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

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 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...