Late Roman Palestine Research Articles

Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE. By Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar.

The idea for the Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity arose out of a conversation between its authors at the conference ‘Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine’ at the British Academy in 2008, where the need for a comprehensive and brief reference book was felt. This need was met five years later with the publication of the Handbook that is, according to its editors, ideally to be read in combination with the conference volume edited by M. Goodman and P. Alexander, and published under the conference title by Oxford University Press in 2010. The Handbook is mostly arranged as a bibliographical reference work on all the relevant modern editions, translations, commentaries, and secondary literature related to the different text corpora that are included. In addition to this arrangement, the individual sections on the various sources address questions of content, date, and language. The authors are mainly concerned with Hebrew and Aramaic works from the period given in the book title, to which they consign ‘the central place in the formation of Judaism’ (p. 1). Therefore, Greek and Latin Jewish sources from the same period have been left out, except for a Shabbat Amidah in Greek (pp. 138–9). The authors of the Handbook followed the proverb ‘brevity is the soul of wit’, which allowed them to include many texts that cannot be found in other reference works or introductions to Late Antique Jewish literature. Thus, the authors offer their intended audience of students of ancient history, theology, and of course Jewish literary and cultural history a notion of the wide range of literary and documentary evidence from Late Antiquity. The temporal classification as ‘literature of late antiquity’ from 135 to 700 ce, however, seems rather misleading for the layman. None of the texts under discussion dates back to the end of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 ce. Some of them nevertheless contain traditions from that period, and even earlier ones from the late Second Temple period. Thus, one might question the terminus a quo of 135 ce as both too early and too late. Since the work primarily aims at introducing Jewish literary works from the Eastern Mediterranean and Babylon, while excluding a detailed description of the political history of Palestine, it would have been more convenient to take the redaction of the Mishnah around 200 ce as a starting point—the earliest completed rabbinic work, whose redaction by R. Yehudah HaNasi is not disputed among scholars of Rabbinic Judaism. In addition, some of the texts such as Qohelet Rabbah and Kallah may even be post-talmudic and thus belong to the early Middle Ages. Moreover, the authors themselves justifiably raise awareness of the problems related to some of the rabbinic texts included: they are best characterized as open-ended products of school discourses that are likely to contain not only ancient traditions but also medieval accretions, due to the fact that the oldest attainable manuscripts originate in the Middle Ages (p. xi). For this reason, a more open time-frame from Antiquity to the early Middle Ages might have better matched the character of the texts, while at the same time not questioning the relevance of both the Handbook and the sources for the study of Late Antiquity.

Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar (review)

Reviewed by: Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Ra‘anan Boustan and Henry Gruber Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 ce Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012. Pp. xxv + 162. ISBN 0197265227. This accessible and well-structured handbook aims to guide the classically trained historian through the wealth of Jewish literature from Late Antiquity that scholars working primarily in Greek and Latin often overlook. The Handbook was designed to serve as a companion to the volume of state-of-the-field essays that emerged from a conference held at the British Academy in 2008 on “Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine.” The origins in the British Academy conference are still visible in its overriding emphasis on rabbinic literature. This is unfortunate because, while the book presents itself as a comprehensive guide to the full range of sources produced by and for Jews in the period from 135–700 ce, it largely neglects the abundant materials that elucidate Jewish life in Late Antiquity outside the orbit of the rabbinic movement. The Handbook is divided into three main sections: prefatory materials, a historical introduction, and eight thematically organized body chapters. The third section, which forms the book’s core, details the range of surviving Jewish literary materials from Late Antiquity and the available scholarly resources for accessing them. The book concludes with a rather sparse two-page subject index. In a foreword, the distinguished scholar of ancient Judaism, Philip Alexander, frames the book as a less specialist alternative to Gunter Stemberger’s still fundamental Introduction to the Talmud and Mishnah (Edinburgh, 1996). The prefatory section also provides a handy guide to the online collections of text-editions, manuscripts, reference works, and bibliographies currently available to scholars interested in Jewish literature from late antiquity. This section is capped by a convenient glossary of Hebrew and Aramaic technical terms that would otherwise puzzle the intended reader. The introduction lays out the historical contexts within which the major works of late antique Jewish literature were produced. This literature was composed in Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic and derives almost exclusively from Roman Palestine and Sasanian Iraq. The authors observe the curious fact that the Jewish communities of the western Mediterranean did not produce an indigenous literature—or, if they did, it was not transmitted through recognizably Jewish channels. Moreover, the rabbis, for their part, studiously avoided Greek genres and forms, such as biography or historical writing, despite the high degree of Hellenization within rabbinic circles. Thus, virtually no Jewish work in Greek, from either Palestine or the Diaspora, survives from Late [End Page 360] Antiquity. The authors speculate that this lacuna resulted from a conscious decision on the part of Jewish scholars and writers to avoid Greek language and forms precisely in the period that saw the rapprochement between Christianity and the Roman Empire—and with it the successful absorption of much of the “pagan” classical tradition within Christian literary culture. The authors treat in more cursory fashion the less well documented and still poorly understood contexts of Jewish literary production in the Sasanian Empire, perhaps missing an opportunity to capture adequately the recent and exciting advances in this wing of the field. In addition, the authors note that rabbinic literature does not survive in manuscripts from Late Antiquity but is mediated almost exclusively through the scribal activity of medieval copyists, thereby raising the specter of pervasive anachronism. But, pointing to what they view as positive inscriptional evidence for rabbinic activity and authority as well as the historically accurate use of place names in rabbinic sources, they argue that rabbinic literature does indeed date from and reflect the social and political realities of the late antique world. The authors leave open the question of whether these sources originally took a written or oral form. While brief mention is made of the distinctive formal conventions of rabbinic writings, the Handbook does not aim to provide sustained guidance regarding the interpretative challenges presented by this literature. Rather, the user must—and should...

Rabbinic texts and the history of late-Roman Palestine. Edited by Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander. (Proceedings of the British Academy, 165.) Pp. xv+419. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the British Academy), 2010. £70. 978 0 19 726474 4p; 0068 1202

Rabbinic texts and the history of late-Roman Palestine. Edited by Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander. (Proceedings of the British Academy, 165.) Pp. xv+419. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the British Academy), 2010. £70. 978 0 19 726474 4p; 0068 1202 - Volume 63 Issue 3

Rabbinic Texts and History of Late-roman Palestine (review)

Reviewed by: Rabbinic Texts and History of Late-roman Palestine Joel Gereboff Rabbinic Texts and History of Late-roman Palestine. Edited by Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander. Pp xv + 410. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Cloth. $115.00. Scholars working on the late Roman Empire of the second through the seventh centuries, especially those who focus on the Roman East and Palestine in particular, have not generally made use of the rich corpus of rabbinic writings. When they do draw on this literature, they often are not up to date with current specialized research discussing the dating, provenance, and genres of these sources. The present volume, along with an accompanying collection, Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity (135-700 C.E.): A Handbook, edited by Ben-Eliyahu, Cohn, and Millar, contains revised [End Page 450] versions of papers presented at a conference held in March 2007 at the British Academy. Collectively these papers provide rich guidance to non-specialists regarding key developments in the scholarship on rabbinic sources, their authors, and their social-cultural contexts that should result in their greater employment in studies of the late Roman Empire. The volume consists of three sections. Part 1, "The Issues," contains five essays on several basic topics. Philip Alexander offers an overview on, "Using Rabbinic Literature as a Source for the History of Late-Roman Palestine: Problems and Issues." The Roman historian, Fergus Millar discusses "The Palestinian Context of Rabbinic Judaism." The section ends with reprints of an exchange between Peter Schafer and Chaim Milikowsky from the mid 1980s on the character of rabbinic texts—whether one can speak in all cases of these "documents" as ever having achieved a fixed "edited" version or whether in many cases the texts remain fluid, largely transmitted orally, resulting in multiple recensions. The section ends with an update of the debate by Schafer and Milikowsky which explains the former's advocacy of synoptic presentations of the multiple manuscripts of a given "document" while Milikowsky continues to argue that he "sees no evidence of any significant recensional variation in any of the classic works of midrash, neither those included in the corpus of midrash halakhah nor those included in the corpus of midrash aggadah" (p. 86). The respective positions give rise to alternative views on how historians ought to use these texts. The issue of the character, formulation and redactional history of rabbinic "documents" is taken up in more detailed manner in the essays of part 2 of this volume. Current scholarship on ten different rabbinic texts or genres of texts, for example, Targum, Piyyut, forms the content of part 2. Chapters begin with brief summaries of the contents, manuscripts, dating, language, printed editions, and translations of key works that are generally seen as rabbinic, though some of these texts may come from marginal elements of the emerging rabbinic "movement." All of the chapters underscore the importance of attending to the literary nature of the documents. Most of the chapters then go on to illustrate the type of historical data one might glean from a careful use of the particular document. For example, Ronen Reichman argues briefly for the value of case stories in Tosefta for historical research. Gunter Stemberger notes the limitations of halakic midrashim for historians of the Roman Empire—these texts are largely inner focused and are best suitable for commenting on the relationships between rabbis and their special interests and views, for understanding early rabbinic approaches to Scripture and its interpretation. While they offer much less regarding "the political, economic and social history of Palestine in the tannaitic and early amoraic periods" (p. 133), some information on aspects of Roman administration [End Page 451] and daily life may be gleaned from them. Other documents covered in part 2 include the Mishnah, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the use of the Babylonian Talmud for Late-Roman Palestine, literary structures and historical reconstruction using the Amoraic Midrash, Leviticus Rabbah, Piyyutim, Targum, the Epistle of Sherira Gaon, and Hekhalot literature. Together these chapters provide non-specialists, including beginning students in rabbinic studies, with critical information on the literary character, transmissional and redactional history of these texts, and valuable insights into the types of historical information one can...

Urban (re-) organization in Late Roman Palestine and the early Rabbinic guild: The Tosefta on the city and classification of space

Over the latter half of the 2nd century and into the 3rd century, urban institutions and administration figured ever more prominently in the organization and governance of Roman Palestine. In this context, the consolidation of the earliest guild of rabbinic masters took hold, and their Mishnah and its supplement, Tosefta, were composed. When compared with correlative passages in the more utopic Mishnah, traditions in Tosefta show decidedly greater interest in the urban setting and its constituent institutions as the territory for meaningful, ordered, human activity. Tosefta superimposes over Mishnah's utopic mapping of a world centred on one city, an "ideal" Jerusalem, a complementary mapping in which meaningful human action and interaction is centred upon one's "local city." In this respect, one might characterize Tosefta as "diasporizing" Mishnah's mapping of an ideal world centred upon a single Temple-city.

Rabbinic Sources for the Study of Settlement Reality in Late Roman Palestine[1

Rabbinic Sources for the Study of Settlement Reality in Late Roman Palestine[1

Jews and Christians in Late Roman Palestine: Towards a New Chronology

It has long been assumed that Palestine experienced the same political and social disintegration in the third and fourth centuries C.E. as the Roman world in general. The growing realization, howev...