Jewish Identity in the Greco-Roman Diaspora

Like other ancient religions and cultures, the study of Græco-Roman Judaism is wrapped up in a negotiation of presupposition and evidence. The textual and archaeological evidence from the ancient world that tells us about Judaism needs interpretation in order to be understood. However, this is no simple task. What I would like to bring up in this paper is the problematic nature of our evidence for the Judaisms of the ancient Græco-Roman world. While presupposition is important for coming up with a research question, in the study of Græco-Roman Judaism, presupposition has too often been used to shape the answer as well. I hope to break open some common assumptions in order to make space for a more careful understanding of what it meant to be Jewish in the city of Rome, in particular, but also in the other parts of the diaspora, where I hope this mind-frame can serve as a model with which to examine what little evidence we have of this extremely interesting social and religious minority group.

The Judaism of the diaspora has most often been studied as a “deviation” from the “pure” form of Palestinian Judaism. Further, it has usually been assumed that the Judaisms of this time were in fact one unified form of proto-Rabbinic Judaism; the form and beliefs of a later manifestation of the religion were read back into the older, less uniform traditions of the Græco-Roman period. Much of the information we have on early Judaism is in the form of much later rabbinic tractates that claim to report on the sayings and actions of earlier rabbis, but which were written, of course, many centuries after the fact. On the other side of this problem is the idea that Judaism is somehow incomparable to its fellow Græco-Roman religions; the move towards seeing Judaism and indigenous Greco-Roman religions of the Mediterranean as belonging to the same category has been slow in coming. The idea that Judaism is somehow isolationist in its community relations is anachronistic, and displays a bias towards the sources of late antiquity while not taking into account earlier evidence from the centuries both before and after the turn of the common era. [1] Martin Hengel’s Judaism and Hellenism made great movements in this direction, breaking down the artificial barriers between those two categories, but as usual, much work remains to be done; Judaism and Christianity have only very recently begun to be included in the category “Græco-Roman religions.”

As such, it is the purpose of this paper to do three things: first, to promote the idea that there were multiple, coexisting manifestations of Judaism both in Palestine and the diaspora; second, to suggest that these “deviant” Judaisms deserve equal study when examining Græco-Roman religions; and third, that Judaism itself should be considered a religion of the Mediterranean alongside indigenous religions of this area. Because the exploration of this topic could easily carry on for years and even decades I have limited myself to the community of Jewish Romans in that most important city, Rome.

An Introduction to the Problems of Early Judaism

To highlight some of the problematic assumptions that often underlie common approaches to Græco-Roman Judaism I will briefly draw attention to, by way of introduction, the text of Second Maccabees. This is a fascinating piece – one that I think it is a particularly good example of the sort of thinking going on in various Jewish communities during this time because of its contradictions. This is a Jewish text recounting the successful rebellion of the Maccabees against the Seleucids and the institution of an independent Jewish state for the first time in four hundred years. The tone of this text is decidedly anti-Hellenistic, and is frequently cited as evidence for the rejection of Hellenism by “all Jews.” The text is explicit in its condemnation of Hellenistic institutions such as the gymnasium. I would specifically point out 4:7-20 here, and especially verses 13-15: “Godless wretch that he was and no true high priest, Jason set no bounds on his impiety; indeed, the hellenising process reached such a pitch that the priests ceased to show any interest in serving the altar; but scorning the Temple and neglecting the sacrifices, they would hurry, on the stroke of the gong, to take part in the distribution, forbidden by the Law, of the oil on the exercise ground; setting no store by the honours of their fatherland, they esteemed Hellenic glories best of all.” Nevertheless, and in translation of course this is easy to miss, the text itself is written in Greek. This in itself indicates that the anti-hellenistic bias the text so proudly wears on its sleeve is not so intense as to warrant the composition of a Hebrew or Aramaic history of the events! The situation in the Hellenistic world and the interactions it allowed are therefore more complicated that we might expect – 2 Maccabees is a good example to keep in the back of our minds throughout this paper.

• [1] Leonard Victor Rutgers, “Archaeological Evidence for the Interaction of Jews and Non-Jews in Late Antiquity” American Journal of Archaeology 96.1 (1992): 102.