The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis. Naftali S. Cohn
Читать онлайн книгу.
or with the non-rabbinic Judaean “commoners”—may in fact have had more authority than rabbis.84
Among the other “hybrid” subgroups of Judaean society—whether or not they formed cohesive communities—there were likely also ritual authorities particular to those groups. These authorities, too, may have been political leaders or ritual experts without any particular political power. And they may have been priests, synagogue leaders, scribes, or others, like the rabbis, dedicated to the interpretation of the Torah and its traditional practices. To the extent that Romanized Judaeans, those engaged with Samaritan society (even perhaps full Samaritans), Judaean believers in Jesus, and those whom the rabbis believed observed the traditional way of life incorrectly were distinct from the “people of” a given city or village (that is, “common” local Judaeans), they likely had their own experts to whom they turned. The Christian Didascalia Apostolorum may be instructive on this point. According to the Didascalia (which may be, as Fonrobert argues, partially addressed to Judaean believers in Jesus within a larger Christian community), bishops are empowered to determine the detailed ritual practices such as are laid out in the text, and they are empowered to adjudicate disputes, perhaps through unofficial arbitration. The Christian community imagined in this text is subject to the authority of its leaders, who, according to the text, are ritual and legal experts.85 In parallel, leaders of the various Judaean and hybrid groups likely claimed similar authority over their own communities.
Based on the various hints provided by the rabbinic and non-rabbinic evidence, it seems that others in Judaean society besides rabbis also claimed the authority to determine how traditional rituals should be performed. The rabbis were but one small group in the complex social and political landscape of late second-or early third-century Roman Palestine. As I argue, they aimed to be the ultimate authority over traditional Judaean practice, but others likely claimed the same authority.
The Roman Context and Cultural Mimicry
Living under Roman imperial rule in the presence of numerous expressions of the dominant colonial culture and competing against other Judaean groups and ritual authorities, the rabbis appear to have appropriated the model of the jurist in order to lay a unique claim for their own importance and power. As Amram Tropper has suggested, it is highly probable that the rabbis were familiar with this cultural model. Based on a variety of evidence, Tropper argues: “It [is] likely that Greek-speaking lawyers who possessed at least a rudimentary knowledge of Roman law flourished throughout the east. In short, the presence of Roman legal jurisdiction and Greek-speaking lawyers in the Near East indicates that the fundamentals of Roman law were probably well known throughout the Graeco-Roman environment in Palestine.”86 Thus the rabbis would have been at least generally familiar with elements of Roman law and the institution of the Roman jurist. By fashioning themselves jurists of Jewish ritual law, the rabbis seem to be borrowing from the Roman cultural model with which they were familiar.87
Following Beth Berkowitz’s insight in her analysis of rabbinic mimicry of Roman methods of capital punishment, this cultural mimicry can be seen as an “appropriation of power” achieved by “cleverly constructing rabbinic power out of the cultural materials of Rome.”88 In Roman culture, legal ingenuity in juristic argumentation was a source of prestige for those of relatively high social standing who engaged in this activity. Indeed, Alan Watson argues that this feature of Roman law explains the continuing importance of legal interpretation by experts for many centuries.89 Rabbis were not, for the most part, from the same upper stratum of society from which the Roman jurists emerged. Nevertheless, this model seems to have presented an opportunity for rabbis to attain a modicum of power or expand the minimal power they already had simply by fashioning themselves this way.90
The rabbis mimicked Roman cultural forms pertaining to the law and legal practice in many ways, and this seems to be one of them. In addition to fashioning themselves jurists, the rabbis also appropriated Roman conceptions of capital punishment, as Berkowitz has shown; they imitated the form and ideology of the scholasticism and sophism of the Second Sophistic and perhaps even conceived of their traditional system of practice as law in imitation of Roman notions of the law, as Tropper has shown; and they mimicked the style of presenting legal material in a heterogeneous manner, as Simon-Shoshan has shown.91 In part, each of these similarities between the Mishnah and Roman literary and cultural forms stems from a shared cultural universe, as Tropper and Simon-Shoshan emphasize; but, as Berkowitz stresses, the rabbis’ use of Roman cultural models serves their ends specifically because they are from the dominant culture as well.
As Berkowitz demonstrates, rabbinic mimicry also involved resistance to the dominant Roman culture and its power. In modeling themselves on Roman jurists, the rabbis were not merely appropriating a Roman cultural model to advance their own cause; they were also resisting Roman dominance by asserting the importance of Judaean tradition and their own version of this tradition. Law, the rabbis insist, includes ritual practice and is not limited to civil and criminal law, as it largely is in the Roman legal system of the time.92 The inclusion of ritual law signals, moreover, that at the heart of the law is the Torah, in which law encompasses all these realms. The true law, in other words, stems from the Torah. By claiming to be jurists of Judaean ritual law, the rabbis are imagining themselves in a Roman mold, but they are also asserting the primacy of their ancestral tradition. This is precisely what distinguishes them from Romans. Because they claim to be purveyors of the authentic interpretation of the ancestral tradition, this is also what establishes their authority among Judaeans.93 The rabbis, then, are not simply borrowing from the dominant culture; rather, they are negotiating multiple cultural models in order to carve out their own niche that is at the same time uniquely Jewish, uniquely Roman, and uniquely rabbinic.94
Chapter 2
The Temple, the Great Court, and the Rabbinic Invention of the Past
The makeup of society in Roman Palestine at the time the Mishnah was written and the place the rabbis claim for themselves within that society provide an important context for understanding how the rabbis remember the past and how the past they remember is shaped by and functions within the present. In this and the following two chapters, I take up three key ways in which the mishnaic Temple ritual narratives, as memories and as Temple discourse, make a powerful claim for the authority of the rabbis, one small group within the larger complex social landscape of Roman Syria Palaestina. These three aspects of the rabbinic narration of the Temple ritual of the past help the rabbis assert their own primacy as legal interpreters and the primacy of their version of the traditional way of life—as against the various alternative versions that existed among competing subgroups within society.
In this chapter, I discuss one key component of the rabbinic memory of the Temple in the Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives—an aspect of this memory that is fundamentally bound up with the place the rabbis assert for themselves in post-destruction society, the largely made-up “character” within these narratives: the Great Court. On multiple occasions in these narratives, the rabbis invent a key role in the performance of Temple ritual for the Great Court, and they portray the Great Court as an institution with ultimate authority over the way Temple rituals were carried out. The rabbis construct the Court and its members as their predecessors in Temple times, so the past in these accounts functions as a mirror on the present, reflecting the image of the rabbis as they see themselves. And the memory of the past, in which the rabbinic predecessors are legal-ritual authorities, makes an argument for rabbinic legal-ritual authority in post-Temple times. By inserting the Court into the past, the rabbis are asserting the antiquity of and providing a myth of origins for the role they claim for themselves within society.
The Great Court and the Rituals of the Temple
Throughout the Mishnah, not just in Temple ritual narratives, the court appears numerous times in an abstract sense, as a legal body that hears and adjudicates cases (or the location where this judicial institution engages in its activities), as well as in the concrete historical sense, as a legal institution existing in the time of the Temple. When referring to the purportedly historical Court of the Second Temple era, the Mishnah uses a number of different terms: בית דין (bēit din, Court), בית דין