Augustine as Revolutionary?: Reflections on Continuity and Rupture in Jewish–Christian Relations in Paula Fredriksen's Augustine and the Jews

Thirty or forty years ago, the most divisive issue in the study of ancient Jewish society and culture was the degree to which Judaism in the Second Temple and talmudic periods (circa 450 B.C.E. to 650 C.E.) operated within the bounds of a single unified authoritative framework. Some scholars explained the conspicuous variation in Jewish belief and practice attested in the sources as relatively minor deviations from a more or less cohesive system of religious norms (as reflected perhaps in the writings of the rabbis). Others, however, viewed this diversity and even pluralism as the original and enduring condition of Jewish religious practice in antiquity, despite the strident insistence of a handful of ancient sectarians to the contrary. At this point, all but a very few have abandoned the proposition that ancient Jews functioned within or even had the notion of a "normative Judaism" governed by a systematic set of theological beliefs—though many now would also wisely refrain from speaking of multiple "Judaisms" as wholly discrete cultural or sociological systems.¹

The current generation of scholars, by contrast, is far more riven by a different, though equally perennial, historiographical conundrum, namely, the problem of historical continuity, change, and rupture. The past ten years have seen increasingly heated debates concerning the degree to which Jewish institutions, practices, and discursive categories were repeatedly and fundamentally transformed in antiquity at key moments of historical disjuncture. Can we indeed still speak usefully of Judaism as an essentially continuous, if always evolving, phenomenon? Thus, we find in recent—especially North American—scholarship the conspicuous recurrence of such terms as "beginnings," "rupture," "making," and "invention." Novel forms of Jewish identity are called—or "interpellated"—into existence. Rather than forming the fabric of a continuous religious and cultural system known as Judaism, "Jewish tradition" is unmasked as a discursive strategy, the name under which historical change masquerades.²

To take two prominent recent examples: in a series of books and articles, Daniel Boyarin has argued that the gradual consolidation of a Christian orthodox establishment and the concomitant production of the specifically Christian discourses of "orthodoxy," "heresy," and "religion" did not merely provide the background for the emergence of Judaism as formulated by the rabbis of Late Antiquity but were the prime engines in this process.³ According to Boyarin, at least from a certain analytical vantage point, we can productively say that rabbinic Judaism was "invented" by Christianity as Jewish elites, over the course of Late Antiquity, engaged with—and, ultimately, refused—the hegemonic logic of imperial, orthodox Christianity. Complementarily, though in a rather different academic idiom, Seth Schwartz has advanced the equally provocative thesis that, from the second to fourth centuries, Jewishness formed at best a "vestigial" element in the social identities of the now highly Romanized and provincialized ethnic Jews of the Mediterranean basin, but under the often heavy-handed auspices of imperial Christianity its fragments were—somewhat paradoxically—reconstituted into a new and newly robust form of communal identity.⁴ In Schwartz's analysis, the disembedding of the Jews from the increasingly Christianized Roman imperial system of the late fourth to sixth centuries was critical to the emergence of Judaism as a radically new type of religious, social, and cultural formation.

Of course, not all historians of ancient Judaism would endorse such sweeping, even extravagant narratives of social and cultural rupture.⁵ The work of Lee Levine may offer a particularly useful counterpoint, since he is himself hardly a "traditionalist."⁶ Indeed, Like Boyarin and Schwartz, not to mention Jacob Neusner and Shaye Cohen, Levine has consistently questioned the existence of a unified "normative" Judaism in antiquity as well as the centrality of rabbinic authority and power within Jewish society.⁷ Yet his work...