Afterword: Rabbinization and the Persistence of Diversity in Jewish Culture in Late Antiquity

Ra‘anan Boustan (Princeton University)

1.0. Introduction

The term ‘rabbinization’—much like its sister-concepts Hellenization, Romanization, Christianization, and, for that matter, Minoanization—raises as many problems as it solves. It runs the risk of saddling research into the complex social and cultural processes that shaped Judaism in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages with the unpardonable sins of diffusionism, homogenization, and teleology. The historical transformations that the term is intended to denote might be thought: 1) to emanate top down from a centralized source of power, authority, or prestige; 2) to produce a high degree of cultural uniformity; and 3) to carry an air of self-evident inevitability.¹

At the same time, these sorts of terms signify interrelated clusters of phenomena that are so extensive and pervasive that they demand some sort of organizing rubric. Happily, scholars of ancient and medieval Judaism can benefit from several decades of historiographic refinement during which such concepts have been forged into more manageable tools of historical description and explanation.² These methodological advances—in conjunction with a century-long broadening of the evidentiary basis for the study of Judaism in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages—have, I think, put us in a better position to capture the dialectical, variegated, and contingent process of rabbinization.

In this Afterword, I would like to accomplish two primary goals. First, I offer a brief survey of the different—and often divergent—uses to which recent scholarship has put the notion of ‘rabbinization’. Second, I present a concise catalog of many, though not all, of the sources at our disposal for studying the various facets of this process. In doing so, I draw heavily on the studies included in this volume. The fact that the sources for the study of rabbinization are as varied as they are fragmentary should not, in my view, be treated as a source of frustration, but rather as an opportunity for scholars to give due weight to the geographic, sociological, and institutional differences that conditioned the pace, extent, and nature of this process. Moreover, these sources attest the diversity of cultural and religious expression that continued to characterize Jewish life in the Mediterranean world during Late Antiquity and into the Early Middle Ages. I, therefore, conclude with some provisional reflections concerning the relationship between this persistent diversity and the growth of rabbinic hegemony in this period.

2.0. Rabbinization: A Brief History of the Concept

The term ‘rabbinization’ has only recently become a recognizable fixture of historical research on Late Antique and Early Medieval Judaism. Despite this short history, the term has undergone a major shift in its primary scholarly usage, which corresponds to developments in historiographic concerns.

From a search in Google Books Ngram Viewer, the term—at least in its English-language variant—does not appear until 1907.³ From 1907 to 1963, the term appears in merely four books contained in the database. Published in 1907, David Philipson’s The Reform Movement in Judaism uses the term to describe the modern process of secularization in nineteenth-century Germany, asserting that “with the de-Orientalization and de-rabbinization has gone hand in hand a de-Judaization.”⁴ One of the books from this period is a study of Karaites in Byzantium, which refers very broadly to the “ever more engulfing ‘Rabbinization’ of Jewish life.”⁵ The last two books are studies of early Christianity, focusing on the Synoptic Gospels and the history of the sacraments, and use the concept in rather problematic theological terms.⁶ It would seem that, before the 1960s, no book in English employed the term to describe or analyse the formation of rabbinic hegemony.

From the 1960s until the final years of the twentieth century, scholars began to deploy the concept of ‘rabbinization’ more readily. Ron Naiweld shows in his contribution to this volume that during this period the term was especially characteristic of the writings of Jacob Neusner, where it generally refers to the ideological aims and rhetorical strategies that the rabbis of Late Antiquity used to project their own institutions, practices, and norms backwards in time.⁷ This tradition of scholarship concerning the ‘rabbinization of history’ highlights how frequently rabbinic literature validated its own innovations by transposing scholastic institutions that had only recently developed back to the time of the biblical patriarchs and matriarchs. The rabbis also applied their penchant for creative anachronism to the more recent Jewish past, casting their rabbinic forebears as the most important arbiters of proper ritual protocol in the Jerusalem Temple prior to its destruction. They also sought to neutralize alternative sources of power and authority by, for example, domesticating charismatic figures like Honi the Circle Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa.⁸

From my survey, it would appear that Seth Schwartz’s 2002 essay ‘Rabbinization in the Sixth Century’⁹ (prefigured by a few lapidary observations the previous year in his Imperialism and Jewish Society¹⁰) inaugurated a new era in the study of ‘rabbinization’. The vast majority of the publications since 2005 that employ the term use it to consider the institutionalization and extension of rabbinic norms and forms beyond the limited circles of the rabbis and their retainers.¹¹ It is noteworthy that the cluster of treatments of ‘rabbinization’ that have appeared over the last decade and a half have largely depended on the close reading of an eclectic range of sources drawn primarily from outside the rabbinic corpus, narrowly conceived. Certainly, rabbinic literature does provide evidence, albeit often indirect, regarding the increasing institutionalization of rabbinic academic practices as well as the posture that rabbis assumed vis-à-vis Jews outside of the rabbinic movement.¹² As a partisan literature that, since its beginnings, sought to invest the rabbis, both individually and collectively, with an aura of authority, rabbinic texts have yielded limited insight into the process of rabbinization. The academic study of rabbinization has largely moved away from grappling with the grandiose claims of classical rabbinic literature to consider a far more heterogeneous assortment of sources that might illuminate the gradual and always partial achievement of rabbinic hegemony.

3.0. The Evidence for the Study of Rabbinization

Having attempted to clarify how the ‘rabbinization’ of Jewish society and culture has emerged as such a pressing historiographic problem, I now turn to the sources that can best illuminate the various facets of this process. My treatment of the various types of evidence at our disposal will be both selective and concise.

First, rabbinic literature itself, when read with due caution, can be used to track the process of rabbinization. Thus, for example, scholars have suggested that homiletical Midrashim from the fifth and sixth centuries (e.g., Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana and Leviticus Rabbah) reflect the activities of rabbinically-oriented preachers who sought to convey rabbinic exegetical traditions and religious norms to synagogue communities in Late Antique Palestine.¹³ It has likewise been argued that some rabbinic tractates from a somewhat later period, such as Seder Eliyahu Rabbah and Zuta, offered their audiences a “minimal Judaism” that sought to popularize rabbinic piety and ethics.¹⁴ Similarly, unconventional midrashic works like Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer incorporated a host of originally non-rabbinic motifs and traditions within the novel form of extended exegetical narration.¹⁵ Taken together, these formal and rhetorical developments within the corpus of midrashic works produced from the fifth to tenth centuries may attest the ever-widening impact of rabbinic teachings and styles of learning, while also demonstrating the increasing malleability of rabbinic literary culture.

This picture may be augmented by the small corpus of rabbinic responsa and other halakhic writings that can be located with some degree of certainty in Palestine in the sixth to eighth centuries. Most notable is the Sefer ha-Maʿasim, which, according to Hillel Newman, indicates the existence of rabbinic courts of some kind prior to the Muslim conquests.¹⁶ Such sources suggest that institutionalized mechanisms were already in place in this transitional period for the dissemination of rabbinic law and custom to other sectors of Jewish society in Palestine, although the exact scope of their reach is difficult to determine.¹⁷

The remains of monumental synagogues from Late Antique Palestine represent a second body of materials that may help the historian assess the degree, pace, and timing of rabbinization. Lee Levine has argued that these archaeological discoveries attest the limits of rabbinic power as well as the ongoing diversity of Jewish communal life well into the Early Medieval period.¹⁸ Others have been more eager to discover in the synagogue mosaics, especially those depicting scenes from the Hebrew Bible, the active influence of the rabbis on the culture of the synagogue.¹⁹ Still others have seen in the growing discomfort with images, evidenced in the purely inscriptional mosaic from the Jericho synagogue and perhaps in the highly controlled iconoclasm inflicted at nearby Naʿaran, and especially in the rabbinic inscription at Rehov, the growing influence of the rabbis.²⁰ These are live questions. The recent mosaic discoveries at Wadi Hamam, Horvat Kur, and Huqoq make clear how far we are from a scholarly consensus on this topic. To take but one example: the panel depicting the story of Jonah that was unearthed at Huqoq during the 2017 excavation season, in which the prophet is being swallowed by a succession of three fish, has as its closest parallels—in either image or text—a cluster of early medieval Jewish and Islamic traditions.²¹ Should the mosaic be viewed as a reflex of an old midrashic motif that is preserved only in relatively late texts like the Midrash of the Repentance of Jonah the Prophet?²² Or, as I think more likely, perhaps these medieval sources absorbed an exegetical tradition that was in general circulation in Late Antique Palestine and that did not per se originate within the confines of rabbinic Midrash. The complex dynamics of cultural interaction and transmission behind these tantalizing parallels should caution against simplistic readings of rabbinic tradition into the archaeological data.

More promising perhaps is the evidence of the vast, if only fragmentarily preserved, corpus of piyyut from Late Antiquity. Piyyut and rabbinic literature exhibit numerous forms of literary and linguistic convergence. To mention only the most uncontroversial: the basic performative contexts and genres of piyyut presume the structures of rabbinic statutory prayer; numerous piyyutim feature exegetical traditions that appear to have originated in rabbinic Midrash; and some refer to rabbinic social types, institutions, or practices and even re-use recognizable blocks of rabbinic text.²³ At the same time, a ‘revisionist’ approach to piyyut has stressed the significant divergences between the two corpora, most notably in their institutional locations and in their attitudes toward the priesthood and the history of the Hasmonaean dynasty.²⁴ The corpus of piyyut may be more heterogeneous in its institutional and ideological orientation than either the traditionalists or the revisionists have allowed. If we are far from consensus regarding the literary relationships between piyyut and rabbinic literature, we are even further from understanding how these two types of religious specialists—the Sage and the liturgist—might have navigated their competing or complementary communal roles, especially as their social profiles and cultural prestige varied from place to place and evolved over time.

The still-expanding pool of public inscriptions in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and other Jewish languages from across the ancient Mediterranean world has long been studied for information regarding the extent or limitations of rabbinic authority. I will not rehearse here the historiographic debate about the use of the title rabbi in the inscriptions.²⁵ Even if we concede that some or even all of these ‘inscriptional rabbis’ did in fact belong to the rabbinic movement (which is not something I am prepared to do), it nevertheless remains the case that the wider corpus of inscriptions provides indisputable evidence that Jewish communal life throughout the Late Antique Mediterranean generally operated according to structures of patronage and prestige that had little use for a formally recognized rabbinic leadership. If Schwartz is correct, the sixth-century inscription from Venosa, Italy, which employs the term rebbites in a new fashion, as a noun rather than as an honorific title, was a bellwether of wider developments.²⁶ The hagiographic Actus Silvestri from late fifth- or early sixth-century Rome, in which the Jewish disputants of Pope Silvester I (314–335 CE) are specifically characterized as a group of twelve learned rabbis, may also reflect the emergence of rabbis as communal leaders in parts of the Italian peninsula in this period.²⁷ Taken together with a series of later inscriptions from Venosa, Naples, and Brindisi that mention ‘rabbis’ as well as with the colourful account of a family of rabbinically-trained scholars, liturgists, and ritual experts in the eleventh-century Megillat Ahimaʿaz, this evidence may point to a pattern of increasing rabbinic influence in this region from the late fifth century on.²⁸ While certainly suggestive, this dossier of sources remains slight, raising more questions than it answers concerning the origin, function, and scope of rabbinic leadership within some Jewish communities in Italy toward the end of Late Antiquity.

A fifth source of information about the consolidation of rabbinic authority is the corpus of Patristic writings in Greek, Latin, and Syriac. Regrettably, since Samuel Krauss’s seminal multipart study from the early 1890s on ‘The Jews in the Works of the Church Fathers’, which already surveyed much of the evidence, scholars have most often limited themselves to a restricted set of writers from the second to fifth centuries, such as Justin, Clement, Origen, Eusebius, Ephrem, John Chrysostom, and Jerome.²⁹ These sources have shed important light on contacts between Christian intellectuals and local Jewish religious experts, rabbis apparently among them.³⁰ Sources like the Didache, the Didascalia Apostolorum, and the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies and Recognitions may provide some of our earliest non-rabbinic evidence for the emergence of the rabbinic movement as a recognizable social phenomenon.³¹

Still, to my knowledge, ecclesiastical sources from the sixth to eighth centuries that might illuminate the gradual ‘rabbinization’ of Jewish society have gone largely untapped. To take one example that has received some attention: the seventh-century Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, set in Africa, offers a starring role to a Palestinian Jew named Justus who brings word of recent developments back home, especially concerning reactions among local scholars to the teachings of “the Saracen prophet.”³² When read together with the references to rabbāniyūn in the Qurʾan (3.79; 5.44, 63) and in other early Islamic sources, this passage may contain precious information about the widening scope of rabbinic influence at the advent of Islam.³³ Alas, the Doctrina Jacobi also speaks throughout of ‘priests’ occupying leadership positions in the cities of Palestine, which has suggested to some that, at this pivotal historical moment, the rabbis represented at best bit players in the multipolar world of Jewish religious expertise.³⁴ More data will be needed to advance our understanding of this landscape.

By contrast, the evidence provided by the Roman legal compendia of the fifth and especially sixth centuries is somewhat less equivocal.³⁵ Most notably, Justinian’s Novella 146, with its proscription of “the deuterosis,” has figured prominently in accounts of the penetration of rabbinic reading practices into local Jewish communities in the Western Diaspora and a concomitant process of Hebraization.³⁶ Here, too, the situation is complicated: the ongoing vitality of Greek biblical translation into the Middle Ages, as reconstructed by Nicholas de Lange and others from Genizah documents, suggests that whatever inroads the rabbis made into these communities did not extinguish the local traditions of scriptural recitation cultivated by the so-called Hellenizing faction with whom Justinian had sided.³⁷ Similarly, the scheme of rabbinic attribution that was laid over medieval Byzantine compositions in Hebrew, such as the tenth-century Hippodrome of Solomon, lend only a veneer of rabbinic authority to what appears to be an expression of the vibrant indigenous literary culture of Constantinople and its environs.³⁸ However tempted we are, we should resist historical accounts that lead directly from Novella 146 to the medieval ‘Minor Midrashim’ published by Adolf Jellinek, J. D. Eisenstein, and others.³⁹

Even Geonic writings from the eighth to eleventh centuries tell a suitably complex story. On the one hand, we have a sizable corpus attesting the newfound assertiveness of the rabbinic leadership in Iraq and Palestine. On the other, the Geonic responsa from before the ninth and tenth centuries show the heads of the yeshivot grappling with a wide range of non-rabbinic forms of Judaism, which the Rabbanite leaders had not yet conceptualized as a unified Karaite opposition.⁴⁰ Moreover, Marina Rustow’s penetrating analysis of Rabbanite–Karaite relations has taught us that Rabbanism and Karaism are best viewed not as stable sociological or even ideological entities, but as competing discourses of tradition.⁴¹ The vying claims to authority, which Rabbanite and Karaite literati never tired of broadcasting, mask the practical work of competition and cooperation that obtained among various kinds of Jewish elites in their negotiations with each other, with far-flung local communities, and with the Fatimid state. In this respect, the process of rabbinization remained fundamentally incomplete well into the Middle Ages.⁴²

The Jewish magical tradition, in all its regional, linguistic, and formal variety, offers scholars a promising body of non- or para-rabbinic materials for tracing the process of rabbinization. Gideon Bohak has persuasively shown that there exists a significant disjunction between the types of magical practice attested in rabbinic literature and the Jewish magical sources themselves.⁴³ However, the two bodies of evidence intersect at certain points that demonstrate a dynamic relationship between them. It remains to be seen whether scholars can divine patterns in the evidence that might elucidate the processes by which rabbinic authority, texts, and expertise became available or even attractive to larger segments of Jewish society. Among the many examples that I might invoke, perhaps the most promising is the corpus of Aramaic incantation bowls from Late Antique Iraq. The heterogeneity of the bowls presents both challenges and opportunities. Some specimens show no evidence of contact with rabbinic tradition. Others invoke named rabbis, refer to rabbinic traditions, or even incorporate passages from rabbinic literature. Thus, a pair of recently published bowls (MS 1929/6 and MS 2053/170) cite material from chapter five of Mishnah Zevahim.⁴⁴ Even in such cases, rabbinic elements are merely one ingredient within a capacious Mesopotamian religious koiné—and not necessarily the most essential. We await systematic assessment of the significance of the rabbinic elements in the bowls and in the magical materials more generally for our understanding of the process of rabbinization.

By way of bringing to a close this rather skeptical sketch of the sources that have been brought to bear on the problem of rabbinization, I turn very briefly to consider how the variety of apocalyptic, cosmological, martyrological, and mystical sources produced between the sixth and eighth centuries might contribute to the picture. Some scholars have proposed seeing in this congeries of sources—often also bundled together with piyyut, Targum, and the remains of public Jewish art and architecture—a more or less unified ‘non-rabbinic Judaism’, which they have variously labeled ‘synagogal’ or ‘priestly’.⁴⁵ In my view, we should not lump all Jewish texts or artifacts that appear to fall outside the bounds of rabbinic culture into a unified, overarching category; such grand generalizations ultimately perpetuate a dichotomous view of Late Antique Judaism that assesses all expressions of Jewish culture primarily in terms of their relationship to the rabbis. The realization that we can no longer accept the view that the rabbis served as the leadership of Jewish society in Late Antiquity does not necessitate that we posit the existence of a single class of alternative leaders. Moreover, we need not follow the scholarly habit of viewing the process of rabbinization and the persistence of diversity within Jewish culture in strict opposition to each other.⁴⁶ It may be that rabbinic expertise and the attendant power it conferred flourished alongside other forms of professional knowledge and knowhow. We must thus reckon with the fundamental autonomy of local Jewish communities and of their primary benefactors and leaders,⁴⁷ not to mention the variety of religious specialists—scribes, poets, artists, magicians, and so on—that operated within and across those communities.⁴⁸ This process of professionalization was not unique to Jews, but was characteristic of the period of Late Antiquity more broadly.

I would propose that, rather than treating difference from rabbinism as the privileged feature of the diverse range of Jewish expressive forms that do not bear the hallmarks of rabbinic culture, we ought to allow for what I would call ‘difference-within-difference’. Thus, for example, the creators of Jewish magical and mystical sources need not have occupied the same institutional locations or served the same social functions simply because their products are in an important sense ‘non-rabbinic’.⁴⁹ At the same time, we should attend to the permeability that existed among these discursive domains. Just as certain rabbis surely came into possession of books of magic, and rabbinic writings appropriated concepts and terminology that originated within the literary context of Hekhalot literature, so too did rabbinic literary forms have an impact on the linguistic idioms and modes of self-authorization employed in many ‘non-rabbinic’ genres.

A proper history of rabbinization still waits to be written. Such a history must go beyond tracing the movement of elements from one literary tradition to another to consider the period-specific conditions that generated this intertextual web.⁵⁰ It is only once we have a clearer profile of these structural shifts that we will be able to grasp the emergent appeal that rabbis and rabbinic knowledge apparently held for widening sectors within Jewish society.

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