1The volume under consideration is the first product of a now-recurring series of meetings that seek to understand the production and promulgation of Rabbinic Judaism in Late Antiquity. The essays in this collection strive to do away with any presumption of Rabbinic Judaism’s inevitable takeover of Jewish cultural life and institutions. Doing so prompts a wholesale reconsideration of late antique and early medieval Jewish and non-Jewish sources. Diversity and Rabbinization will therefore serve as a touchstone for a more extensive repositioning of late antique Judaism, a project that will call on multiple scholars with an array of textual and other skills.
2Diversity and Rabbinization is divided into four thematic sections. The first contains essays that investigate aspects of the ancient synagogue and its makeup, with particular interest in the varieties of Judaism that might be recovered therein. Lee Levine shows that the evidence from Late Antique synagogues uncovers a far wider range of religious, social, artistic, and architectural practices than earlier scholarship had allowed. Placing synagogal architecture alongside Palestinian and Babylonian rabbinic literature, Levine further challenges the idea that Christianization diminished Jewish life, identifying a vibrant Jewish community after the fourth century, not one that suffered a long period of decline. Relying on recent studies of Eastern Christian liturgical poetry, Michael Swartz reconstructs the “liturgical self” found in some of the earliest synagogue poetry (piyyut). He mines the writings of Yose ben Yose for their constructions of the author and his community, and he concludes that the authors of piyyut more generally should be understood as a professional class who, in many ways, can be taken to represent synagogal life. José Costa offers a lengthy historiographical review essay, closely analyzing English and French scholarship on the nature of nonrabbinic Judaism in late antiquity. His own proposal, that rabbinization should be characterized as a process of rabbinic integration into the institution of the synagogue, is suggestive and will hopefully be developed more fully in future analyses.
- 1 Other scholars, too, have taken up this approach; see most recently S. Gross and A. Manekin-Bamberg (...)
3In the second section, the geographic and chronological gaze moves eastward, attempting—as best as possible—to allow nonrabbinic Jews to speak in their own voice. Geoffrey Herman is on the lookout for nonrabbinic Judaism in Babylonia, a quest that earlier scholars had largely deemed futile. Herman concludes that any picture of a cohesive, rabbinic Babylonia is no longer tenable and that separate loci of cultural capital might be recaptured in the exilarchate and in the producers of magical bowls; it is the latter that, in his view, holds out the opportunity to rewrite Babylonian Jewish history most profoundly.1 Focusing primarily on the eighth and ninth centuries, Robert Brody reviews geonic literature for evidence of nonrabbinic movements. He closes this synthesis of earlier literature with a tantalizing suggestion, that Anan and (proto-)Qaraites succeeded where earlier messianic, nonrabbinic groups failed because the former produced a body of written literature instead of relying on charismatic leadership. Yoram Erder suggests that while medieval Karaites had access to ancient materials (whether they are labelled Sadduccean, Zadodike, or otherwise), they did not slavishly adopt views that they could identify with any specific earlier group. Erder proposes that Mu‘tazilite theological commitments led many Karaites to in fact reject beliefs that medieval writers associated with their alleged forerunners. Christian Julien Robin argues to reassess the Judaism associated with the kingdom of Ḥimyar, which dominated Arabia from the fourth to the sixth centuries. Robin submits that this nonrabbinic Judaism did not emphasize belief in the afterlife and may even have endorsed a post-Temple priestly ideology; his appraisal of the Jewish life in Ḥimyar is more robust than those of other scholars and it enables the author to suggest that Yemenite Judaism was not rabbinic prior to the advent of Islam.
4The third section, arguably the most innovative, shifts scholarly focus to Europe and collects evidence for the Judaisms practiced outside of the Near East in the first millennium. The essay by Capucine Nemo-Pekelman seeks to capture the career of a fifth-century Roman Jewish figure. While she admits that her reconstruction is somewhat speculative, she does point to valuable data regarding the nonrabbinic elite of Italian Jewry in this period. Also focusing on Italy, Giancarlo Lacerenza traces the changing valence of the title rabbi in Italian inscriptions. In part due to his less skeptical attitude towards this epitaph than other scholars, Lacerenza allows for a small rabbinic presence in the fourth century and—following a long silence in the epigraphical record—a rapid increase in rabbinic titles in the ninth century. It is in the gap between the sixth and ninth centuries, the author suggests, that rabbinic Judaism was imported from the East and began to flourish. Michael Toch tackles the question of rabbinization from the perspective of demography, arguing that northern European Jewry was a relatively late phenomenon. Accordingly, he proposes, communities in that locale were not subject to a process of rabbinic influence on a preexisting Jewish culture but were likely rabbinic in orientation from the outset.
5The fourth and final section turns to literary evidence, focusing mostly on rabbinic texts themselves for indications of their social setting and of their concern to propagate rabbinic ideology. Ron Naiweld argues that both Tractate Kallah and certain aspects of the Hekhalot corpus uphold rabbinic authority for an audience that needed not a little cajoling. His distinction between more “scholastic” documents and those intended for individuals outside of rabbinic circles is, in addition, potentially quite helpful. (Not that it would affect his argument, but for some reason Naiweld does not grapple with the various criticisms of David Brodsky’s earlier dating of Kallah.) Daniel Stökl Ben Ezra turns to a work not usually considered to be part of the “rabbinic” corpus: the polemical account of Christian origins known as Toledot Yeshu. He sees the earliest layers of Toledot Yeshu as having a mid-first millennium Syriac context and as expressing sympathies with Rabbinic Judaism. Consequently, he argues, the attacks on Christianizing Jews in Toledot Yeshu must come from rabbinically aligned circles concerned with Jewish adoption of Christian mores or even Christianity itself. Gavin McDowell explores the “unusual” rabbinic work Pirqe de-Rabbi Eilezer, which defends traditions of the rabbis but incorporates numerous nonrabbinic sources and may even be one of the first works to depart from the rabbinic practice of collective writing. McDowell views this composition as something of a reclamation project, one that served the interests of a rabbinic audience as it engages, attacks, and absorbs legends that originally appear in Christian, Muslim, and “Gnostic” materials. In so doing, McDowell sees Pirqe de-Rabbi Eilezer as an attempt to give a rabbinic spin on ideas from outside of this tradition. Günter Stemberger argues that Seder Eliyahu Rabbah advocates for what he calls a “minimalist Judaism,” that is, it moderates classic rabbinic emphasis on Torah study and it shows sympathy for nonelites. Stemberger also notes that the imagined audience of this text was more familiar with biblical than earlier rabbinic literature; he allows that this may indicate concern with proto-Qaraism in Seder Eliyahu Rabbah but prefers to see this work as an attempt at outreach to less educated Jews who were open to Rabbinic Judaism.
6Ra‘anan Boustan’s thoughtful closing essay provides a historiographic summary of what are still relatively new scholarly questions. Synthesizing many of the essays in Diversity and Rabbinization, Boustan stresses that even the new inquiries into how Rabbinic Judaism took hold show the process of rabbinization to have been disjointed and hardly inevitable. He uses the remainder of this essay to review the utility of various corpora in (re)writing a history of rabbinization. Suitably, the author—and the volume as a whole— underscores that a history of rabbinization remains to be written; such a history, or more correctly, histories, promise to upend much scholarship and, hopefully, recover the richness of Judaism in the first millennium.
- 2 E. Krakowski, “Maimonides’ Menstrual...”.
7Any attempt to trace the ways that Rabbinic Judaism took hold will inevitably need to grapple with multiple and sometimes competing issues. As Costa notes (85–86), the term rabbinization was once used for the ways that Rabbinic Judaism imposed its values and ideas on the past and on earlier texts (announcing, for example, that figures in Genesis were engaged in deep Torah study). More recently, the term rabbinization has come to denote the spread of rabbinic doctrines and distinctively rabbinic ideas among nonrabbinic Jews. But which ideas might be considered distinctively rabbinic? Much of what might have been practiced by Jews outside of elite rabbinic circles (e.g., the Sabbath and festivals, prohibitions on certain foods, and purification after menstruation) have a biblical basis, and identifying characteristically rabbinic practices remains challenging. For this reason, perhaps, several of the essays focus on the synagogue as a meeting point between various types of Jews. Other writers find markers of rabbinization in the veneration of rabbinic leaders. Eve Krakowski’s argument that Moses Maimonides’ reforms of post-menstrual ritual immersion in the twelfth century seek to undo not Qaraite practices but a more amorphous “common Judaism” comes to mind here.2 The imposition of rabbinic norms on the production of Torah scrolls might be another indication of growing rabbinic influence on Jewish ritual in the medieval period. Finding what Jack Tannous called the “simple believers” of late antique and medieval Judaism will be tricky business indeed—but these were the vast majority of Jews in most premodern societies and the process of rabbinization is undoubtedly one of the most significant of their history.
- 3 S. D. Goitein, Jews and Arabs..., 95.
8Ultimately, studies of rabbinization aim to track a process that, without question, developed differently in different times and places, and with respect to various aspects of Rabbinic Judaism (arguably, the process of rabbinization continued well into the modern period and, in certain ways, even to this very day). The chronological sweep of Diversity and Rabbinization, covering at minimum the last six hundred years of the first millennium, suggests that rethinking Jewish life in centuries that overlap with what Goitein branded “the most obscure in Jewish history”3 will require careful definitions and significant scholarly collaboration. The limits of the source base also mean that any conclusions will be partial and somewhat speculative. One nevertheless hopes that this volume inaugurates much in the way of fresh inquiry.
9Content aside, this volume is also noteworthy because it has been published in open-access format, allowing for free downloads of the entire volume. The electronic copy even has color photographs, an advantage over the black-and-white printed version. Whether such a model is financially sustainable remains to be seen, but the aspiration to share scholarship widely should be commended and encouraged.