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As is well-known, the Jews of Palestine largely refrained from using figural art from around the 2nd century BCE (or a bit earlier) to the third or fourth century CE, including the creation of statues.  There were, of course, exceptions to this general phenomenon – some figures show up in grave graffiti and on some municipal coins from cities like Sepphoris, that had a strong Jewish population – but when seen against the archaeological record of the Greek and Roman worlds the absence is striking.  Equally striking is the virtual explosion of such art beginning in the third and fourth centuries CE.  While we still lack identifiably “Jewish” statues, representations of figures begin appearing routinely on synagogue floors, among other places.  What happened?

The predominant scholarly explanation for the absence of such art in the earlier period is that Jews interpreted “the second commandment” strictly.  This, more or less, follows the explanation of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus.  Yet in a recent essay, Jason Ehrenkrook suggested that Josephus may have had ulterior motives for offering this explanation: it makes it easier to convince his Roman patrons that the Jews refused to erect statues of the Roman emperors due to religious rather than political scruples.

At the other end, scholars have suggested that the explosion of such art in the third century is due to a combination of (1) influence from non-Jewish art and (2) a deliberate reinterpretation of the second commandment or reinterpretation of the art so that it is not covered by this commandment.  There are unquestionable parallels between Jewish and Christian (and Roman) art at this time, but that does not really explain why it began when it did.  There is also some rabbinic evidence for (2), but it is rather thin and in any case probably was not of much concern to the actual patrons of this artwork.

The question of why Jews avoided figural art for centuries and then took it up with a passion has, undoubtedly, a complex answer. What I would like simply to suggest here, though, is an angle that I am not sure has been sufficiently appreciated.

In an earlier post, I suggested that Jewish knowledge of the Bible through the first century CE may have been far less comprehensive than we sometimes think.  It expands, certainly in the Galilee, beginning in the second century CE.  This might, I think, help us to understand the changing art.

In antiquity, almost all art was based on myths.  If the art – whether from the ancient Near East or the Greek or Roman worlds – did not actually representat such myths, it modeled contemporary scenes on them (e.g., an athlete or monarch portrayed as a mythic hero).

The Jews, though, had no divine or semi-divine figures to represent and, just as importantly, most did not really have easy access to or know the myths that could be represented.  Later, as knowledge of the Bible spread, so did the art, which was almost entirely modeled on biblical stories such as the sacrifice of Isaac and the Exodus from Egypt.  The increased knowledge of the Bible not only increased access to these myths, but also helped to authorize them for use.  It was less the second commandment per se that stopped Jews from figural representation before then than an inability to frame a Jewish myth that would be appropriate for artistic representation.  The same, incidentally, applies to Christian art, which also begins to develop around the third century as their sacred texts begin to circulate more widely.

Just an idea.

 

Reading the twitter feed of the Al Qassam Brigades during this ongoing crisis is a bit surreal.  Many of the tweets are dry, simple facts: how many “projectiles” have been fired where.  These tweets appear (from cross-checking with those coming from Israeli officials and new outlets) more or less accurate. Sometimes the tweets are downright lies. Occasionally, though, they seem to go off the rails.  The feed reports with what seems like glee when Palestinian civilians – especially families and children – are killed in the fighting creating a posture of the victimized.  Other tweets, however, try to project strength with apocalyptic predictions of doom, such as the now famous phrase that Israel has “opened the gates of hell” or this, from 7:29 AM on November 20:

@IDFSpokesperson Al Qassam Brigades is always ready to smash your arrogant heads. #GazaUnderattack #Gaza #Resistance #Shalestones

I’m sure that had a powerful impact on the IDF.

Even with the welter of emotions that I have now, it is hard to suppress the text scholar in me.  These tweets make me wonder if everybody in the Al Qassam tweeting office is on the same page.  Do these tweets, and the dissonance they sometimes exhibit, reflect the personalities and emotions of the tweeters more than any unified strategic goal?  This thought occurred to me especially on reading two tweets that came out shortly after the bus bombing in Tel Aviv.  At 3:46 PM today, they tweeted:

Oh, Zionists, #Netanyahu‘s government dragging you for hell, you have the choice whether to stay in hell or escape, go back home in Germany.

The evocation of the Holocaust here might have gone a little too far, even for Hamas – and thus we get a “revised” tweet five minutes later:

Oh, Zionists You have to drag yourselves out of hell, go back home now, go back to Garmany, Poland, Russia, America and anywhere else. #Gaza

It’s as if the dispassionate guy – the one tweeting the number of projectiles, etc. – turned to his office mate after his excited tweet and told him to tone it down; this hurts our credibility.  Really, Hamas is not interested in causing another Holocaust, only that they control the territory.  This would play slightly better among some audiences.

Of course, I don’t know if this reconstruction is correct.  When it all ends and settles down (as I pray it does sooner rather than later), though, I would be interested in knowing – as I never will -which of the tweeters gets the better promotions and raises.

“Regular public reading of the Torah,” Wikipedia (as of today) reports, “was introduced by Ezra the Scribe after the return of the Judean exiles from the Babylonian captivity.”  The original source for this claim was certainly not the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, which report a public reading of the Torah (so we think) but make no mention that the practice did or should continue, whether on a regular or irregular basis.  Rather, the Wikipedia article repeats a claim popular today – whose origin I have not tracked down – that conflates at least two rabbinic traditions.  One of these traditions, in the Palestinian Talmud, Megilla 4:1, attributes the regular reading of the Torah on Shabbat mornings to Moses.  Another, in the Babylonian Talmud, Bava Qama 82a, ascribes to Ezra the beginning of regular Torah readings on Shabbat afternoon and Monday and Thursday mornings.  I suspect that earlier scholars were uncomfortable with ascribing any part of the practice to Moses, so simply assimilated that claim to the Ezra tradition.

The more interesting question, though, is whether it is true.  It turns out that there is no – none – evidence for the regular public reading of the Torah until the first century BCE to first century CE, and even then our information is very fragmentary.  A single inscription from a synagogue in Jerusalem seems to mention the reading of the Torah, but how often, how much, and in what form is not stated.  In the New Testament, the synagogue is portrayed as a place of teaching, although in very few cases is it explicit that what is taught is the Bible, and in even fewer that it was read aloud.  Our evidence instead seems to point more toward the second or even third centuries, CE, when regular Torah reading (especially in Palestine) may have started in some form.

This, then, leads to another question: If Jews were not hearing the Torah (or any other part of our Bible) read regularly, and if they were highly illiterate and in any case would have had limited access to biblical scrolls, did they know the Bible at all?  If so, how and how much?

Outside of Judea/Palestine, at least in the first century CE, the Bible was probably better known than inside.  The Torah had been translated into Greek centuries earlier and several other books were translated over the course of time.  These books all became the inspiration for a rich cultural production that drew upon them.  Even if someone never heard or read the Bible itself, they may have read Philo or Artapanus, and thus learned parts of it in an ad hoc fashion.

But in Jerusalem that was not the case.  The priests and other ritual experts largely controlled access to it, and they would have disseminated knowledge through (1) the teaching of short selected passages; (2) the deployment of certain oracular or prophetic passages to prove a point; or (3) practical use of passages, e.g., to heal a child or write an amulet.  Surely people would have known some stories that can be found in the Bible, but their knowledge of them would have been secondary or tertiary and learned orally.  Knowledge of the Bible would have been spotty at best and almost never sequential.  This would change for many in late antiquity with the institution of regular readings in the synagogue, but that change was yet to come.

So now, would anyone like to make the appropriate changes to Wikipedia?

In the year between graduating from college and beginning graduate school, I stumbled on a book that profoundly changed the way that I thought.  Gerd Theissen’s Sociology of Early Palestinian Christianity (Fortress, 1978) presented a way of reading New Testament texts that thoroughly rooted them in their historical contexts.  Theissen read these texts in a way that was less attuned to their surface arguments than to their social function.  Behind every text there is a community, and attentive reading of opaque ancient texts can bring this community into light.  This technique, I would soon learn in graduate school, is in one form or another basic to much of the study of early Judaism and Christianity.  While later I would better recognize the weaknesses of this approach, at the time it opened to me an intellectual vista.  It was exciting.

Last week I finally got to meet Gerd Theissen and tell him personally how much his work had meant to me.  I also had the opportunity to hear his keynote lecture at the conference that I was attending.  (More accurately, since the lecture was in German I followed along with a written English translation that had been prepared.)  The lecture was a tour de force, a history of how New Testament scholars had engaged with social theory.  In Theissen’s telling, New Testament scholars, particularly in Germany, were well attuned to sociological questions in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but then they stopped.  They would not regain interest in these questions until the 1970s.  In effect, Theissen argued (and I did clarify this with him afterward to make sure that I understood this), German NT scholarship stood still for some 50-60 years, only to pick up with questions that came primarily from the United States.

Now this brought me up short.  If Theissen is correct, it would mean that the two world wars and the Shoah had no impact on German NT scholarship.  This is disturbing for all kinds of reasons.  What got my attention was one of the less important of these reasons, and that is the implications that this could have for the very kind of scholarship to which Theissen has been devoted.

Let me explain.  One of the standard ways of interpreting much ancient literature is to correlate it with the historical context in which it was produced.  This makes intuitive sense: Could Jews and Christians in the first two centuries actually fail, for example, to respond to Roman power and domination?  The important historical conditions of antiquity anchor these texts and provide a context to interpret them.  The texts do not float around abstractly.

Now the problem:  If I were a historian far in the future reading 1950s German NT scholarship as scholars like Theissen today read the NT, I would have to account for these texts in the context of German’s wrenching material and moral scars at that time.  How could the wars and their aftermath have had no impact on New Testament scholarship, of all things?

If the wars and the Shoah really had little or no impact on German New Testament scholarship, perhaps the great events of antiquity had little impact on some or many contemporary texts.  Maybe the relative silence in many of these texts to contemporary events that strike us as having great import is to be understood not as a veiled response to historical conditions, but as indifference.  Unless there are explicit statements in the texts, this would mean pulling back from attempting to explain texts as “responses to” great historical events.

I have learned a great deal from Gerd Theissen, but I hope that in this case he is wrong.

 

 

Translations are intriguing.  To translate a text – especially a large and complex one – is no small undertaking.  A translation project originates as a potentially idiosyncratic perception by somebody (or a group) that their target audience needs linguistic access to a text. The translation itself might be a labor of love funded out of personal resources, perhaps with the hope of turning an eventual profit.  On the other end of the spectrum are projects initiated and financed by a group because they want access to a text.  As to the translation itself, it may be an accurate rendition or not, pleasant to read or not, and – regardless of whether it is accurate or fluent – it may acquire an audience.  Or not.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I stumbled across a Yiddish translation of the Mishnah.  This particular translation dated from the early twentieth century and was produced in Europe (I did not pay attention at the time to where in Europe it was produced).  This alone was interesting.  This was, I am sure, due to my own ignorance, but I did not expect to find a Yiddish-speaking Jewish community that was interested in the Mishnah but was not comfortable accessing it in Hebrew in that time and place.  Where did such a community live, and how large was it?

I am no specialist in these matters and I invite others to supply a more full answer and cite the relevant bibliography.  What I can say is that my searches in the National Library of Israel turned up several such translations.  We find Yiddish translations of selected parts of the Mishnah (mainly “Ethics of the Fathers”) as early as the fourteenth century.  The first full translation of the Mishnah that I could find, though, dates from 1862 and was printed in Czernowitz.  The pages in this edition were divided into thirds: the Hebrew text; notes (in Rashi script); and a translation with explanation in Yiddish in the bottom third.  Czernowitz had a major Jewish population at this time, and a bit later would be a center for promotion of Yiddish.  At this stage, however, the text seemed aimed at those who knew rabbinic Hebrew, but weakly – or who wanted to learn it.  The Hebrew was privileged.

A second, and to my mind more interesting, translation, was printed in Warsaw in 1887.  The layout is similar to that of the Czernowitz version, but it is clear from its multiple printing that it found an audience.  Unlike the earlier translation, this one had a forward (in Hebrew) that made it clear that the translation was not intended for women – who even if they did not know Hebrew they were not allowed to learn Torah – or for “boors” (‘amme ha-aretz) who did not have the capacity to learn Torah.  It was, instead targetted to ordinary, hard-working Jews who did not have the time to master Hebrew to the degree that would give them easy access to the text.  Like modern translations of rabbinic literature, this was meant to make sacred texts accessible to a wider, less-learned audience.  And it makes it clear that such an audience existed in Warsaw in the late nineteenth century.

Later editions followed.  By the time a translation was printed in Vienna-Berlin by the Menorah publishing company in 1927, Hebrew no longer held the pride of place: now Hebrew and Yiddish were printed side by side.  Several translations were also made following World War II for Yiddish speakers, especially in Montreal and New York.

These translations make visible a whole community of Jews who seriously wanted to engage their religious texts but were far more comfortable with their vernacular language than they  were with Hebrew or Aramaic.  Not much has changed.