In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Manumission and Transformation in Jewish and Roman Law Natalie B. Dohrmann Introduction In Roman and rabbinic legal and literary sources from the first centuries of the Common Era, the institution of slavery exhibits a double nature. For both Jews and Romans, slavery is a dreaded state of denigrated nonpersonhood , and yet in both legal worlds, slavery can be a site of acculturation , even conversion, to the dominant status and ideals of rabbinic and Roman civilization.1 Initial research into key symbols and ideas on this topic reveal some suggestive similarities—structural and conceptual homologies between Roman and rabbinic constructions of slavery and the modes and cultural valuations of the manumission of slaves. The slave marks the outer boundary of the person and yet, at the same time, provides an exemplum that facilitates a transformation of the slave-self and an opportunity for movement from periphery to center, from thing to citizen, from Gentile to Jew. I will compare a few aspects of Roman and rabbinic legal thinking on slaves in the first centuries c.e. as a way to think more broadly about rabbinic legal/exegetical self-fashioning in the Roman Near East. In this essay I want to map the narratives of integration that are encoded in Roman and rabbinic slave law. The common features of the legal itinerary from slave to free are several. It is important to note from the beginning that the notion of slavery as paideia that leads to enfranchisement is largely a legal and cultural fiction. For most freedmen in both cultures, past slavery seems to have stigmatized them their entire lives.2 However, the fact that a part of each culture imagines that its slaves could become them provokes many questions. What does this ideal transformation tell us about the fact of Jewishness or Romanness; and, how, if at all, is the figural ‘‘enslavement’’ of the Jews under Roman power reflected in the Jewish slave laws (or more pointedly, in the rabbinic interpretation and recasting of biblical slave laws)? 52 Dohrmann The legal strain preserved in the Roman and rabbinic legal sources that presumes or supports manumission as gateway to belonging reveals surprisingly similar ideas of the person and the nature of freedom and belonging in the rabbinic/Roman legal imagination. For both legal cultures slavery effaces past history and social connections. Both the rabbinic and Roman legal material uniquely imagine slavery, after it has obliterated family and history, as a site of acculturation and conversion that has the potential to culminate in manumission into membership in the master’s own community—be it as Jew or Roman. And finally, this membership is within a legal community, in a world portrayed as an idealized nomos. My evidence in this particular essay is limited to Roman and rabbinic literary texts, namely, legal texts written in the first three centuries of the Common Era.3 The Roman legal source that presents the closest parallel to the tannaitic texts is the Institutes of Gaius (and its later recapitulation by Justinian).4 This epitome and codification of Roman law was intended to be a textbook for law students. It was the first attempt at such a systematic ordering of Roman law, and was completed during the reign of Antoninus Pius in the late second century, ca. 161 c.e.5 The Roman and tannaitic sources have a great deal in common.6 Neither the Institutes nor the rabbinic material functioned as working legal texts in court situations (at least in the forms in which we inherit them).7 Neither is comprehensive. And while it is famously difficult to extrapolate from the texts to actual legal praxis, each preserves many of the culture’s social and legal ideals, and each quickly accrues iconic status within its respective social and legal context.8 The rabbis, as is becoming increasingly evident, were a diffuse group with limited authority within Jewish society in the tannaitic era. Since their legal decrees had at best minor social impact, they were freer to inhabit a more idealized legal landscape .9 Throughout my work, I aim to set legal texts in social-historical conversation but, more immediately, to show a case in which legal (interpretation and) writing is productive rabbinic discourse that functions beyond its manifest legal content. Law codes are notoriously bad sources for descriptive social history.10 By limiting myself primarily to legal texts, I limit myself to a certain form of cultural presentation, one that organizes data structurally, systematically , and...

Share