jews 393
incorporates a good deal of knowledge about the sea and seafaring, including some
maritime law (Sperber, 1986, 2000; Patai, 1998). The tension between a Jewish incli-
nation toward terra firma and ancient Mediterranean connectivity is vividly put on
display in a rabbinic blessing required to be recited upon seeing the Mediterranean,
but only if the sighting is extraordinary for the beholder: “Blessed is He that made the
Great Sea” (Mishna Berakhot 9:2: Danby, 1933: 9).
Rabbinic knowledge of the Mediterranean and other distant locales reflects in part
the dispersion of Jews beyond their ancestral homeland. By the first century ce, Jews
could be found in most regions of the Mediterranean (Smallwood, 1999), even as far
away as Spain, as evidenced by the apostle Paul’s intention to journey there some time
in the 60s. Since his modus operandi in any place that he visited was to preach to Jews
before turning to gentiles, Romans 15.23–28 suggests there was already an estab-
lished community there. Later, after Roman victory over Jewish rebellion in Palestine
in 67–70 and again in 132–135, the presence of Jews across the Mediterranean was
augmented by refugees who fled the bloodshed and by slaves taken as prisoners of
war. The extent to which these widely-dispersed populations of Jews, with theological
and ritual limits on their participation with out-groups, became integrated into the
culture of Greco–Roman society, with its ideals of reciprocal relationships based on
benefaction, patronage and dependency, is a matter of intense debate (Schwartz,
2010; Weitzman, 2012). Similar questions can be asked about the ancient world’s
largest Jewish community in Parthian and Sassanian Mesopotamia, called Babylonia
by Jews.
Late antique testimony to Jewish inhabitation across the Mediterranean abounds,
whether tangibly, as in archaeological evidence from Egypt, Cyrene, Asia Minor,
the Aegean, Rome, and southern Italy (Levine, 1999, and appropriate chapters in
S.T. Katz, 2006), or graphically in the records of church councils and imperial acta
of the Visigothic kingdom (Bradbury, 2006) and the letters of Gregory the Great
(S. Katz, 1933–34; Bammel, 1991).
That rabbinic Judaism—a certain kind of Judaism—was to be dominant among
Jews was not a foregone conclusion in antiquity. The multicultural influences that
characterized the Hellenistic and early Roman eras lent themselves to sectarianism,
whereby Jews disagreed over biblical interpretation and the political configuration of
Jewish society. The resulting milieu, which spawned the Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes,
Dead Sea scrolls, militants, and messianist figures (including Jesus of Nazareth), was
shattered by rebellion and military defeat at the hands of the Romans. After the
Roman destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in 70 ce, the rabbis succeeded the
Pharisees and redefined Judaism and Jewish authority.
The history of how rabbinic Judaism became normative is hidden in the historio-
graphical obscurity of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Some traces of its
diffusion across the Mediterranean can be seen in medieval Jewish sources.
The rabbis and the MediterraneanAfter 70 ce, pre-modern Jews were rarely concerned with recording history
(Yerushalmi, 1989: 31–34). The extant Jewish literary corpus of late antiquity and the
Middle Ages is overwhelmingly focused on Jewish law (halakha), biblical exegesis,
and liturgy. Even when philosophy and the esoteric sciences became fields of interest