Gendered Language and the Construction of Jewish Identity in 2 Maccabees

Abstract

Gendered Language and the Construction of Jewish Identity in 2 Maccabees Joshua Ezra Burns (bio) When thinking about Judaism and gender, it is a common misconception to assume that the interface between the two is an exclusively modern phenomenon. According to conventional wisdom, Judaism is an ancient construction steeped in the scientific and sociocultural sensibilities of people who lived long before the contemporary distinction between sex and gender came to be articulated as such. Yet as that distinction has made its way into the discipline of Jewish studies, several scholars have observed that the ancient sages who authored Judaism's Talmudic intellectual canon exhibited acute anxieties about the instability of gender binaries analogous to those detected by contemporary gender theorists in modern texts. Thus, they have proposed to look within classical Jewish texts for signs of non-binary gender identities later written out of Judaism by self-appointed regulators of rabbinic orthodoxy.1 In this paper I hope to contribute to this project with a discussion of the earliest text that identifies Jewish culture as "Judaism." This text is 2 Maccabees, a second-century BCE Jewish composition predating the Talmudic era and preserved exclusively in Christian scriptural traditions. I shall contend that the author of 2 Maccabees used gendered language in his construction of Judaism to make the point that women were just as likely as men to exemplify its values, a point lost on subsequent Jewish generations who propagated more strictly hierarchical gender regimes. Finally, I argue that it useful to understand 2 Maccabees' negotiations between Jewish and Greek culture in the work. Interrogating Jewish Identity in Antiquity Before considering how 2 Maccabees articulates its author's sense of Judaism, it will be instructive to address what it meant to be a Jew in antiquity.2 Conventional wisdom has it that it meant something not unlike what it means to be a Jew today, namely to identify in whole or in part with the multifaceted religious, ethnic, and cultural system traditionally known as Judaism.3 Yet the very premise of describing "Jews" and "Judaism" in antiquity has been challenged [End Page 107] of late, eliciting a minor scholarly imbroglio with far-reaching implications for the documentation of the Jewish past.4 That debate is a consequence of an apologetic trend in biblical scholarship that started in the mid-twentieth century. After the Holocaust, Christian theologians became sensitive to the ills of antisemitism and sought to dull the sharp rhetoric against the Jews embedded within their sacred texts. Their solution, as it were, was to change the translation of the Greek term ioudaios (plural: ioudaioi), a linguistic cognate of "Jew" utilized in the New Testament and traditionally understood to indicate the Jewish identities of Jesus' opponents. As the hostile portrait of those Jews had given Jews in general a bad reputation in Christian discourse, scholars took to rendering ioudaios no longer as "Jew," but as "Judean," an ostensibly value-neutral demonym indicating nothing more than its subject's association with the long-since-vanished territory of Judea. The Christian animosity once heaped upon the Jews was thereby redirected toward the Judeans, a people who could not possibly be offended since they no longer existed as such.5 Yet what began as a well-meaning effort to circumvent the vilification of the Jew in early Christian texts eventually went off course. In his new edition of the writings of the first-century CE Jewish chronicler Flavius Josephus, Steve Mason decided to take the premise of recasting Jews as Judeans to its logical conclusion. Following the precedent of New Testament scholarship, Mason opted to render the generations of ioudaioi documented by Josephus as Judeans, effectively erasing every last Jew from the historian's work.6 He explained his rationale in a subsequent publication addressed to his detractors,7 first noting that the Greek word ioudaios and its Latin cognate iudaeus were commonly understood in antiquity to indicate one's nationality or ethnicity. According to Mason, the reinvention of the ethnic "Judean" as a religious "Jew" was the result of an invidious Christian arrogation of the terminology in question. Early Christian writers seeking to malign the erstwhile adversaries of Jesus, Mason maintained, cast...