A Matter of Time: Writing Jewish Memory into Roman History

Abstract

The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds preserve fascinating stories about the origins of Roman festivals, through which they attempt to connect Roman history with Jewish history. This paper offers contextual readings of these narratives (Y. Avodah Zarah 1:2 [39c] and B. Avodah Zarah 8b) in light of Greek and Roman texts, epigraphical material, and numismatics, and places these rabbinic narratives within broader debates about cultural memory, Jewish historiography, calendars, and time. In one story, the idolatrous sins committed by a series of Israelite kings are blamed for the geological, mythical, and historical origins of the city of Rome, and a series of Roman imperial motifs and figures (the Tiber River, Remus and Romulus, Numa) are inverted. In another, the Romans are said to draw on the power of the Torah in order to defeat their Greek rivals. The rabbinic stories of Roman festivals and their Jewish origins can be understood as examples of what James C. Scott has called “a hidden transcript”—texts that bring to light an alternative perspective, that of the rabbis, within a Roman imperial context that they often interpreted as hostile or threatening.