The Matrix of Ancient Judaism

Seth Schwartz's Imperialism and Jewish Society offers a fresh look at the various factors—political, social, and religious—that shaped Judaism in the Greco-Roman and subsequent early Byzantine worlds. Although the book centers on history rather than literature, it holds far-reaching implications for any study of ancient Jewish texts (and art). Literary production does not operate in a vacuum: the historical context in which ancient authors created their texts is critical for the modern scholar's understanding of these writings. A story exhibiting the Rabbis as community leaders, for example, the likes of which are found throughout talmudic and midrashic literature, would be read differently if one believes that the protagonists in fact held such roles or if they were struggling with only limited success to achieve leadership. Schwartz's book, therefore, is essential for modern readers of ancient Jewish literature. As Frank Kermode has taught, the interaction between literature and its historical contexts is a subject calling for subtlety and caution.¹ Indeed, much of Schwartz's discussion deals with what can and cannot be extracted from literary sources about how ancient people lived, organized their societies, and shaped their religious and cultural landscapes. In doing so, he himself becomes a particular reader of texts, utilizing tools from the literary disciplines in his historical analysis of the sources. Among its many assets, Schwartz's book is important both for its claims regarding the historical context of Second Temple and late antique Jewish literature and for the methodologies and strategies that inform his own reading.

In the twentieth century, historians of the ancient world operated on two tracks: one, fastidious in its attention to detail and restricted in its focus (its critics rate it as anywhere from deathly dull to entirely expendable); and the other, general and widely embracing the full historical spectrum. Advocates of the first believe that the whole contains only what its constituent elements impart to it. Historians writing in this mode fasten their attention to sources and submerge themselves in minute details—deciphering them, teasing out information, cross-checking them, identifying and resolving contradictions. Only then do they attempt to integrate these details into a broader picture. Menachem Stern's Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism represents a classic product of this school.² The second approach seeks to illuminate a more expansive and complete picture of the past, in which the whole imbues the details with significance. The ultimate objective of these works lies not in a particular source or subject, but rather in a comprehensive reconstruction of the past, drawing on many sources. Schwartz's book fits solidly into this latter model, as he himself states: "[H]ypotheses about the society that produced the artifacts must necessarily accompany the interpretation, and the evidence as a whole must be used to construct these hypotheses. Thus it seems worthwhile to get a sense of the entire system before, or while, examining its parts" (1; emphasis added).³

The mast around which Schwartz has rigged his sails, if for the most part loosely, is the relation between imperial power—Persian, Greek-Hellenistic, Roman, and finally Byzantine—and Jewish society. He is particularly interested in the influence that imperial recognition of the Jews had on the crystallization of Jewish society, its character, and its identity. He fills his sails with a good measure of claims and diagnoses about Jewish experience in the ancient world, the forces that acted within that civilization, and the trends that set its direction. From these, he produces a new story of the Jewish people's history in the thousand years between the Hellenistic conquest and the rise of Islam.

The story that Schwartz tells in Imperialism and Jewish Society is one of collapse and revival. In a sense, Schwartz operates within the traditional historiographic model that portrays the first century C.E. and the beginning of the second century C.E. as a great divide in Jewish history: the failure of...