The Rabbis and Palmyra: A Case Study on (Mis-)Reading Rabbinics for Historical Purposes

Several rabbinic texts refer to the Syrian oasis city of Palmyra and its third-century rulers, Odenathus and Zenobia. Historians, including specialists in Jewish history, have used these texts to claim that the rabbis, unlike other Jews of the time, were hostile to Odenathus, Zenobia and the Palmyra they led. This article re-examines the texts to discover what they reflect the rabbis saying and thinking about in their own terms, and reaches a negative conclusion: Rabbinic hostility to Palmyra is not found in them. The article's point is less about the past than about the present, and the way some scholars use rabbinic sources. When historians reach erroneous conclusions and include them in otherwise salutary books or articles, they mislead their students and other readers, who then include those conclusions in their own work without replicating research they assume is reliable because it was done by qualified predecessors. Instead of revealing evidence of rabbinic hostility to Palmyra, detailed examples show that these texts reveal, among other things, rabbinic concerns such as the need to reconcile inconsistent beraitot about captive women, for which purpose the rabbis used the unusual figure of Odenathus, and the problem of would-be Jews of uncertain ancestry, in connection with which the rabbis used Palmyra as a symbol of a locale inhabited by such people.