Networks and Ethnogenesis 107In response to the destruction in Judea, Judaism underwent a series of reforms, initi-
ated by the rabbis in Palestine and Babylon, which entailed stricter adherence to Jewish
laws and moral codes—the halakhah recorded in the Mishnah (Schürer 1986: 513).
Equally, following the cataclysms in Judea and the uprisings across the Empire, the
Roman state imposed a “Jewish tax,” thefiscus Judaicus, on Diaspora Jews. Combined,
these elements—shock and mourning for the destruction of the Temple and the deaths of
so many Jews, the gradual adoption of new moral codes and laws, and the transformation
of the Temple tax into thefiscus Judaicus, payable to their Roman overlords—caused Jews
to experience social tension with their Greco-Roman environment. This tension strength-
ened interpersonal bonds between communities, re-activating a dispersed “strong-tie”
network built on a new understanding of their shared ethnicity. I suggest that these
reforms were gradually transmitted across this social network of the Jewish Diaspora—an
ethnic network that had been strengthened andrenewedas a result of the destruction in
Judea (Collar 2013a; 2013b). By interpreting this trend in the epigraphy as evidence of
the impact of new universalized halakhah of the rabbinic reforms on the lives of ordinary
Jews, we may consider the phenomenon as a demonstration of how the Jewish com-
munity re-created themselves across a dynamic network based on strong-tie “familial”
ethnic connections.
Although the communities were widely dispersed, communications were strong
enough to enable first the organization of a number of broadly simultaneous revolts, and
then the gradual adoption of renewed Jewish halakhah. This suggests that the network
structure of the Diaspora was akin to a small world: news of the rebellions and the
subsequent rabbinic reforms possibly came to the communities through long-distance
weak-tie connections, and the communities then were strengthened by this network
structure and so passed on the changes in Jewish identity that were required by the
Mishnah across these renewed strong-tie bonds (see also, Chapter 25, “Ethnicity:
Greeks, Jews, and Christians,” and Chapter 28, “Romans and Jews”).
The Germanic Tribes
The final case study is the ethnogenesis of the Germanic tribes in the late Roman period.
It appears at first that we know much about the various groups that made up the “Ger-
mans”: they were the topics of histories, with both Caesar and Tacitus contributing
important works. However, the evidence used (mythological, linguistic, archaeological,
literary) to build a picture of ancient Germanic tribal society is open to interpretation.
Early German ethnic identity was a controversial and political topic in twentieth-century
scholarship, largely because the foundations of National Socialism were based on the
idea that the modern Germans were the direct racial descendants of an ancient and
unified ethnic group (Liebeshuetz 2007). However, after the Second World War, the
picture was radically changed by Wenskus (1961). Using anthropological studies of
modern tribes, he concluded that, even though they were described and described
themselves using terms implying kinship, the various peoples who formed the complex
picture of ancient German tribes were not kinship organizations. Instead, he argued