ReViews

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No subject has been more central to modern Jewish scholarship than the role of the Pharisees and the early Rabbis in the history of Judaism. Like “Historical Jesus” scholarship for the history of Christianity, “Historical Rabbis” scholarship has often served as a Rorschach test for modern Jewish identity.

The Pharisees, a major religious movement within Second Temple Period Judaism, were understood by the Rabbis of the late first and second centuries C.E. to have been their precursors. The traditions of the Rabbis were redacted in the Mishnah (in about 200 C.E.), the Talmuds (completed by 600 C.E.) and in other genres of Rabbinic literature. Various modern Jewish communities that have sought to modernize Jewish liturgy, beliefs and practices have embraced the Quest for the Historical Rabbis in hope of finding Jewish models that could legitimize their particular agendas. Looking over their shoulders these Jewish scholars knew that Christians were watching—among them academics and churchmen who were negatively inclined toward both the Pharisees and the Rabbis.

During the 19th and much of the 20th centuries, Jewish scholars assumed absolute continuity between the Pharisees and the Rabbis, presenting them in the best possible light. The Rabbis were the spiritual and political leaders of the Jews, these scholars argued, and were well worthy of admiration. The finest statement of this approach was made by none other than a Presbyterian minister and professor at Harvard, George Foote Moore, who referred to the religion of the Rabbinic elite as “Normative Judaism.”

“Normative Judaism” was the focus of Jews of all allegiances well into the 20th century. At mid-century, however, this model was challenged by two former Christian clerics, E. R. Goodenough and Morton Smith. While Goodenough is often hailed as the father of a “counterhistory” of Judaism that placed the Rabbis on the margins of Jewish culture and moved “non-Rabbinic” local communities (as revealed by archaeology and magical texts, for example) to the center, the scholar most responsible for changing the historiography of Judaism was Morton Smith of Columbia University. In fact, much American Jewish scholarship on the history of ancient Judaism during the last 30 or so years is based on Smith’s approach.

Morton Smith was a maverick. A former Episcopalian priest who had been the first Christian to earn a doctorate at the then-new Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Smith spent a career carefully debunking what he regarded as myths. In a widely influential article (now discredited among a wide swath of scholars), Smith argued (based on extremely scant literary evidence) that the Pharisees were not, in fact, the leaders of Second Temple Jewry, as had once been thought. Smith also argued that Jewish history in the Roman Empire must be understood not solely in terms of Rabbinic literature (in this he was right), but rather in terms of sources that had previously been marginal to scholarship. In moving sources once thought to be central to the periphery, Smith followed in the footsteps of German Protestant scholarship and of his Jerusalem teacher and lifelong friend, Gershom Scholem (who set Jewish mysticism at the center of the Jewish sacred story, pushing Rabbinic law to the side). Goodenough and Smith sought to understand Judaism beyond the Pharisees and Rabbis, the world beyond “Normative Judaism.”

Smith’s principal research was not on the Talmudic Rabbis. His influence on the study of Rabbinic history came through a group of disciples, almost all of whom were either Conservative rabbis or were destined to serve on the faculty of the premier institution 057of that denomination, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. The principal scholars of this “school,” Jacob Neusner, Shaye J. D. Cohen and Lee I. Levine, have shaped the way that ancient Judaism is studied in North America, each in his own way applying Smith’s academic approach. Central to this is the rejection of the “Normative Judaism” model in favor of seeing Judaism in antiquity as an amalgam of “Judaisms” (Neusner) or otherwise as a “multifaceted” phenomenon (Levine).

Seth Schwartz, professor of Jewish history at the Jewish Theological Seminary and a late student of Smith, closely follows the traditions of his school. Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. is a learned book with many important insights, written in a clear and attractive style. Schwartz has chosen to cover a very broad stretch of time, from the Hasmoneans (142–63 B.C.E.) to the fall of Palestine to Islamic armies (638 C.E.). Drawing on a full range of Jewish literature and archaeological remains, Schwartz contends that during the Second Temple period a distinct Jewish identity existed focused on Temple and Torah. This identity, like that of later periods, was formed in response to Hellenistic, Roman and Roman-Christian imperialism. So far, so good.

Schwartz then goes on to explain these developments with particular emphasis on the position of the Rabbis in Jewish culture. He suggests that the shared Second Temple-period identity was “shattered” in the wake of the Roman destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 C.E. and the failure of the Second Jewish Revolt (the Bar-Kokhba revolt) of 132–135 C.E., after which the Jews were thoroughly Romanized. The Rabbis were a minor group during this period (an assumption shared, with some differences, by Smith’s other students), a peculiar sect that eventually gained control of Jewish life during the Byzantine period. At that time synagogues were built, liturgical poetry and other literary forms developed and a new Jewish identity emerged that resembled the Second Temple period consensus in its broad outlines.

The most problematic element of the book is Schwartz’s discussion of the period between the destruction of the Temple and the emergence of the so-called new Jewish identity. He accounts for the scant physical remains of distinctly Jewish culture during the second and third centuries C.E. by marginalizing the heroes of the only extensive literary sources we do have for that period, the Rabbis as portrayed in Rabbinic literature. Rather than show modesty before a paucity of sources, Schwartz draws 058broad historical conclusions based on what does not exist. His historical reconstruction implicitly assumes that the extant evidence is all that ever existed.

Much more can be said about this volume, about the scholars Schwartz ignores or doesn’t engage (including, among others, Yigael Yadin, Ronny Reich, Stuart Miller, Robert Goldenberg and Yaron Eliav), about his casual acquaintance with art historical and archaeological approaches, and much else. I will leave that to scholars writing in academic journals. Here, I will give two examples of Schwartz’s approach that are particularly questionable. He writes, “We cannot be certain, in the absence of external confirmation, that Torah reading was universally practiced and that all synagogues possessed scrolls.” The bar for “external confirmation” that Schwartz sets here is extraordinarily high—so high that confirmation cannot possibly be found! Sources for the history of synagogues in antiquity are quite ample, ranging from archaeological remains throughout the Mediterranean world to literary references in Josephus and Philo, Rabbinic writers, Roman law and the Church fathers. The reading of scrolls in synagogues is amazingly well attested—among the best attested phenomena in the history of Judaism! For Schwartz, however, this evidence does not reach the bar of “universal practice,” a level of evidence that cannot be proven. His overly developed “hermeneutics of suspicion” allows Schwartz to fill the space between the sources, and to assess the status of the Rabbis in Jewish society, with an amazingly thick cloud of ambiguity.

One more example: Schwartz suggests that in the wake of the Jewish revolts,

Judaism “shattered.” Its shards were preserved in altered but recognizable form by the rabbis, who certainly had some residual prestige and thus small numbers of close adherents and probably larger numbers of occasional supporters. But for most Jews, Judaism may have been little more than a vestigial identity, bits and pieces of which they were happy to incorporate into a religious and cultural system that was essentially Greco-Roman and pagan …

Were we to replace the words “Greco-Roman and pagan” with “Western European and American” one would be hard pressed to distinguish this description from issues of Jewish identity during the 19th and 20th centuries. Historians routinely draw analogies from their own times for understanding the past. These models must always be explicitly acknowledged and argued, however, if a historian is not to be charged with anachronistic projection. It is the issue of “vestigial identity” that is most troublesome in Schwartz’s characterization. Despite his best efforts, Schwartz simply has not proven his claim that such a thing existed. Schwartz does not acknowledge the source of his model any more than he admits that his preference for the term “egalitarian” over “democratic” to describe the Rabbinic movement reflects terminology developed in contemporary Conservative Judaism.

Finally, one might ask what Schwartz and other scholars associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary found (and find) attractive in Smith’s approach. It should be noted that the counter-histories of the Rabbinic movement written by Conservative Rabbi-scholars over the last 30 or so years coincided with major changes at the Jewish Theological Seminary, most importantly the ordination of women to the rabbinate. As this community has distanced itself from historical norms of Talmudic jurisprudence, it has revised its image of the historical Rabbis. Modern scholarship on the “Historical Rabbis,” like the search for the “Historical Jesus,” must be seen in terms of the communities that produce them. Seth Schwartz’s Imperialism and Jewish Society is best read within this wider communal search for a usable past.

No subject has been more central to modern Jewish scholarship than the role of the Pharisees and the early Rabbis in the history of Judaism. Like “Historical Jesus” scholarship for the history of Christianity, “Historical Rabbis” scholarship has often served as a Rorschach test for modern Jewish identity.