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

3. Law and Imperial Idioms: Rabbinic Legalism in a Roman World

c h A p t e r 3 Law and Imperial Idioms: Rabbinic Legalism in a Roman World nAtAlIe B. dohrmAnn The words of the shemaʿ should not be in your eyes like some antiquated edict to which no one pays any attention but like a new edict that everyone runs to read. —SifreDeut §33 The centrality of the law to antique and rabbinic Judaism is a commonplace so pervasive as to seem hardly worth mentioning. Many scholars presume that the halakhic edifice of rabbinic literature grows in some measure from the seeds of Second Temple legal precedent—and in substantial content areas, we know this to be true. Others emphasize rabbinic legal innovation.1 But what do we mean when we speak of Jewish law? Does this mean some set or sets of laws? The specific practices of a given community or the collected practices of several? Biblical law? Hermeneutics? Composition? The function of this chapter is to interrogate the category of law in a particular historical landscape; but in so doing, I want to shift the frame from practice and halakhic detail to one of religious discourse. Why do the rabbis think, and speak, a legal argot? The dominance of halakhah in rabbinic literature and culture has prompted the question: Was halakhah always the central category through which Jewish religious expression was mediated, and, if not, when and how did halakhah become the dominant genre and language of Judaism? This essay will argue that only under the rabbis does legal discourse come to dominate their Jewish 64 Chapter 3 discourse and that rabbinic legalism is not an inevitable evolution. I will suggest—somewhat counterintuitively—that rabbinic literature represents a break from Jewish precedent precisely in its legality and that this in turn may tell us something about Romanization. The rabbis emerged on the historical scene in the centuries following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by the Romans in the first century ce. My interest is in the massive literary output of the rabbis generated in the third and early fourth centuries in Palestine. The rabbinic Jewish elites were Roman subjects, and many were citizens. Even though the rabbis had no official jurisdiction under Rome in the third and fourth centuries,2 the extant tannaitic corpus is overwhelmingly legal: it is composed by legal experts and celebrates legal expertise. Beyond obedience, the study and mastery of law were, for the rabbis, the modes of knowledge and worship most highly valued not only among their colleagues but, from their perspective, by God. But since rabbinic law lacks the authority to coerce, it is difficult to read its predominance. First, I would like to denaturalize halakhah as an indigenous language of Jewish religiosity. To do this, it is vital to note that the particular legalism we tend to ascribe to Judaism as a whole actually emerges somewhat late, and in marked contrast to an earlier cultural context that did not privilege legal expression. (I want to be clear to distinguish law as a set of practices from my focus, which is the specific legalism of rabbinic discourse.) Second, I will suggest a range of approaches as to why rabbinic legality emerges when it does (that is, in major works dating from the third century),3 with the aim of collating aspects of this era that may have provided the fertile context for this evolution in Jewish thought and expression. Methodologically, I hope to have found a way to compare rabbinic and Roman law as broad cultural systems while sidestepping the often frustratingly complex genealogies of legal specifics.4 Additionally, my approach temporarily brackets questions of the law’s political and polemical content; whether the rabbis and their laws are pro- or anti-Roman is not my main concern. However , that the rabbis have chosen to make central a mode of self-presentation that is also that of the dominant power, while perhaps entirely expected, is strikingly revealing. Imperial Idioms 65 Rabbis and Their Precursors The question of the origins of rabbinic legalism qua legalism has hardly been broached in the scholarship on Jewish law except in pejorative or polemical contexts, mostly because Judaism has long been presumed to be always already legalistic.5 This presumption grows in part from a long history of Christian attempts to reduce Judaism to mere legalism, in contrast with Christian “spirit.”6 The presumption of a certain innate Jewish legalism emerges as well...