Sharing my inner geek

Remember the class I helped create, World of the Talmud? Well, to no one's shock and surprise, it's my favorite class this semester, hands down. Let me share with you some detail about why.

When Jews want to know about the time of the rabbis (think 70-400CE, approx.), they usually study the rabbinic literature, like Talmud and all the other non-Talmudic contemporary sources. BUT, I (and therefore the professor) protested, that's so insular! What else do we know?

So yesterday, the prof went over all our other sources of knowledge of Judaism in this time period:

1) Pagan literature, like Hellenistic philosophers. Written in Greek and Latin
2) Patristic lit, or stuff recorded by the early Church fathers, in Greek, Latin, and Syriac
3) Roman legal sources, when they mention the Jews in their law codes
4) Egyptian papyri
5) Stone and bronze inscriptions, mostly from synagogue plaques and funerary epitaphs
6) Archeological sources, usually old synagogues

We can learn so much from this stuff, often that contradicts what the Jewish literature tells us. For example: from rabbinic sources we learn about the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE. Jews fought a worthwhile and highly successful guerrilla war against the Romans until they lost in the end. Rabbi Akiva and a bunch of other famous rabbis were martyred, and Jews were kicked out of Jerusalem once and for all. It was the last time they had an independent state til 1948. The holiday Lag B'Omer commemorates it.

But yesterday we looked at two other sources: Dio Cassius, a Roman historian, and Eusebius, a Bishop in Caesaria. Basically they gave a wholly different account - they said that the Jews were ridiculously outnumbered, it was a losing battle the whole time, and that thousands upon thousands were slaughtered for no reason other than the Jews' stubbornness. In order to reconstruct history, we have to look at all the sources in context.

Another example: the Talmud never talks about women having any power in the larger communities, it portrays the synagogue and community life as very patriarchal. But in synagogue inscriptions from Greece and Asia Minor, a lot of them reference women's names with the translation for "leader" or "benefactor." So which was right? Were the titles honorific or real? There's support for both arguments. We looked at some data which supports that women in the Diaspora did have power - we read a Church historian's summary of the death of Hypatia, a prominent woman philosopher who was killed by Christians in the late 300s for teaching Greek pagan philosophy. The theory goes, Hypatia was a woman who obviously had power, otherwise her story wouldn't have been recorded by the church. All these Greek Jews lived in a pagan environment. We know that they acculturated, since some synagogues have mosiacs of Helios and other gods inlaid in their floors .. so why wouldn't their temples have female leaders like the Greeks did?

And last but certainly not least, a third example of how learning about non-Jewish sources can add to our understanding. The Talmud, for the most part, is pretty anti-conversion. It divides the world into categories of Jews and non-Jews. Yet, inscriptions from the 3rd century have very clear categories of people who donated money to the temple: Jews, converts, and something called "God-fearers." These were people who were Jewish sympathizers, but who hadn't officially converted. It makes me think: today we have Jews and Jewish converts (though it isn't polite to point them out as such). But we don't have a word for those intermarried couples where the spouse hasn't converted but comes to temple. Or for the non-Jewish parent who still enrolls their kid in religious school. The ancients did have a word, "God-fearers." But the rabbis didn't approve of it, so they didn't even include it in their own personal literature. We only find it - albeit in spades - in external sources. How much do we today self-censor, and why don't we have similar categories in outreach?

Just some food for thought, courtesy of World of Talmud.