Name Calling: Thinking about (the Study of) Judaism in Late Antiquity

In this special issue of JQR we have made the review essay the primary medium for reflecting on a field in transition—the study of late antique Jews and Judaism. By pairing major scholars with major works (produced by other major scholars), we hope to step back and catch a glimpse of a dynamic moment—one full of shifting and shared problems and innovations—in the unfolding of this rich arena of scholarship. What we wanted to avoid was the standard single-book review, hoping instead to use books as provocations to broader inquiry. The result is a densely interconnected set of essays.

Jewish Late Antiquity is a notoriously difficult period to see clearly; not only is the evidence sparse and idiosyncratic but the stakes are high and our lenses are perennially clouded. After all, the first centuries of the Common Era are the cradle of both Christianity and classical Judaism. The significance of this era is of intense and decidedly proprietary interest to many contemporary scribes no less than it was to ancient polemicists and practitioners. The methodological and confessional biases that inform the history of this period are, if not different in kind, then perhaps distinguished in degree from those that inflect all historical endeavors. The dangers posed, while hardly new to the field, are nonetheless persistent: we still need to sort out the very language and terms with which we do our work.

It is less a time of refinement in the fields than of dramatic reconfiguration. The comfortable categories that have been used to talk about Judaism in the high and late Roman empire are being undermined. Several paradigms have shifted in this past decade or so—from ideas of rabbinic normativity and authority, to basic notions of periodicity. The conceptual landscape has altered to such a degree that nearly all the evidence can or should be revisited and reimagined. We are in a moment strikingly light on received wisdom. One vital aspect of this (re)appraisal has been the need to remember constantly that names create conceptual contexts— labels inescapably analogize, prioritize, and situate evidence. Descriptors that were once deemed simple and transparent have been outed as loaded concepts with histories, earning them scare quotes and necessary reevaluation: "religion," "Judaism," "Christianity," "orthodoxy," "ethnicity," "race," "nationalism" (as in Martha Himmlefarb's review of David Goodblatt and Shaye J. D. Cohen), even "Romanitas." The vocabulary that describes ancient evidence will to a certain extent determine the company it keeps. The ease with which Judaism and Christianity can be talked about as sister or rival religions, for example, becomes complicated if we deny that Judaism is a religion at all. In other words, what can be compared and how is also under scrutiny. In fact, we might say that attention to the (generative and obfuscatory) language, labels, and analogies used to comprehend late antique Judaism is a major thread connecting the various pieces assembled in this special issue.

As Megan Hale Williams says:

From Ignatius of Antioch and the rabbis of the Mishnah, to Origen and the Jews of third-century Caesarea, to Jerome and the redactors of the Yerushalmi, . . . Jews and Christians occupied quite different positions in society, and thought in terms of different categories. These must neither be carelessly assimilated to one another, nor forced to fit into artificial typologies, however elegant.

Shorn of the old terminological (and accompanying conceptual) strictures, the evidence of late antique Judaism is set free, and we have the exciting, if daunting, opportunity to examine evidence anew—to question the analogical, comparative, and metaphorical logic that has (tacitly or explicitly) provided the generative syntax of so much that we know—or think we know.

To wit, "religion" as a category used for historical and phenomenological analysis comes under examination, as can be seen in both Daniel Boyarin's and Megan Hale Williams's pieces. Is there such a thing, they ponder, and if so, when, and for whom? Boyarin dismantles the usefulness of the label "Jewish Christianity," a term that depends...