Natalie Dohrmann

A great deal of ink has been spilled on the question of early rabbinic literary culture and the rabbinic dedication to the development of an explicitly oral legal tradition. In this essay I will argue that given that the manifest content of early rabbinic discourse is law, it is productive to look to the very public practices of communication inscribed, literally and figuratively, in the Roman legal culture of the east. Within this context, the rabbinic legal project makes sense as a form of provincial shadowing of a dominant Roman legal culture. This paper will explore the paradoxical rabbinic deployment of the most public of Roman genres, law, in a manner explicitly coded as private. How does one make sense of the public aspirations of rabbinic law with its choice to remain unwritten and therefore largely invisible in the imperial landscape of the rabbinic city?

In this essay I use the imperial library as a figure of the dynamic reading practices of an imperial elite and to frame the early rabbis’ own relationship to the book. The rabbis, like Aristeas and Josephus writing in Greek, I will argue, are significantly affected by the imagined imperial reader and his library. Their language, genres, media, and content are similarly created in relationship to them. Key elements distinguishing tannaitic literature from antecedent Jewish literatures are some of the very things that align them with Roman literary culture: (1) a heightened sense of the authority of the book, and a belated and deferential stance
to the book-based knowledge manifested in careful attention to wording, precision, and citation as driving mode of creation/composition; (2) a sense of foreboding in the face of the proliferation of knowledge, and an attempt to manage it; and (3) the emergence of the real person from behind the pseudepigraph, and the concurrent elevation of the human scholar-expert, who curates and brokers knowledge, and functions in his person as a sort of walking library. In highlighting these parallels I
hope to communicate that rabbis are not prima fascia an inversion of the imperial, an outlier or special case. Indeed, they are facing down some of the same challenges that vex Pliny, and in this way they are fellow travellers. And yet even as they shape a Roman-inflected literacy, the rabbis curtail imperial logic, and move dramatically to thwart it. The primary gestures of this recusal are three: a contraction of the sacred library and a concomitant censorship of both Jewish and non-Jewish books; a refusal to trace non-Scriptural knowledge to books; and the refusal of authorship – they not only don’t depict themselves writing, but they do not attribute works to individual persons. In sum, the rabbis’ unusual focus on the book – the ways they reify the textuality of one small corpus, while stigmatizing the authorizing power of all others – deviates from the book-centered Jewish imagination that preceded them. Looking at the rabbinic project through the lens of the Roman book consumer, for whom the production and circulation of books was central to intellectual life, we might draw together a set of related aversions: in saying no to knowledge derived from books, no to writing, no to authorship, to Greek and Aramaic and most antecedent genres, the early rabbis create a literary cosmos that confronts the Roman reader/librarian with daunting barriers.

Among other things, CTh 2.1.10 declares that the judgments of Jewish tribunals in civil matters will be enforced by the state as if they were issued by Roman courts of arbitration (ad similitudinem arbitrorum). The extraordinary power exerted by this analogical reasoning characteristic of the fictio iuris reasoning —comprehending all Jewish civil law as ersatz arbitration—serves as the inspiration for an exploration into the question of “similarity” between legal systems. A look at the rabbinic laws of arbitration reveals that the space opened by Rome for the operation of Jewish legal practice seems in the tannaitic sources to have been more anxiety-producing than empowering. The first part of the paper will look at the early rabbinic construction of the idea of arbitration (cf. Mek Nez 1; tSan 1; SifreDt 17), and map its conceptual foci in relation to similar Roman ideas. The second part of the paper reflects on the manifold methodological pitfalls (and potentials) of comparison, history, and jurisprudence in the study of rabbinic and Roman law in an imperial landscape.

Making reference to contemporary political theories of the establishment of the rule of law in war zones, this thought piece suggests that the management of civil and external strife is deeply imbricated in the early rabbinic legal project and adds another facet to the legal project's entanglement with the Roman Empire.

Rabbinic literature shares a suggestive array of literary features with later Latin literary sources: commentary, fragmentation and quotation, and a granular attention to language. In this material narrative tends to be lost; classical source texts, such as Vergil, are fetishized, broken apart, and repurposed. In this essay I ask of one corpus—early rabbinic midrash (biblical commentary)—what is the origin and impact of its fragmented and finally incoherent narrative project? At the risk of oversimplifying , I will focus on the rabbis as a case study in the etiology of a more general phenomenon. I will argue that the fragmentation so typical of aggadic midrash is the result of the application of a specifically legal hermeneutic to nonlegal, specifically narrative, sources. As a result, rabbinic midrash beginning in the third century consistently undercuts its own narrative aims. Metaliterary, anthologized, pastiched, commentarial forms become standard in the late antique Roman repertoire, with rabbinic texts we can historicize and contextualize one such transformation, and in so doing center law, legal thinking and forms into literary genealogies.

SACRED LAW " All laws of men are nourished by one law, the divine law. " So wrote the fifth century Greek philospher Heraklitos. The concept of " Sacred Law " is likely the remnant of a category first used in 1906 to define a particular corpus of Greek inscriptions pertaining to cult practice. It constitutes a subcategory of the vast category— " all laws of men " —that includes the intersection of the normative and the divine. Sacred law is not the abstract, pervasive, and diffuse notion of divine sponsorship—however conceived—of state power, or the vast realm captured between the terms " religion and law, " but covers a subcategory of explicit norms that govern religious cult practice. Despite being shaped by a particular curatorial moment, the term is a useful rubric for entry into the ancient materials, since the study of practice is an important cognate to studies of theology or belief. Sacrifice and the apparatus that developed to regulate it were perhaps the most important religious institutions in the ancient world—the stakes of obedience were cosmic in scale. Though modern readers may be accustomed to dismissing the legalistic component of ancient religion as primitive and though the laws themselves can be tedious to read, they are nonetheless a critical language through which these cultures communicated their idea of divinity. Moreover, they permit scholars an important inroad for comparison of phenomena, the commonalities of which, were one to look only (and anachronistically) at " theology " would be lost. Moreover indeed, one cannot understand religion at all in the ancient Mediterranean through the category of belief alone; right action, or orthopraxy, was not only what could be prescribed, but was what mattered. Sacred laws are preserved in a variety of corpuses, each of which presents challenges concerning analytical method. Within each culture, sacred laws, which are a category classified by content, must also be considered according to the genres in which they appear. While historical, literary, and other material remains tell us much about how religion was practiced, our concern here is with legal sources that take prescriptive and normative form. The standard compendia of Greek sacred law are made up of inscriptions, and so preserve distinctly public and emphatically local data, while Jewish sacred laws are preserved largely through textual collections composed in both earlier and later ages. The main sources here are the priestly materials in the Torah, a collection of laws governing the cult compiled in the Persian period (5 th c. BCE) or slightly earlier, but which take as their stated object the tabernacle, or tent of meeting, of earlier narratives. The second major source is the Mishnah, an early third-century CE legal collection that emerged from the rabbinic movement. The rabbis, who thrived only after the cessation of Jewish sacrifice following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, were a group of lay Torah experts whose complex relationship to the cult is belated and ambivalent, holding archival, nostalgic, and polemical motives in tension. Roman sacred laws are found in a wide array of sources, and much of what we know comes from collections compiled under the Christian empire, which combines a similar dual stance—conservative and polemical—toward the cultic traditions. Sacred laws are difficult to use as historical data. Their narrow focus and paradigmatic content testify to their profound conservatism across time and space, such that a phenomenological approach may be best. It is not unusual to see an inscription from the fifth century BCE anthologized alongside or discussed seamlessly and without comment beside another from the first century CE. Compounding this is the fact that most sacred law is technical and telegraphic —they have been compared to recipes for master chefs, so in lieu of a full recipe, we may have only an abbreviated list of ingredients. And given the ubiquity and centrality of sacrificial

... What we wanted to avoid was the standard single-book review, hoping instead to use books as provocations to broader inquiry. ... After all, the first centuries of the Common Era are the cradle of both Christianity and classical Judaism. ...