164 CHAPTER FIVE
Yet the rabbis did live in the cities and wished to win the support of their
Jewish inhabitants, whose religious behavior and thought in many cases dif-
fered in no way fro mthose of pagans. So the rabbis, who needed to take the
Pentateuchalhorrorofpaganismveryseriouslyinformulatingtheirownviews,
also needed to develop a mechanis mto allow the mto live in the cities and to
participate in some the the cities’ public activities, pagan though they were.^5
This mechanism, I would like to argue, was an act of misprision, of misinter-
pretation, whereby the rabbis defined pagan religiosity as consisting exclu-
sively of cultic activity, affirmed, and even extended the biblical prohibitions
of it, but in so doing declared the noncultic, but still religious, aspects of
urban culture acceptable.^6
To the extent that words like “problem,” “mechanism,” and “misprision”
imply intention, I use them as metaphors. I would not care to argue thatthe
rabbis, still less that specific rabbis, were conscious of the systemic tensions
between Judais mand the life of the city, though of course they knew that the
city posed many specific halakhic problems. Nor would I want to suggest that
the act of misprision, which constitutes the foundation of the laws ofavodah
zarah(“alien worship”), wasintendedas a way of coping with Greco-Roman
culture,andwasnot,say,theresultofconventionallyrabbinicwaysofthinking
abouthalakhicissuesingeneral.^7 Inthefinalanalysis,intentionsmaybewhat
is least knowable about another, and when that “other” is in fact agroup—
consisting by definition of individuals whose motivations are complex and
variable—that lived in the remote past and that we know about entirely from
a small and opaque corpus of texts, any attempt to recover intentions would
empire, the difference being that Greeks such as Plutarch and Pausanias were at least ambiva-
lently coopted by the Romans, while the rabbis and the Christians were not, before the fourth
century; see J. Elsner, “Pausanias: A Greek Pilgri min the Ro man World,”Past and Present 135
(1992): 3–29.
(^5) See M. Halbertal, “Coexisting with the Enemy: Jews and Pagans in the Mishnah,” in G.
Stanton and G. Stroumsa, eds.,Tolerance and Intolerance in Early Judaism and Christianity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 159–72. This is one of several surprising
pointsofconvergencebetweenourwork—surprisingbecause ofadrasticdifferenceinapproach.
(^6) In other words, I reject the common emphasis on the rabbis as primarily pastoral figures,
who, in one view, adopted astringentapproach to paganis min order to protect their spiritually
vulnerable flock fro mthe encroaching religious environ ment (so M. Hadas-Lebel, “Le pa-
ganisme a`travers les sources rabbiniques,”ANRWII 19.2[Berlin: De Gruyter, 1979], p. 398), or
in another, adopted alenientposition in order to allow the economically vulnerable Jews to
subsist in an uncaring pagan world (so Urbach, “Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry”). Apart fro mthe
problematic understanding of the rabbis’ role, these blanket characterizations clearly miss the
point, as is well observed by C. E. Hayes,Between the Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds:
Accounting for Halakhic Difference in Selected Sugyot from Tractate Avodah Zarah(New York:
Oxford University Press, 1997).
(^7) For a very detailed argument that this is usually what is behind the rabbinic laws of idolatry,
directed mainly against the naive historicism of E. E. Urbach, see C. E. Hayes,Between the
Babylonian and Palestinian Talmuds.