Reviews

056

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties

Shaye J.D. Cohen
(Berkeley: Univ. of California, 1999) 426 pp., $45

This is among the most important books on ancient Judaism to appear in recent years. More than that: Shaye Cohen’s monograph on the origins of Jewish identity is a pleasure to read, prudent in handling the evidence and yet crisply written, even when the going gets tough.

Who was a Jew? That is the question Cohen begins by asking. The answer depends on what we mean by Jewishness, a term Cohen prefers over the more standard “Judaism.” (For him, “Jewishness” more closely approximates the Yiddish Yiddishkeit and the modern Hebrew Yahadut in expressing the interwoven nature of Jewish ethnic, cultural and religious identity.) To answer this question, Cohen relies strictly on texts: literary documents, papyri and inscriptions. Even when he uses a visual metaphor, such as “How do you know a Jew in antiquity when you see one?” he does not make use of available visual materials. (To some extent the answer is, you can’t, for Cohen concludes that there were no physical-racial differences between Jews and their neighbors.) Oddly, Cohen leaves out the best evidence of all: The images of Jews (albeit, biblical figures) in the wall paintings from the third-century A.D. synagogue at Dura Europos, in Syria. In these images, as in later synagogue mosaics from Israel, Jews depicted their cultural heroes. Not surprisingly, Moses and Abraham and a host of others all appear in late antique costume and hair styles! At Dura, for example, Moses is dressed in a typical Roman chitan (knee-length garment)—except that on each corner of his chitan is a tassel. This tassel, tsitsit in Hebrew, is in fulfillment of the biblical commandment: “They shall make tsitsit on the corners of their garments eternally” (Numbers 15:38).

Of course, physical characteristics are the least of it. Jewishness is a combination of historical, social, cultural, political and religious characteristics. So Cohen deals with a number of related issues: the transformation of Jewishness from something denoting a nation to something denoting a national religion; problems associated with intermarriage and conversion (at what point does someone who does not possess Jewishness come to possess Jewishness?); and the relations between Jews and non-Jews.

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Central to the idea of Jewishness is the idea of progeny, or descent. It is in Cohen’s discussion of the matrilineal principle that the methodology distinguishing his work is most pronounced. According to Cohen, Jewish descent (whether ethnic, national or religious) was patrilineal until the rise of the Rabbinic movement in the second century A.D. That is, the child of a Jewish man was Jewish, no matter the affiliation of the mother. For the Rabbinic Sages, however, and hence for all of Jewry until recent Reform innovations, Jewishness was determined by descent from the mother, regardless of the father’s identity.

This conclusion is in striking contrast to that reached by another contemporary scholar, Lawrence Schiffman, who deals with the same historical sources. In Who Was a Jew? (Ktav, 1985), Schiffman concludes that Jewish identity in antiquity was indeed based upon the Jewishness of the mother—at least from the Persian period (fifth century B.C.) onwards. To Schiffman, the Rabbis were simply preserving Jewish customs established hundreds of years earlier.

How is it that two such capable scholars reach opposite conclusions regarding the same evidence? It comes down to the way each scholar reads sources. Schiffman tends to read the evidence in as synthetic a manner as possible; aware that our knowledge of ancient life is full of holes, he fills in gaps by extrapolating from the evidence. Cohen, by contrast, reads the extant evidence as if it were all the evidence: If something cannot be documented, it did not, so to speak, exist. The result is that Cohen rather consistently asserts the newness of Rabbinic approaches, while Schiffman tends to assert continuity between the Rabbis and the Judaism of the Second Temple period (beginning in the late-sixth century B.C.). The real problem, though, is that there is simply not enough evidence to answer this question properly. As with so many other issues in ancient history, we want to know more than our sources tell us!

Like so many other issues in ancient history, this one has not gone away. Cohen is clearly somewhat uncomfortable that his study might be understood as serving some particular, modern Jewish agenda. He asserts: “I am a rabbi, but I am not writing as a rabbi.” By this he means that he is not “consciously advocating” a particular position about “Who is a Jew?” Whether advocacy or not, Cohen’s book, in addressing that question, supports the centrality of Rabbinic doctrine while employing a methodology that emphasizes variety and uncertainty (see the book’s subtitle). Professor Cohen’s emphasis on the variety of forms and the uncertainty of our knowledge is, to some extent, an expression of the Conservative Judaism that Rabbi Cohen lives.

The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties