Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome's Challenge to Israel by Katell Berthelot (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome's Challenge to Israel by Katell Berthelot Christine Hayes Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome's Challenge to Israel Katell Berthelot Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Pp. 552. ISBN: 978-0-691-19929-0. Jews and their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome's Challenge to Israel is a brilliant work of meticulous scholarship that explains central features of late antique Jewish culture (both pre-rabbinic and rabbinic) as a response to the unique challenge that the pagan Roman Empire posed to the self-concept and ideology of Israel. Katell Berthelot marshals an exhaustive array of evidence—Roman, Jewish and early Christian writings, but also papyri, coins, inscriptions, and archaeological artifacts—in support of her central claims. The writing is pellucid. The engagement with other scholarship is comprehensive, collegial, and admirably generous; and even when offering a corrective to a previous scholar's hypothesis, the author makes her case synergistically rather than agonistically. The book is an absolute pleasure to read. In the Introduction, Berthelot articulates two of the book's important interventions. First, she asserts (and will proceed to demonstrate) that rabbinic literature's engagement with Rome does not center primarily on Christian Rome and its supersessionist threat—as argued by Neusner (169) and widely assumed—but rather pagan Rome (8). Indeed, for nearly six centuries (from the second century bce to the fourth century ce, the time frame covered by the book), Jews encountered Rome as a pagan power. As a consequence, Jewish modes of response to Rome were well established long before the Christianization of the empire—a simple but often overlooked fact that underwrites the author's insistence on a thorough re-consideration of the impact of pagan imperial ideology, policy, and practice on Israel. Second, Berthelot cuts through the tiresome and muddled debate over the "Romanness" of the Jews, and especially the rabbinic class and its halakhic project, a debate often marred by simplistic notions of (passive) influence or (active) resistance as the two primary paradigms for imagining cultural encounter. Against the first, she notes that there is no such thing as passive influence; the transfer of cultural elements from one context to another context always entails an active and creative dynamic (25). Against the second, she follows Seth Schwartz and others in noting that rabbinic rhetoric (often separatist and rejectionist) should not be confused with rabbinic reality (which clearly attests to various degrees of accommodation and imitation, even when subversive; 24). Instead of speaking of "influence," she employs the term "impact" to capture Rome's role as the trigger, or catalyst, for a wide array of responses including: adhesion, [End Page 561] collaboration, accommodation, adaptation, integration, acculturation, imitation with differentiation, mimesis, mimicry (which is mimesis of a subversive or parodic character), rivalry, opposition, rejection, rebellion, and even the creation of alternative and quasi-utopian counter-models to the Roman order (21). These many responses stand in tension with one another, sometimes in the selfsame source, but as different as they are, they all may be seen as arising from the encounter with Rome. The book's basic thesis is straightforward enough: Israel (later the Jews) encountered several imperial powers in its long history (the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Hellenistic kingdoms) and responded in certain well-documented ways to imperial domination and ideology. Nevertheless, Roman imperialism posed a unique political-religious (rather than cultural) challenge grounded in its ideologies of power, law, and citizenship. The encounter with Rome thus prompted a set of distinctive responses unprecedented in Biblical and Hellenistic Jewish writings that would redefine central aspects of Judaism in a lasting way. Prior attempts to explain the emergence of Judaism in Late Antiquity have not been fully cognizant of the role played by Roman imperial ideology and by the combined impact of Roman power (imperium), law, and citizenship as instruments of expansion and domination. This book offers a powerful and convincing corrective. The Introduction lays out this basic thesis, explains the two interventions described above, defines terms, and reviews helpful theoretical frameworks. Chapter 1 surveys Israel's encounter with and response to earlier imperial powers as manifested in the pages of...