Reflections on Jewish Identity in Late Antiquity (original) (raw)
Related papers
In the early-mid first century BCE, inhabitants of the Hasmonean kingdom deliberately refashioned certain household items so as to differentiate their homes and daily lives from those of their non-Jewish neighbors. By actively creating differences where before none had existed, they crafted a distinct material identity. I have termed this phenomenon “household Judaism” (Berlin 2005). Household Judaism allowed Jews to infuse daily life with a religious sensibility, “to advance the holy into the realm of the common” (Regev 2000) and thereby form a new cultural identity. In this paper I will focus on the century that led up to the emergence of household Judaism, beginning with the Seleucid take-over under Antiochus III. During this period, essentially the second century BCE, personal names reveal a population with a multi-cultural sensibility. In Idumea, the self-identified Sidonian Sesmaios had a Greek-named son, Apollophanes, as well as an Edomite-named daughter, Sabo. In Galilee, a man named Zoilus made a dedication at the ancient Israelite shrine at Dan. In Judea, the High Priest Jason was challenged by Judah the Hasmonean. In this fluid atmosphere, cultural identity appears more a personal choice than a birthright. What can archaeological evidence add to this picture? Cooking vessels, storage jars, lamps, figurines, and interior décor demonstrate that some of the region’s ethnoi, such as the Idumeans and the Phoenicians, embraced the dominant Hellenizing culture. At ground level, without the testimony of names and written records, an ethnic Idumean and an ethnic Sidonian were indistinguishable. Judeans, on the other hand, adopted demonstrably fewer aspects of a Hellenizing lifestyle. Their houses were marked by the absence of goods that were familiar in the homes of their neighbors. In the second century BCE, Judean material identity was passive. Ioudaioi simply did not acquire or manufacture various types of objects, e.g., imported table wares, painted house walls, and decorative figurines. What goods they did have were the same types that occur at Idumean and Phoenician sites. Judean households were less adorned, plainer and poorer, but not otherwise markedly distinct. This passive material identity lasted through the Maccabean uprising and the formation of the Hasmonean kingdom. Not until the early-mid first century BCE, sometime between the rule of Alexander Jannaeus and the imposition of Roman rule, did Ioudaioi create an alternative to the Hellenized households of Idumeans and Phoenicians. By turning everyday objects into cultural markers, Ioudaioi actively made their identity manifest. In so doing, they made themselves identifiable wherever they lived – whether in Judea, Galilee, or Gaulanitis. The practice of household Judaism allowed a Ioudaios to be readily identified as a Jew.
Jews Judaeans Judaizing Judaism Problems of Categorization in Ancient History
Th e very title of this journal reflects a commonplace in scholarly discourse. We want to understand "Judaism" in the Persian and Graeco-Roman periods: the lives and religion of ancient Jews. Some scholars in recent years have asked whether Ioudaioi and its counterparts in other ancient languages are better rendered "Jews" or "Judaeans" in English. Th is essay puts that question in a larger frame, by considering first Ioudaismos and then the larger problem of ancient religion. It argues that there was no category of "Judaism" in the Graeco-Roman world, no "religion" too, and that the Ioudaioi were understood until late antiquity as an ethnic group comparable to other ethnic groups, with their distinctive laws, traditions, customs, and God. Th ey were indeed Judaeans.
Ethnicity and Ancient Judaism: Jewish Identities in 1st Century Alexandria and Antioch
New Perspectives on the Ancient World. Modern perceptions, ancient representations. BAR International Series 1782 (eds. P.P. Funari; R.S. Garraffoni; B. Letalien), 2008
The goal of this paper is to present a comparative study of Jewish identity as expressed by the Jewish community of Alexandria, in Egypt, and as expressed by the Jewish community of Antioch, in Syria, in the first half of the 1st century CE.
of change, since it shifted from a basically ethnic to a basically religious definition. However, this shift did not result from the formation of diaspora communities per se, but from a coincidence between two structural factors. First, Judean ethnic identity from the outset had a central cultic component. Second, distinctly religious identities that did not overlap any longer with the traditional forms of social identities such as ethnicity and citizenship started emerging in Mediterranean societies in the late second-early first century BCE, creating the basic conditions that allowed the progressive transformation over several centuries of the Judean identity from an ethnic identity with a prominent cultic component to a religious identity. The span of time between the late second century BCE and the second or third centuries CE may be defined as a period of transition—partly explaining the well-known controversy in recent scholarship as to whether the Greek Ioudaios and the Latin Iudaeus should be translated as " Jew " or " Judean, " although the pace of evolution varied according to regions. These variations in chronology invite us to look more closely at the conditions that prompted this shift from an ethnic to a religious identity. In this paper I focus on the impact of state policy—and more particularly the official, administrative definition of personal and group statuses—on the shaping and evolution of local Judean/Jewish communal identities. More precisely I investigate how the very different definitions of personal status that were successively instituted in Egypt by the Ptolemies and the Roman imperial authorities affected the ways in which the Judeans who lived there shaped and reshaped their communal identity. As I show, the two related notions that the Judeans/Jews were a minority—with the afferent connotation of weaker social status—and were distinct from all other social groups in whose midst they lived, must be apprehended in a very different way under Ptolemaic and Roman rules.
Judaean and Christ-Follower Identities: Grounds for a Distinction
New Testament Studies
In NTS 62.3 (July 2016) David Horrell argued that certain passages in 1 Corinthians 7 and 1 Peter 3 showed ‘ethnicising’ traits among the early Christians. He set this result against an alleged trend in scholarship that would distinguish and disparage a closed ethnic Judaism in relation to a new spiritual-universal Christianity. The present authors’ work was proffered as representative of this trend, even though no evidence was cited for such a connection and their work moves in a very different direction. Leaving aside Horrell's interpretation of the New Testament passages for reasons of space, this article takes up the larger question of Judaean and Christ-movement identities by reconsidering the position of Ioudaioi and Christ-followers in the early Roman Empire. Using different but convergent (social-scientific and historical-philological) methods, we find that ethnos-language was everywhere applied to the Judaeans, that this reflected normalcy and exchange with the world, a...