Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100-400 CE

by Hayim Lapin

Conventionally, the history of the rabbinic movement has been told as a distinctly intra-Jewish development, a response to the gaping need left by the tragic destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. In Rabbis as Romans, Hayim Lapin reconfigures that history, drawing attention for the first time to the extent to which rabbis participated in and were the product of a Roman and late-antique political economy. Lapin discusses how rabbis as a group were relatively well off, literate Jewish men, a kind of sub-elite in most provinces of the Roman empire. That rabbis were deeply embedded in a wider Roman world is clear from their marriage choices, the rhetoric they used to describe their own group (often mirroring that used for Greek philosophical schools), their open embrace of Roman bathing habits, and their ambivalence towards theaters and public entertainments. Rabbis also form one of the most accessible and well-documented examples of a 'nativizing' traditionalist movement in a Roman province. It was a movement committed to articulating the social, ritual, and moral boundaries between an Israelite 'us' and everyone else. To attend seriously to the contradictory position of rabbis as both within and outside of a provincial cultural economy, says Lapin, is both to uncover the historical contingencies that shaped what later generations understood as simply Judaism and to reexamine in a new light the cultural work of Roman provincialization itself.

Genres: Jewish, History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2012

Reviews

[Miles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lapin reconstructs what we can of the Rabbis of the Mishna and Roman Palestine (first to fourth century CE) from external Roman historical sources and a close reading of the Mishna itself. The work is scholarly, technical, and all but demands a certain familiarity with the Mishna. Lapin's principle argument is that the Rabbis of the Mishnaic period should be understood as Roman provincials - part of the Roman orbit in an obscure Roman province. They were, likely, few in number, and deeply interwoven with the social and cultural fabric of first to fourth century Palestine. Were they a "philosophical" school? Were they arbitrators and judges of cases? What level of recognition did the Roman state accord to their legal decisions and social engagements?

For those of us who inherit or practice some form of modern "Rabbinic" Judaism, the Mishna, more than the bible or the Torah, is our Ur text - it explains and organizes why we do the things that Rabbinic Judaism does. More profoundly its enshrining of the dialectic method, recording not one answer, but disputes over fine points of law, lays the foundation for an openness to multiple truths that would ramify in Jewish intellectual tropes for centuries to follow. The Mishna is a re-foundation of Jewish existence following the existential shift wrought by the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

That is what the Mishna is now, but that is not to say that that is what the Rabbis of the Mishna are doing in the Mishna. The mysteries of the actual lived social reality that it reports, followed by the agendas of its editors, layered on top of each other, century after century, are, arguably, essential to understanding the origins of Rabbinic Judaism. Lapin walks us through the difficult task of separating the possible concerns of the actual people reported in the text from the uses and interpretations and purposes to which they were put in subsequent centuries of editing and commentary.

Much as Christianity was, among other things, an effort to organize the Jewish past (and the Jewish bible) into a new religion, and ultimately a new Roman reality, so also the Rabbis were engaged in an act of construction, in the Mishanic period and beyond. They were reorganizing what it meant to be a Jew, after the things that had defined being a Jew and Jewish nationhood, such as the Temple, were gone. They were doing it within the new social political reality created by the very empire that had destroyed the Temple - the Romans. One of the profound questions raised by Lapin's book is where to locate, if at all, that foundational context. It is probably not with the Rabbis OF the Mishna - they weren't writing the Mishna, but deciding law and participating in life. But is it with the editors and redactors of the fourth century, or perhaps in the later interpreters in the Babylonian Talmud? It is extraordinarily difficult to discern who the Rabbis of the first through fourth centuries really were and what were their concerns, as distinct from the concerns of the fifth or eighth centuries of the Common Era, but it is fun to watch a scholar, unbounded by any limits except a commitment to search for historical truth, make the effort.