Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity

Introduction: Rethinking Romanness, Provincializing Christendom

I n t r o d u c t I o n Rethinking Romanness, Provincializing Christendom Annette YoshIko reed And nAtAlIe B. dohrmAnn In memory of Alan Segal (1945–2011) and Thomas Sizgorich (1970–2011) In histories of ancient Jews and Judaism, the Roman Empire looms large. Already in 1 and 2 Maccabees, Roman power is figured as a factor in the negotiation of Ioudaismos and Hellenismos, and at least since Flavius Josephus, the writing of Jewish history in Greek presumes a Roman gaze. Since Josephus, moreover, the first Jewish revolt against Rome (66–73 ce) has been a primary pivot and problem for recounting the fate of the Jewish people under foreign rule. The revolt serves as the stormy horizon for the Judaean War and Antiquities alike—two works that represent the culmination of Hellenistic Jewish historiography but also the last known Jewish-authored historical writings until the Middle Ages. To be sure, much ancient Jewish literature effaces the specificity of Roman rule. In the apocalyptic imagination, Rome could be collapsed into Babylon; and in the midrashic imagination, Jewish life in the Roman Empire could be folded into the Deuteronomistic dichotomy of Israel and the nations. Among some rabbis, their relationship could even be reread as a rivalry between two commensurate powers, like the wrestling of Jacob and Esau.1 Nevertheless, in the Sages’ Edom—as in the Kitim of the Qumran literature and in the blurred Babylon-cum-Rome of 4 Ezra and Revelation—we glimpse hints of engagement with a distinctive imperial culture, not so neatly mapped onto biblical models or onto the historical precedents provided by Assyrian, Babylonian , Achaemenid, Ptolemaic, or Seleucidic rule.2 Furthermore, as much as a fantasy of isolation envelops the literature of Palestinian rabbis, the ideal 2 Introduction of separateness may betray something of the Romanness of its motives and settings. That Roman power is implicated in rabbinic authority, after all, is suggested in the origin myths of the rabbis themselves, wherein the establishment of Yavneh is retrospectively tied to the Roman razing of Jerusalem, as Judaism resurrected—with Roman imperial ratification—from the ashes of the Second Temple.3 The present volume attends to such paradoxes, subtleties, and ironies of empire, supplementing the scholarly discussion about conflicts or contrasts between ancient Jews and Romans, with reflections on the experiences of ancient Jews as Romans.4 Much distinguished Jews from others in the Roman Empire, and there is no dearth of sophisticated studies exploring the ramifications of such differences for Jews and Christians in the Land of Israel as well as the Diaspora.5 It remains, however, that Rome is also the functioning context of almost all early Jewish and Christian literature. Recent attention to the Sasanian Persian settings of the major exceptions to this pattern—the Babylonian Talmud and Syriac Christian literature—serves to sharpen, by comparison, our sense of the Romanness of so much of the surviving evidence for ancient Judaism and Christianity.6 Not only is Palestinian Judaism our best-attested example of a Roman provincial culture, but the situation, stance, and strategies of Palestinian rabbis share much more than is commonly noted with Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, and other local sub-elites who simultaneously subverted, absorbed, and manipulated Roman norms. The essays in this volume address such overlaps— highlighting the Romanness of rabbis and other late antique Jews living in the empire, revisiting issues of Jewish and Christian difference in triangulation with Greek prestige and Roman power, and grappling anew with the Christianization of the Roman Empire by considering the role of Jews (real and imagined) in developments traditionally studied in terms of Christians and “pagans.” It is a timely moment to try to make sense of the simultaneous Romanness and Jewishness of ancient Jews in the Roman Empire. It is also a timely moment to explore the implications of their typicality and exceptionalism for understanding the meaning and limits of Roman power, on the one hand, and the parallel paradox of persecuted and imperialized Christianity, on the other. In recent decades, subjects of empire have attracted fresh attention within the fields of Jewish Studies, Classics, and Late Antiquity, inspired in part by postcolonial theorists pressed by modern examples to retheorize agency, destabilize the idea of identity at center and periphery, and highlight the role of Introduction 3 local elites in producing the illusion of imperial stability.7 Such work reminds us that no text can be...