Читать книгу Judaism I - Группа авторов - Страница 90

Jewish history under pagan Rome represents perhaps the most radically transformative period in the history of the faith. In this era, Judaism shifted from a temple-based nation ruled by client kings and priests to a religion grounded in a sacred text, beginning to reorganize itself around a lay leadership in the form of the nascent rabbinic movement. The second century forces Jews to confront the stakes of apocalyptic thought, to experience sovereignty and its loss, to determine how to navigate a world over which they had little control. Though not widely influential in their own age, the tannaim sketched the blueprint with which Judaism rebuilt itself in the aftermath of a string of devastating defeats at the hands of Rome. But Rome’s impact on Judaism stretched far beyond military might—and Roman concepts of law, power, political influence, architecture, and much more, left a deep impact on Judaism, then as now.⁶⁹ A century after the Antonine Constitution grants citizenship to Jews, a more momentous imperial change rocks their world: the early fourth-century conversion of Emperor Constantine to Christianity.