JEWS OR PAGANS? 147This may have had a polemical thrust, even beyond what some of the stories
explicitly indicate. Perhaps this is especially true of the stories in which the
death of a rabbi causes the collapse of an idol or pagan temple, since at the
time the Talmudic passage was compiled Christians were taking most of the
credit for the destruction of the public institutions of paganis min Palestine.
Epiphanius claims that his hero, Joseph, turned the Tiberian Hadrianeum
into a church after he had won a magical competition with the Jews. This
suggestionmaybepartlyconfirmedbythefactthatEusebiusalsoknewofthe
weeping columns of Caesarea but believed they were weeping for the unbur-
iedChristianvictimsofpersecution.^63 Polemicalornot,someoftheserabbinic
stories presuppose a conception of the universe as characterized by a precise,
and hypostatized, moral economy. Whenever some good disappears from the
world, a corresponding piece of evil must go, too, hence, the death of a rabbi
is balanced by the collapse of an idol (by contrast, the death of one of the
patriarch’s men causes a near calamity!). This seems to foreshadow the much
later notion that there are in each generation righteous men by whose merit
God permits the world to exist.^64
Notonlydothestories,then,provideaninterpretatiorabbinicaoftheprod-
igy, in which the death of the rabbi plays a role similar to (though inversive
of) that of the mass catastrophe in pagan prodigy collections, but they may
also have offered an aetiology, fro mthe perspective of the fourth century, for
thechanges intheappearance,and sointhe publiclife,ofthe city.^65 Another
suchstory,reportedelsewhereinYAvodahZarah(4:4,43d),claimsthatRabbi
Yohanan,theleadingrabbinicfigureofTiberiasinthesecondhalfofthethird
century, had ordered one Bar Drusai, apparently supposed to be a pagan,^66 to
remove thestatues from the publicbathhouse of Tiberiasand destroy them.^67
Thepagandestroyedallbutone—which,theTalmudexplains,wassuspected
of having been worshiped by a Jew (!). So, according to rabbinic law, destruc-
tion was not sufficient. The idol had to be discarded in a way that rendered it
(^63) See K. Holum, “Identity and the Late Antique City: The Case of Caesarea,” inReligious
andEthnicCommunities, 157–60.
(^64) SeeG.Scholem,“TheTraditionoftheThirty-SixHiddenJustMen,”inTheMessianicIdea
inJudaism:AndOtherEssaysinJewishSpirituality(New York; Schocken, 1971), pp. 251–56.
(^65) On statues in pagan prodigies, see Ch. Clerc,Lesthe ́oriesrelativesaucultedesimageschez
les auteurs grecs du IImesiecle apres J.C., (Diss., Paris, 1915), pp. 45–49. In pagan prodigies, the
suffering of the gods resonates with that of humans.
(^66) Since the story, or the Talmud’s editors, take it for granted that Bar Drusai is engaged in the
act of “nullifying” the statues, that is, rendering them halakhically harmless by disfiguring them;
this can be done only by pagans. On “nullification” of idols, see G. Blidstein, “Nullification of
Idolatry,”PAAJR41–42 (1973–1974): 1–44. On Bar Drusai, see S. Friedman, “Recovering the
Historical Ben D’rosai,”Sidra14 (1998): 77–92.
(^67) Curiously, what seems to have been the central public bathhouse of the city, excavated in
the 1950s, is said to have been built in the fourth century. Its floors were paved with mosaics
depicting fish and animals; seeNEAEHLP. 1466.