A History of the Jews or Judaism? On Seth Schwartz's Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E.

Abstract

A History of the Jews or Judaism?On Seth Schwartz's Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. Michael L. Satlow (bio) No account of Jewish history in antiquity, Seth Schwartz argues with verve in Imperialism and Jewish Society (Princeton, 2001), can afford to ignore the effects of the shifting types of imperial domination over the Jews. This imperial domination—whether Greek, Roman, or Christian—had a decisive impact on not only Jewish society but indeed on Judaism itself. Judaism in antiquity (and by implication its modern descendents), Schwartz argues, owes as much, or even more, to colonialist powers as it does to the tradition of the Bible. Schwartz has provided us with an excellent, rich, and highly textured account of ancient Jewish society. This book, in fact, is so crammed with insights and novel arguments that it would be disingenuous to suggest that even an extended review can do it justice. Hence, my goal here is to assess only the primary argumentative line, paying particular attention to the two themes mentioned above: (1) the changing effects of imperial domination upon the Jews throughout antiquity; and (2) the relationship between this story and that of "Judaism." Schwartz develops his thesis through a nuanced story that traces the effects of imperial domination on both the Jews (primarily of Palestine, between 200 B.C.E. and 640 C.E.) and their religion. The book is organized as three "time-lapse photographs" (p. 3), with the parts focusing respectively on the late Second Temple period (200 B.C.E.–70 C.E., with some attention to 500 B.C.E.–200 B.C.E.); from the Bar Kokhba Revolt to the Christianization of the Roman Empire (135 C.E.–350 C.E.); and under the Christian emperors (350 C.E.–640 C.E.). Each time period presents a different model of imperial domination, although, it turns out, the Jewish responses to these models remain similar. Part I argues that the Persian and then Hellenistic overlords of Palestine legally and financially backed the Temple and Torah. The nearly [End Page 151] universal Jewish response to this imperial support was the assimilation of these institutions into a unifying ideological core that Schwartz calls "Judaism." This core has an almost sloganlike simplicity: "the one God, the one Torah, and the one Temple" (p. 49). The Jerusalem Temple was the physical center of power (both symbolic and real) for the Jews of Palestine, but "it would not be an exaggeration to say that the Torah was the constitution of the Jews of Palestine" (p. 56). In Schwartz's salutary formulation, Torah is not just a scroll or the text of the Pentateuch, but has a more capacious meaning: "the 'Torah' was a series of negotiations between an authoritative but opaque text and various sets of traditional but not fully authorized practices" (p. 68, original emphasis). Schwartz uses this formulation to explore the gap between Torah as ideology and the often complex and unpredictable ideas and behaviors that Jews understood it as authorizing. Schwartz gives us a hint of what Judaism might have looked like without the imperial backing of Temple and Torah. Instead of a "complex, loosely centralized but still basically unitary Jewish society" (p. 291), Jewish society would have been fractured, and Torah (really its covenantal notions, which Schwartz seems to regard as identical to it) would at times have given way to the myth of the apocalyptic literature. The extant "apocalyptic" literature, Schwartz argues, frequently combines the two logically separate strands of covenant and myth; "the myth was a more or less fully naturalized part of the ideology of Judaism" (p. 81). Perhaps without the imperial backing of Torah there would have been no need to combine these two systems; each would have followed a different trajectory. In the wake of the two destructions, Part II argues, imperial backing gave way to a more characteristically Roman combination of legal imperialism and political laissez-faire. There was a common culture of the Greco-Roman city throughout the Roman Empire and Jews were free to participate in this culture or not, although power could only be obtained and exercised through the city...