The Commerce of the Sacred: Mediation of the Divine among Jews in the Greco-Roman World (review)

Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 383 Reviews more open to contacts with non-rabbis, both characteristics shared with Palestinian sages but not earlier Babylonian sages. His innovation in this book is his connection of this shift in behavior with similar shifts in other eastern cultures, including Christianity. Throughout, Kalmin’s analysis is nuanced and balanced. He takes into account opposing explanations of texts, explains why his are preferable and openly admits when the text does not reveal much about a given topic. He is aware that his theses often rest on sparse textual evidence. His argument that there is a significant shift in the mid-fourth century in the depiction of the learning and behavior of Babylonian sages is convincing and raises a challenge to Rubenstein who dates most shifts in rabbinic culture to the later period in which the Babylonian Talmud was redacted. His differentiation between the behavior of Babylonian and Palestinian sages, a focal point of his entire career, continues to be enlightening. How these textual analyses impact our larger understanding of Persian culture in this period remains to be more expansively argued. Joshua Kulp The Schechter Institute of Jewish Studies Jerusalem, Israel kulp@uscj.org THE COMMERCE OF THE SACRED: MEDIATION OF THE DIVINE AMONG JEWS IN THE GRECO-ROMAN WORLD. By Jack N. Lightstone. Pp. xxiii + 171. New York, N.Y.: Columbia University Press, 2006. Paper, $26.50 This book focuses upon the religious practices of Diaspora Jews in late antiquity. The author, Jack Lightstone, presents Judaism pursuant to the categories and taxonomies utilized within the discipline of history of religion . This analysis of the rituals and beliefs of Jews, outside of the orbit of rabbinic Judaism, is highly influenced by religious methodologies. The main topics addressed are: magicians and divine men; the dead and their tombs; the life of the Torah in the Diaspora; the synagogue rituals; the synagogue and the early church; Philo and philosophic mysticism. Lightstone’s book is a reprint of his first edition, which was published in the Brown Judaic Studies Series in 1984. The updated bibliography by Herbert Basser, as well as the index, renders this reprint very accessible to both the scholar and the student. One of the strengths of the book, as discussed in the foreword by Willi Braun, is a different conceptual perspective of late antique Judaism due to its utilization of the methodologies of religion. Nevertheless, this reviewer takes Hebrew Studies 48 (2007) 384 Reviews issue with Braun’s reductive characterization of Wissenschaft des Judenthums as “extra- or pseudo-historical…” in his foreword. In my opinion , Wissenschaft des Judenthums was adamantly opposed to pseudohistorical descriptions, and it had additional agendas, such as the scientific study of Judaism. It attempted to study Jewish texts and Jewish history with similar methods that were applied to the scientific study of other people’s histories and texts—thus removing them from a discourse of transmitted “religious truths.” This scientific approach to Judaism may be compared to the developments in biblical archeology that were stimulated by general archeology , consequently abandoning such chronology as the “time of Abraham” and instead dating according to the framework of general archeology. The problems and challenges of Jews living in the Diaspora in antiquity are elucidated in a creative manner in this book. The Alexandrian Jew Philo used a Greek model, including a metropolis, to describe the realm that Jews occupied outside the Land of Israel. Lightstone invokes this famous passage from Philo which identifies Jerusalem as the mother-city. From Philo’s comment, Lightstone implies that the ancient Mediterranean world was dotted with Jewish colonies. Lightstone notices the ethnic solidarity of Jews in the Diaspora and their struggle to search for places that would mediate the sacred, since they lived far from the Jerusalem Temple. In Philo’s case we may note that he undertook the pilgrimage to the sacred center of Judaism, the Jerusalem Temple. The author relies upon the methodologies of his teacher, Jacob Neusner, and Jonathan Z. Smith; thus Lightstone treats texts and archeological findings as data that may be analyzed through the taxonomies of the history of religion and additional, systematic categories, as well as systemic relationships . Based upon his analysis of...