Aphrodite and the rabbis : how the Jews adapted Roman culture to create Judaism as we know it

264 Pages·2016·30.32 MB·English

by  Burton L. Visotzky

APHRODITE AND THE RABBIS
How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It
BURTON L. VISOTZKY
ST. MARTIN’S PRESS
NEW YORK
For Asher:
a book with pictures
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
I: Greek, Roman, Hellenist, Jew
II: Like a Fish Out of Water? Stories of Judaism in Historical Context
III: Judaisms of the Oikoumene: Who Were the Jews in the Roman World?
IV: Esau, Edom, Rome: What Did the Rabbis Really Say about the Romans?
V: Rabbis Learn the Three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Roman Rhetoric
VI: How Many Languages Does a Jew Need to Know?
VII: Love of Wisdom and Love of Law: In Pursuit of Philosophy and Justice
VIII: History Where It Happened
IX: The Handwriting on the Wall (and the Floor and Ceiling): Roman Jewish
Art
X: From Temple Cult to Roman Culture
Timeline
Acknowledgments
Photo Credits
For Further Reading
Index
Art Color Insert
About the Author
Copyright
CHAPTER I
Greek, Roman, Hellenist, Jew
Beneath the streets of Rome, below even the subterranean layer of buildings still
awaiting the kiss of the archeologist’s spade, lies a silent city of the dead. Its web
extends in a collection of catacombs that served as Christian and Jewish burial
grounds in the late second through fourth centuries. The Christian catacombs are
the more famous; they have long been open to visitors who are willing to travel a
bit beyond the walls of the ancient city to the sites on the famous Appian Way.
Church authorities supported the cleansing of their catacombs, removal of
corpses, ventilation of the tunnels, lighting, buttressing, and other safety
measures that make a trip there as tourist friendly as a visit to an underground
tomb can be.
Alas, this is not the case with the Jewish catacombs, which are generally
closed to the public. I visited the Jewish catacomb of Villa Torlonia by special
arrangement in 2007. A fistful of euros having changed hands, I am led through
the catacomb, its entrance curiously located on the grounds of a villa once
inhabited by Mussolini. My tour guide for the day is the city electrician who
checks monthly on the exposed wiring, left over from earlier failed attempts to
improve the site. We wear miners’ caps, beams of light wobbling before us. In
one hand we each carry a lantern. Our other hands alternately follow the wire or
gently mark a path along the porous tufa walls. The soft stone made it easy for
the ancients to dig the tunnels and rooms that made up the warren of catacombs.
But it is moist to the touch and leaves the humid air with a taste of rot that does
not improve my sense of otherworldly claustrophobia. Nor, to be frank, do the
bones and skeletons that still lie dormant upon their shallow platform graves dug
into the walls.
Furtively, I summon my courage and touch, ever so gently, the remains of the
dead. I am more than startled when the bone yields to my finger, spongy rather
than ossified. Deep breathing ensues on my part, but the fetid air does not
exactly help matters. I finally calm myself by reading, which almost always
positively affects my emotions. What am I reading in the murky confines of the
catacombs? Beside nearly every body, either grafittied onto the tufa stone or
mounted as a marble inscription, are the epitaphs of the departed. Not
surprisingly, given that we are in Rome, the names of the Jewish dead are
recorded mostly in Latin, sometimes in Greek. But unlike on the headstones we
might find in Europe or even in an American Jewish cemetery, there is nary a
word of Hebrew. The only way we know that we are in a Jewish catacomb is that
some of the names are biblical, and the frescoes that decorate the Villa Torlonia
catacombs are replete with Jewish symbols, including ubiquitous menorahs—the
seven-branched candelabrum of the Jerusalem Temple destroyed in 70 CE. I read
a name aloud and walk to the next set of bones, where I pause and read again.
Slowly it comes to me that I am making a cemetery pilgrimage to Jews who
perhaps have not had such a visit in 1,700 years. As I turn to the next skeleton
with a name beside it, from some place deep in my soul burble up the words to
the Jewish memorial prayer, El Malei Rahamim, “God full of mercy.”
“God,” I pray in Hebrew, “give proper rest to the soul of Simonides beneath
the wings of your divine Presence. May he rest in the Garden of Eden. May his
soul be bound up in the bundle of eternal life. And let us say, ‘Amen.’ ” I have
been blessed with a pleasant baritone singing voice, so as I walk I gain
confidence, offering prayers of condolence for the long, long departed. Soon I
realize that the moisture on my cheeks is not just the humidity of the catacombs,
but the steady welling of tears from my eyes as I mourn for those so long
unvisited by loved ones. Eventually, I notice that the electrician, too, has tears in
his eyes, although I am sure he does not understand a word of Hebrew. I knew at
that moment, even as I know now, that the inspiration to recite the memorial
prayer would count as one of the few truly religious experiences of my life.
They say that Jews have been in the city of Rome since the century before
Christianity. Even so, they took their time arriving. The Jewish Diaspora, the
dispersion of the Israelite peoples from their land, took place first in the eighth
century BCE (Before the Common Era, what Christians call BC) and again in
586 BCE. Both the Assyrian and Babylonian conquests sent the Israelites into
exile eastward. It wasn’t until the Greek era, during the fourth to third centuries
BCE, that Jews migrated west and settled around the Mediterranean basin. By
the time Jews came to Rome, there were Jewish communities in North Africa
and Asia Minor, as well. The Five Books of Moses were translated from Hebrew
into Greek by the third century BCE for the community in Alexandria, Egypt. Of
course, there were Jews who much earlier had returned from exile to their
ancestral homeland in what was then called Roman Palestine. Those Jews spoke
Hebrew and also Aramaic (the language of their Assyrian captors of centuries
earlier). But the Jews of the western exile spoke the local languages of
Hellenism, which is how I came to be reading Latin and Greek grave inscriptions
beneath the modern city of Rome.
As I look back years later, I still feel a connection with those who were buried
in the catacombs so many centuries ago. But I do wonder about them. Would
they have understood my pious gesture? Might there have been a chance—
despite the absence of the language among all of the inscriptions—that they
could have understood the Hebrew I intoned? Would they even have approved of
the sentiment? Did Roman Jews share the outlook of the rabbis of the Land of
Israel that the soul would eternally survive? It was, after all, an idea that pagan
Greek philosophers shared.
As a scholar, I know that by the time the Jews in that catacomb were buried,
the Judaism of the rabbis, Judaism as we still know it today, already had begun
to develop. And yet, aside from pictorial fealty to the menorah, would their
Roman Judaism have been recognizable to me? And what might they have
thought of my Judaism, visitor from a distant future as I was? Is then like now?
Were those cosmopolitan urban Jews of Rome comparable to the Jewish
community today, say, in New York City? Can asking questions like these about
them teach anything about us now? Or is this just so much naïve wishful
thinking? I will return to this question a bit later, but for now, allow me to pay
homage to the dead.
The Jews buried in the catacombs were Romans who spoke mostly Latin.
Those whose families hailed from the Eastern Mediterranean probably spoke
Greek. By culture, those Jews would be described as Greco-Roman Hellenists.
That is, they were part of a millennium that started with Alexander the Great,
who was born about 350 BCE, and ended at the fall of the Roman Empire,
approximately 650 CE. That adds up to a thousand years of Hellenistic/Greco-
Roman culture.
The father of Hellenism, Alexander the Great, was tutored by none less than
Aristotle, the quintessential standard bearer of Greek philosophy and culture.
The Greek Empire founded by Alexander ruled for only two hundred of this
thousand-year reign; the Greeks were conquered by Rome in the mid-second
century BCE. From that point onward Rome ruled militarily—but the majority
culture nevertheless remained Hellenistic. So, we call it Greco-Roman.
The Roman Empire as a pagan enterprise persisted into the fourth century CE,
when the emperor Constantine converted to Christianity and declared it a legal
religion. The inhabitants of the empire soon followed his lead, and over the next
hundred years, the Roman Empire became Christian. The term “pagan” refers,
rather intolerantly if you ask me, to all non-monotheistic religions. Yet for all of
the shifting to Christian forms of monotheism and the decline of paganism,
Greco-Roman culture persisted. Judaism post-Temple, after 70 CE, coincides
with the heyday of Roman culture, which spread as far west as what is England
today and as far eastward as Armenia and the Caspian Sea. Although the
Romans spoke Latin, the lingua franca in the west (modern Europe), Greek was
very much the norm throughout the eastern empire, particularly along the
Eastern Mediterranean shores, including the Land of Israel.
A G , N N A M
LEXANDER THE REAT MOSAIC APLES ATIONAL RCHEOLOGICAL USEUM
G , L I - ,
EOGRAPHICALLY THE AND OF SRAEL IS SMACK DAB IN THE MIDDLE OF THE EMPIRE
J H
ALTHOUGH YOU HAVE ALREADY SEEN THAT UDAISM WAS NOT LIMITED TO THE OLY
L . C , I
AND HRONOLOGICALLY MOST OF WHAT WILL BE DISCUSSING DATES FROM THE
CE—
SECOND THROUGH THE SIXTH AND SEVENTH CENTURIES FROM THE MIDDLE OF THE
G -R .
RECO OMAN ERA UNTIL ITS END
During the earlier part of the Roman period, in the years designated as BCE,
what I am calling biblical or Israelite religion was focused on the Temple in
Jerusalem. There, according to the dictates of Leviticus, the central book of the
Torah, priests offered sacrifices to the One God. Some of these offerings were
made in thanksgiving, some in atonement; almost all involved the spilling of
animal blood on the Jerusalem altar. I sometimes nostalgically, sometimes
mischievously, yearn for those days of yore. How satisfying it is to think that
offering an animal for sacrifice could wipe clean the slate of my sins. And how
interesting it would be if, instead of painfully chanting a prophetic portion in
broken Hebrew, a bar mitzvah boy were called upon to prove his Jewish
manhood by slaughtering an ox on the synagogue stage.
Oh well, those days are long past. In that time, before there were rabbis, the
hereditary priests (kohanim) were the leaders of religious life, and there was a
dynastic Jewish king who led political life in the Land, even as he was a vassal
to the Roman emperor.
The watershed took place beginning in the year 66 CE, infamously known in