity to God’s law.

The Mishnah and Tosefta are two major tannaitic collections of laws arranged by topic—among them agriculture, the sacred calendar and holy days, purity laws, laws concerning women and marriage, civil and criminal law, and laws concerning the Temple its tithes, and holy objects. The laws are stated and debated in detail, mostly without reference to Scripture. The tannaim also produce several line-by-line commentaries on the Torah known as midrash which include sage stories, parables, and explications of the biblical text. The final stages in the canonization process of the Hebrew Bible in its current form happens under the rabbis (cf. mYad 4.5). The early rabbis also saw to the development and increasing regularization of liturgical structures and rubrics.

The story of Yohanan ben Zakkai notwithstanding, rabbinic literature is emphatically a-historical, even counter-historical. The material goes out of its way to avoid reference to present-day events, and thus learning history from the rabbis is extremely difficult and a task that must be approached with caution. Identifiable Romans are barely mentioned; and one would be hard pressed to know the burgeoning Christian movement in Palestine was happening at all were we to rely solely on rabbinic sources. Interestingly this a-historicity is not atypical of provincial thought in the 2^nd century; rabbinic texts like those of the Greek Second Sophistic among others, »defined their place in the empire by projecting an artificial sense of isolation from others«—self-consciously creating a rhetoric of isolation meant to mask the fact of their deep embeddedness in and indebtedness to the Roman world. In this the rabbis are, in significant ways, enacting a provincial script.⁵⁶

While the rabbis maintain that they are carrying forward a tradition reaching back to Moses and Sinai,⁵⁷ there is much that is new and fascinatingly perplexing about this movement. In an age in which the main spoken Jewish languages were Aramaic and Greek, the rabbis worked in Hebrew; in a time marked by the explosion of books and writing among pagan and Christian intellectuals⁵⁸, the rabbis choose oral transmission; from a Jewish literary past that was largely devoted to extended narrative forms, they choose law and exegesis.

The rabbis indeed set law—its study, application, and embodiment—at the core of their religiosity. This too is surprising. In the late second century, Jews had no legal jurisdiction. Roman rule over Palestine was direct and Roman law normative and increasingly centralized. Jews were not forbidden from consulting local sages (including rabbis) to arbitrate civil disputes, but these decisions had no legal standing, and most Jews used Roman courts, as did provincials across the empire.⁵⁹ The following rabbinic text imagines a competition between Jewish obligations (to recite certain prayers daily) and those of the Roman law in the form of edicts posted in the town square. »[The daily prayer the Shema‘] should not be in your eyes like some antiquated edict to which no one pays any attention, but like a new edict which everyone runs to read.«⁶⁰

The ostensibly counterintuitive efflorescence of legalism in a world without empowered Jewish courts or enforcement mechanisms might be traced to a number of factors. Rabbis themselves descended intellectually from the Pharisees, a class of legal and scribal experts who were active in the Second Temple period. Some of what they set down may be old legal traditions that had been passed on orally. Rabbinic legalism was more encompassing than pharisaic legalism however, claiming expansive authority over all Jews, among them the priestly class and the temple itself (cf. m.Yoma). This represented an audacious theological innovation that allowed Jews to understand themselves in a temple- and sacrifice-free world. Substituting domestic piety, purity, Torah study, and prayer for blood sacrifice was a way to keep biblical religion (Torah) alive and relevant for 2–3rd century Jews, even while it made the rabbis themselves as the authorized brokers of Torah’s meaning.

Another factor that may have influenced the rabbinic turn to law was its centrality in Roman imperial policy and provincial culture, and the rising status of jurist interpreters.⁶¹ Another event, whose impact on rabbinic law scholars continue to debate, is the decision by Emperor Caracalla in 212 CE to extend citizenship to the entire empire (the Antonine Constitution).⁶² At issue is not only the extent to which rabbinic legalism, even in internal Jewish forms, represents a borrowing of Roman imperial vocabularies, but also the extent to which specific Roman laws find echoes in the rabbinic corpus. On the one hand citizenship would have offered a proximate model of membership that the rabbis may have imbibed and recreated in Jewish guise, but from another angle, citizenship meant Jews had much easier access to Roman legal tribunals, posing a direct challenge to rabbinic influence. Halakhah may have developed in part as a way to counter this threat.⁶³

In terms of their organization, the rabbis might be best described as members of disciple networks, not dissimilar to Greek philosophical schools. They did not have central institutions outside of local teachers and their students. Among themselves, these local schools made up loose networks of like-minded Jews. The early generations seemed to make few gestures toward the common everyday Jew; the tannaim, for example, did not to control the synagogues, or leave prose sermons. There is no evidence that they had mass followings. They breathed instead the high ether of scholastic debate. Nowhere are they recognized as leaders or judges of the Jews in Roman sources.

The early third century introduces us to a figure with close ties to the rabbinic movement: the patriarch. The patriarch was the hereditary head of the Jewish community, and while his influence varied over the era in question, Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (prince) rose to special prominence.⁶⁴ A descendent of first-century Pharisee Gamaliel the Elder, Judah was a scholar and patron of the tannaim, and seems to have been instrumental in the collocation and redaction of the Mishnah (200 CE), in which he is known simple as »Rabbi.« We know that early in the third century Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi owned estates as well as substantial wealth gained from trade. Under Judah, the house began to claim King David in its genealogy, and this sort of royal self-regard gets reflected in a range of functions that accrued to the office.⁶⁵ The sources tell us that at various times the patriarchs kept a court of advisors and delegates; filled a judicial role, including appointing judges to local tribunals; collected taxes (and gifts) locally and abroad, set the Jewish festal calendar, and had some authority over synagogues—all apparently without Roman interference. Seth Schwartz has traced the relationship forged between the patriarch and diaspora Jews who may have been seeking, in exchange for financial support, someone to represent the collective interests of diaspora Jews before Rome.⁶⁶ Despite the evidence we have in rabbinic sources and Roman legal sources, it is not at all clear if the office and family remain strong and prominent, nor even how official their role was from Roman perspective.⁶⁷

The rabbis grant the patriarchs leave to learn Greek, even as they seem to have officially discouraged Greek learning among themselves. The tombs of Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi in Beth She’arim show how he moved between worlds: the sarcophagi are decorated with a mixture of pagan and Jewish motifs, and Hebrew and Greek inscriptions, befitting a provincial grandee. Despite the great respect they accorded to Rabbi, the sages over time become increasingly critical of the patriarch’s potentially corrupting wealth, cultural assimilation, and lack of purity of mission as they saw it. The patriarch was a link between Palestinian Jews and the diaspora. For reasons not entirely clear, the office disappeared sometime in the early 5^th century CE,⁶⁸ no doubt under pressure from Christians. The last Palestinian patriarch died in 425 CE.