Jewish Babylonia Between Persia and Roman Palestine (review)

Richard Kalmin has now given us another collection of his studies of Babylonian rabbinic culture, and while some of the themes are familiar, he also has tackled some new questions, in particular the difficult question of the Graeco-Roman influence as manifested in the Bavli (“Josephus in Sasanian Babylonia”). Several themes underlie these studies, as the author himself sets out in his preface.

Chapters 1–4 of this book support my claim in earlier research that Babylonian and Palestinian rabbis relate to nonrabbinic Jews in strikingly dissimilar ways, and that these differences are linked to the larger Persian and Roman contexts within which these rabbis flourished. . . . [The Babylonian rabbis] were internally focused, their reality to a significant extent bounded by the four walls of the study house, in contrast to Palestinian rabbis, who were more fully integrated into the mainstream of nonrabbinic life. Chapter 6 further supports this claim, by challenging the conventional portrayal of early Babylonian rabbis as important players in the late antique Jewish political realm. . . . Nonrabbinic Jews did not wait eagerly for Babylonian rabbis to express themselves on the important “foreign policy” issues of the day. . . . Rather, Babylonian rabbis delivered their pronouncements . . . in the privacy of their own study houses. . . . Chapter 7 further supports this thesis, arguing that the Babylonian Talmud’s hostility to Sadducees is motivated not by the presence of Sadducee-like groups within [their] midst, but more likely by . . . literary traditions that portrayed the Sadducees as an ancient group that espoused views that made them anathema to the rabbis.

(p. 8)

As we shall see, the studies included in this volume, as in its predecessor, The Sage in Jewish Society of Late Antiquity, are full of valuable insights, but this central contention is a non sequitur. Styles of governance vary; the fact that by all accounts George W. Bush is inwardly focused and only speaks to likeminded people does not mean that he is not president! Indeed, Kalmin’s colleague, Seth Schwartz, argues for the marginal status of the Palestinian rabbis (in his Imperialism and Jewish Society), and this despite Kalmin’s contention regarding their greater interaction with the Palestinian laity!

As earlier studies have shown, and as we might have expected, several groups competed for power and honor within the Babylonian Jewish community: those associated with the exilarch, the wealthy, whether or not they were associated with the exilarch, those of priestly descent, and presumably other groups of which we have no knowledge. Geoffrey Herman’s work suggests that none of these groups, the exilarch’s included, had much government support, which made all these claims to power tenuous. (See for now his Hebrew University dissertation, “Rashut ha-Golah bi-Tqufat ha-Talmud” [ Jerusalem, November, 2005]. I understand that it is being translated into English and will be published in the near future.)

Attempting to assess these matters while primarily examining stories depicting rabbinic interaction with non-rabbis, as Kalmin does, or from Babylonian retellings of Palestinian stories, as both he and Jeffrey L. Rubenstein (in his The Culture of the Babylonian Talmud) do, is hazardous, since the Bavli contains within itself much more data. In particular, these approaches ignore the major thrust of the Babylonian Talmud: its legal material. Local case law (uvdot), assertions of rabbinic authority through excommunication and the like, the promulgation of rabbinic decrees (shamta, nezifah, etc.), the participation of Babylonian rabbis in the intense interdenominational debates of the time, whether formal or not, as in the individual theodicies devised by R. Yosef and Rava, all bespeak a rabbinate that was engaged with the issues of its time. One may be inwardly focused and nevertheless involved. How much say the rabbis had clearly varied from time to time and from place to place, and its extent may never be clearly determined, but they were not a negligible factor.

Nevertheless, Kalmin’s work should be of particular interest to both cultural and intellectual historians, because though he was trained by a master of talmudic source-criticism, Prof...