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INTRODUCTION This chapter locates the analysis of religious rivalry within a broader analytical framework. It views religious rivalry and the exclusion of the religiously other as only one dimension of inter-group relations, social formation, and self-definition within the pluri-religious and pluri-ethnic urban environment of the second- and third-century CE Levant. I begin unconventionally, by offering a full account of my conclusions at the outset . The remainder of the chapter is not, however, intended to be a probative argument for those conclusions. Rather, I present a sample of the evidence, principally from early rabbinic texts, meant to lend these propositions sufficient weight to warrant their further exploration and to suggest their utility. The chapter puts forward three main propositions, two conceptual and theoretical in nature, and one methodological: 1. By means of the analysis of several illustrative texts from third-century Galilean-rabbinic sources, the chapter propounds a particular conceptual framework. In this framework, rivalry, exclusion, and competition (which produce group cohesion and, at times, expansion) operate alongside other mechanisms in creating arenas for trans-group social co-operation , co-participation and social solidarity. In this framework, understanding religious rivalry and competition in context requires more than the identification of social spheres in which Jews, Christians, and adherents of other religions operated as rivals or practised mutual avoidance. In addition , scholars also need to attend to social spheres in which these same My Rival, My Fellow Conceptual and Methodological Prolegomena to Mapping Inter-Religious Relations in 2nd- and 3rd-Century CE Levantine Society Using the Evidence of Early Rabbinic Texts Jack N. Lightstone 5 85 05_vaage.qxd 2006/03/24 10:57 AM Page 85 actors interacted as fellow citizens. But this is already an overly simple account of the proposition. Each of these groups inhabited a highly differentiated social world of its own construction. In that construction, the other had a defined, legitimate place, not infrequently as a friendly co-inhabitant. To be sure, there is nothing startling about this proposition; it has an air of self-evidence about it. But perhaps because of that self-evidence, we have given too little attention to its implications. Acceptance of this proposition invites us to think of a religious group’s social formation and emerging identity as being worked out not only over against the other but also by means of mapping out a pattern of interaction with the neighbouring other. Such a perspective suggests that we remember that rivalry extends beyond the quest for group survival in the face of detractors among, or competition for membership from, the camp of the other. Rivalry includes (perhaps foremost) competition and rivalry among religious communities living cheek-by-jowl in the narrow physical confines of the second- and third-century Levantine urban setting, each seeking to lay their respective mappings over the same urban social landscape. This landscape they must continue to cohabit, as well as divide amongst themselves, a core issue in any minority group’s “struggle for success” (cf. Vaage, chapter 1). Moreover, as Philip Harland (chapter 2) reminds us, the social structures of the city constrained all religious communities, on the one hand, and, on the other, made both rivalry and cooperation a “natural ” consequence of city life. 2. From this last-mentioned element follows an important conceptual corollary. A religious community’s map of those social arenas in which the religiously other is a welcome co-participant will not necessarily result in a consistent fit with the neighbouring group’s equivalent map. Consequently , an important area for inter-religious debate and conflict relates precisely to the categorization of social spheres as either competitive or co-operative arenas. That is to say, religious community A may welcome members of religious community B in zone X; indeed, A may expect and demand B’s co-participation. But B’s social map may not permit access to A in what in B’s world corresponds to zone X. Much conflict between religious communities in the second- to fourth-century CE Levant derives from precisely this sort of asymmetry, and the conflicting expectations it causes. Sometimes, those expectations surface as concern within a community about the potential for its members to drift into, or to be overly influenced by, the community of the other. This would result from the other’s acceptance of members of one’s own community into social arenas, which one’s 86 PART I • RIVALRIES? 05_vaage.qxd 2006/03/24 10:57 AM Page 86...

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