Jewish Childhood in the Roman World by Hagith Sivan (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jewish Childhood in the Roman World by Hagith Sivan Karen Stern Hagith Sivan. Jewish Childhood in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 443 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009420000197 Art historian Anne Higonnet declared, eighteen years ago, that childhood is among "the most recent arrival[s] in a series of demands to know."1 Since then, scholarship of ancient childhood has burgeoned, encompassing the Greek and Roman worlds,2 early Christianity, the Hebrew Bible, ancient Israel, and Mesopotamia. Yet Hagith Sivan's Jewish Childhood in the Ancient World constitutes the first and only full-length monograph to address that subject, among roughly two thousand entries in the current bibliography of ancient childhood (xi, n. 1). Sivan's intervention is therefore significant, but not only because of this fact. Indeed, her comprehensive and inventive approach to [End Page 424] Jewish childhood defies scholarly conventions and demonstrates new models for breathing life into often obscure and disparate data. Sivan begins the book with a rich preface that highlights the instabilities associated with defining childhood and the limitations inherent to evidence available for investigating ancient Jewish children. Most literary sources remain silent: Josephus, for instance, only mentions children as anonymous collectives. Rabbinic corpora of Roman Palestine and Sassanid Persia/Babylonia, by contrast, frequently consider children and childhood. But their writings exclusively reflect the perspectives of rabbinic circles, and, in turn, remain difficult to reconcile with inscriptional and archaeological evidence that documents children from Jewish communities in Palestine and elsewhere (xxi). Sivan thus indicates why, when faced with such logistical challenges, she chooses to ask different questions about the evidence and, ultimately, to examine it through the medium of creative fiction. The first section of the monograph (part I) draws primarily from rabbinic literature to theorize the Jewish child (chap. 1). Here, Sivan interrogates rabbinic texts to consider questions of gender, biology, status, impurity, and agency; she outlines the subjectivities associated with demarcating life stages of childhood (and puberty), when people rarely recorded precise dates of birth (33). Sivan then examines the trajectory of childhood (chap. 2), as presented in rabbinic sources, from before conception to "untimely" death. She begins by analyzing two Greek ketubot found in the Judean desert (from 128 and 131 CE), which demonstrate how couples' obligations to yet-unborn children began with their marriage contracts. Likewise, legal obligations between spouses, rather than expectations of love or affection, bound mothers (or appointed surrogates) to breastfeed their children (M. Ketubot 5:5; Y. Ketubot 5:6) and fathers to support them financially. Sivan's assessment of the daily lives of rabbinic children encompasses textual prescriptions for activities during Sabbaths, feasting, and fast days, attire, schooling, and professional training. Subsequent chapters develop earlier discussions by emphasizing the extent to which the rearing of sons and daughters was differentiated. In "Bringing Up Boys" (chap. 3), Sivan considers life stages of sons, from circumcision through Torah study, which, by "severing sons from the maternal womb," ultimately prepared boys to become full-fledged members of rabbinic society (112). Girls did not share such prospects and, as such, their routines looked quite different: they performed domestic chores (including care for younger siblings), learned to maintain their purity, and generated supplementary income for their parents' households (cf. M. Ketubot 4:4; chap. 4). Parents, furthermore, could initiate processes of girls' betrothals at the moment of their births. But Sivan also considers additional categories of children, whom the rabbis viewed as "other" or "in between," because they confounded bifurcated paradigms of childrearing (chap. 5). These included children labeled as mamzer, androginos, and tumtum, whose dubious parentage, distinct physical appearance, genital formation, or mental and/or physical capacity challenged frameworks of childrearing, agency, marriageability, and social inclusion. [End Page 425] The second section of the book (part II) primarily considers information about Jewish children from inscriptions and archaeologically attested synagogues. This includes wall paintings and floor mosaics, which, to Sivan, served as "visual reworking[s]" and reinforcements of stories children had learned from the Bible (211). After evaluating inscriptions from synagogues sequentially built in Stobi, Sivan initiates more protracted analyses of the Dura-Europos synagogue from Syria. She argues that the western wall from the famous painted...