RABBIS AND PATRIARCHS ON THE MARGINS 105non-Jewish. And yet the evidence, including, surprisingly, that from rabbinic
literature, is quite uniform in regarding the Jewish cities of Palestine and their
rural satellites as characterized by a predominantly pagan public life, though
rabbinic and Christian literature nevertheless regard the cities as having simul-
taneously been in some sense Jewish. We perhaps need to assume that some
Jews retained a sense of being Jewish if only to understand how northern
Palestine could have become Jewish in a strong sense after 350. We can only
speculate about the character of its Jewishness before that date; for now it may
prove instructive to try to imagine Judaism, or rather the disintegrated shards
of Judaism, surviving as a nonexclusive religious option in a religious system
that was basically pagan.
Thus, the Jewish core (the most important component of which was the
rabbis), as far as we know, was a part of the system. It was not very important
sociopolitically (though probably increasingly influential with time) but func-
tioned quite significantly in providing for the Jews a cultural option radically
different from the Greco-Roman norm. How did the rabbis, who needed to
take seriously the Pentateuch’s horror of strange gods, cope with the basically
pagan society in which they lived, even when they lived in Jewish cities like
Tiberias and Sepphoris? In chapter 5, I will argue that the peculiar formalism
of rabbinic legislation about paganism, whereby the rabbis defined, or rather
misprised, a pervasive cultural norm as consisting exclusively of acts of wor-
ship directed at fetishes, was the rabbis’ accommodative mechanism—an error
that fortunately allowed them to live and function in the cities without whose
resources they would have dwindled to sectarian insignificance.
Changes
With the outbreak of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66C.E., five centuries
of imperial support for the Temple, the Torah, and their human representa-
tives, the priests and scribes, came to an end. Though the hope of some Jews
for their imminent revival ended only with the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt
in 135, the centralizing and integrating tendencies of the Roman Empire
made such a revival unlikely from the start. Throughout the Near East in
the late first and early second centuries the emperors were replacing quasi-
autonomous local rulers, the “client kings,” with Roman officials, establishing
“colonies” (cities wit hmore or less Greco-Roman constitutions and in some
cases a citizen body that also enjoyed Roman citizenship and so favorable
tax status),^2 imposing direct taxation, and introducing judges (primarily the
(^2) On “colonies” in the imperial period, which often enjoyed little more than additional pres-
tige, see P. Garnsey and R. Saller,The Roman Empire: Economy, Society, and Culture(Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1987), pp. 26–28; 189–90; B. Isaac,The Limits of Empire: The
Roman Army in the East, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), pp. 342–63.