Judaism I. Группа авторов

Christian historian Eusebius, and hints in rabbinic sources and elsewhere.

      While there is little evidence that diaspora communities were actively involved in the Judean unrest of 66 CE, a generation later, Greek speaking Jews across the empire rose under Trajan (98–117 CE), emboldened perhaps by the emperor’s extended military campaigns in the distant East. A series of outbreaks of ethnic violence took place in Jewish communities across a broad swath of the Greek speaking Mediterranean: Egypt, Cyrenaica (the coastal region of modern-day Lybia), Cyprus, and also in Mesopotamia.³¹ Cassius Dio reports that Jews massacred thousands of their gentile neighbors. It seems that messianic hopes had turned up the heat on simmering economic and cultural tensions.

      In a chronicle of Trajans’s eastern campaigns, Cassius Dio writes:

      Meanwhile the Jews in the region of Cyrene had put one Andreas at their head and were destroying both the Romans and the Greeks. They would cook their flesh, make belts for themselves of their entrails, anoint themselves with their blood, and wear their skins for clothing. Many they sawed in two, from the head downwards. Others they would give to wild beasts and force still others to fight as gladiators. In all, consequently, two hundred and twenty thousand perished. In Egypt, also, they performed many similar deeds, and in Cyprus under the leadership of Artemio. There, likewise, two hundred and forty thousand perished. For this reason, no Jew may set foot in that land, even if one of them is driven upon the island by force of the wind, he is put to death. Various persons took part in subduing these Jews, one being Lusius, who was sent by Trajan.³²

      While the gruesome and exaggerated rhetoric here masks actual events (note the barbarity attributed to the crime of making Romans fight as gladiators), Dio reveals that the revolts were not minor local skirmishes; they left an impact on the region. Jews, he says, were henceforth banned from setting foot in Cyprus, even if shipwrecked there.

      9.3 Jewish Alexandria

      Perhaps the greatest loss of this war was of the Jewish community of Alexandria, Egypt—it was wiped out by Trajan’s army and never recovered. Jews had lived in Alexandria almost since the city’s founding by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BCE and it became a place of Jewish cultural flourishing. Jews were in nearly all professions and walks of life and occupied two of the city’s five geographical sectors. Pious Jewish intellectuals from this community had the five books of the Torah translated into Greek (the Septuagint; 3rd–2nd c. BCE), and created institutions that are among the earliest evidence we have of synagogues—communal organizations which served a range of functions, among them the teaching and dissemination of Torah.³³ While Alexandrian Jews sent money to support the Jerusalem Temple, it is clear from texts such as the Letter of Aristeas, that at least the highly-educated among this community felt fully at home in Egypt—diaspora was not experienced as »exile.« Aristeas and later Philo tells us that the Greek Torah was itself divinely inspired.

      In the Roman period, we may point to the career and output of philosopher, exegete, and statesman Philo of Alexandria. He was prominent in the Jewish community and a prolific author of more than thirty preserved works. He depicted Judaism as a religion in harmony with philosophical wisdom, and as a faith that wrestled with the same metaphysical questions, and held the same ethical ideals as their Greek neighbors: virtue, moderation, the good.³⁴

      In 38 CE, violence broke out in Alexandria between the local Greeks and the Jews. Philo was part of an embassy that in 40 CE reached out to Emperor Gaius Caligula (37–41 CE) to intervene with the Egyptian governor Flaccus on behalf of the Jews. Philo’s historical works offer insight into the Jewish place in the city and empire. They show an ethnic community with unique history, privileges, and challenges, even as they remind us that Jews were like any other subject peoples working to adapt and thrive within empire.

      9.4 Jews of Rome

      Alexandrian Jews left a remarkable literary legacy, unmatched in the rest of the diaspora, however, archaeological remains help to sketch the contours of Jewish life in other regions outside of the land. Burial inscriptions from Rome and other parts of the Italian peninsula paint an especially tantalizing portrait of the Jewish communities there.³⁵ Jews existed in substantial numbers in Rome and Italy, these Jews may well have been populations originally brought as prisoners by Pompey and later Vespasian (several individual inscriptions identify Jews as freed slaves). Leonard Rutgers cautions scholars from attributing the apparent spread of Jewish communities to proselytization, as has long been the norm, but instead to see migration and other factors at work. Inscriptional evidence tells us that Roman Jews supported synagogues across the city and region and felt obvious pride in communal involvement—however, details about Jewish life in Italy elude us. Communal cohesion is reinforced by the fact that Jews buried their dead together in exclusively Jewish catacombs, and by the fact that amidst decorative imagery indistinguishable from their pagan neighbors, Jewish burial sites show a proliferation of Jewish images, especially menorahs. That said, the language of the inscriptions was Greek and Latin, not Hebrew or Aramaic, and the names and naming conventions are distinctly local. On account of the lack of mentions of any afterlife in the funerary texts, Rutgers also surmises that Roman Jews were not of an apocalyptic or messianic bent but were contentedly ensconced in this world.³⁶ Nevertheless, Jewish culture was strange to most Romans (and perhaps for that reason attractive to some). We have evidence of periodic expulsions of Jews from the city under Tiberias, and again in the 40s CE by Emperor Claudius³⁷, related to unrest surrounding the nascent Jesus movement. Still, scant as the evidence is, we have a picture of a culturally embedded Jewish community.

      10 Pagan Perspectives on Jews and Judaism

      The Jewish experience under Rome, as is by now clear, was widely divergent, ranging from deep acculturation to pagan ideas and political organization, to stubborn resistance. The Jewish rejection of the Roman cult was respected by Rome on account of Judaism’s antiquity; but this erected a civic barrier between Jews and Romans no less than a religious and cultural one. Still, Jews performed in a range of ways to make the empire work in their favor. Their position was nonetheless vulnerable, and the empire’s aims and those of any given Jewish community did not always align, sometimes with violent results. Pagan writings about Judaism reflect this range.³⁸

      Some gentile authors found much to admire about Judaism, drawn especially to its monotheism—lauded as devout and philosophically sophisticated—as well as Judaism’s piety, and antiquity.³⁹ More, however, were off-put by Judaism’s alien ways. Pagan authors seem to fixate on a rather short (and oft-recycled) list of Jewish practices that seemed to them especially strange: circumcision which piqued Roman abhorrence of castration⁴⁰; dietary laws (especially the refusal of pork) which transgressed the bedrock Mediterranean value of hospitality; Sabbath observance, which was seen to enshrine laziness. They added up to a broad impression of Jewish misanthropy.

      The early second-century Roman historian Tacitus (d. c. 120 CE) penned a well-known description of the Jews in book 5 of his Histories calling the religion »sinister and revolting,« and accusing Moses of inventing a religion in which »everything that we hold sacred is regarded as sacrilegious; on the other hand, they allow things which we consider immoral.«⁴¹ If we read this and other anti-Jewish writing by Greek and Roman authors out of context, it can easily make us think that Romans reserved a special bile for the Jews, but this reductive and anachronistic take misses much.

      Interest in Jews tended to accompany political or military conflict, and so virtually no pagan writing on the Jews happens in an objective or context-free condition. Moreover, as scholars of the so-called »rhetorical Jews« of Patristic polemic make clear,⁴² Jews served a range of functions for non-Jewish writers—standing in for everything from the embodiment of Roman anxiety about empire, to a range of Christian heresies, to a competitive foil in the eyes of other provincial elites. For some others, Jews served as an idealized ethnic exemplar. While it may not yet have penetrated popular perception, scholarship has largely decoupled anti-Jewish writing of the pre-Christian Roman period from the label of Anti-Semitism, with its weighty and anachronistic baggage.⁴³ One must read pagan