FIVE

THE RABBIS AND URBAN CULTURE

W

EHAVEALREADYSEENthattherabbissharedaterritorywith
Greco-Roman urbanity.^1 They, too, were concentrated and exer-
cised what influence they had, primarily in the “Jewish” cities of
Palestine and the larger villages of Lower Galilee, and secondarily in proxi-
matecitieslikeJoppa,CaesareaMaritima,Akko-Ptolemais,Tyre,Sidon,Beth-
Shean-Scythopolis,Bostra,andNaveh,inBatanaea.Theywerescarcelytobe
found at all in unurbanized and relatively unhellenized Upper Galilee and
Golan, at least in the second, third, and early fourth centuries.^2 The rabbis,
whose conviction that they constituted the true leadership of the Jewish peo-
ple made them not sectarian but expansionist, probably gravitated to cities
because there they had access to networks of trade, money, communications,
patronage, and political power.
But Greco-Roman urban culture and its rural offshoots, permeated as it
was with pagan religiosity, constituted a serious proble mfor the rabbis. This
point requires special emphasis because so much of the best scholarship in
the years since the publication of Saul Lieberman’sGreek in Jewish Palestine
has argued for the normalcy of the rabbis in the context of the high imperial
East.^3 What this scholarship has demonstrated is that the rabbis were influ-
enced by their environment. How, indeed, could they not have been? And
why should they have refrained fro mi mitating attractive or effective features
of philosophical or rhetorical schools, for example? And why should we mar-
velifindividualrabbis—themostfamous,perhapstheonlyavailable,example
is R. Abbahu of Caesarea—were relatively well integrated in some respects

(^1) Most of this chapter has appeared as two articles: “Gamaliel in Aphrodite’s Bath: Palestinian
Judais mand Urban Culture in the Third and Fourth Centuries,” in P. Scha ̈fer, ed.,The Talmud
Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture(Tu ̈bingen: Mohr, 1998), 203ff.; and in expanded and (I
think) improved form as “The Rabbiin Aphrodite’s Bath: Palestinian Society and Jewish Identity
intheHighRomanEmpire,”forthcominginS.Goldhill,ed.,Being Greek under Rome: Cultural
Identity, the Second Sophistic, and the Development of Empire(Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2001).
(^2) The “bet midrashof R. Eliezer Haqappar” in Dabbura, Golan, presumably dates from the
fourthcenturyorlater,thoughR.Eliezerhimself,ifidenticalwiththetannaR.ElazarHaqappar,
lived in the second and early third centuries. See J. Naveh,On Mosaic and Stone(Jerusalem:
Sifriyat Maariv, 1978), no. 6 (in Hebrew).
(^3) S. Lieberman,Greek in Jewish Palestine(New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 1942);
Hellenism in Jewish Palestine.Thisisadifferentquestionfromthatofthecultural“hellenization”
of the Jews.