182 CHAPTER SIXcally iconoclastic argument of Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer that there was no golden
age of Roman-Jewish relations in the high empire, that, on the contrary, the
state was generally hostile to the Jews and even sometimes persecuted them,
just as it did the Christians.^8 This argument was based not on direct evidence
(which is nonexistent),^9 but on the observation, in my view correct, that as a
body, professing Jews were hardly more assimilable in the pagan than in the
Christian Roman state; it implies that the situation of the Jews in the latter
was basically unchanged.
The reaction of the 1970s and 1980s approached the issue from a different
direction.^10 It is no coincidence that this was a period of intensive archaeologi-
cal exploration in Israel and the occupied territories, and of the beginnings
of the systematic questioning of the old consensus about the role of the rabbis
and the normative status of their literature in post-Destruction Jewish Pales-
tine. The new approach to rabbinic literature allowed scholars to adopt an
exaggerated form of Saul Lieberman’s hypothesis of rabbinic acculturation
(viz., rabbinic assimilation) and simultaneously to dismiss the rabbis as mar-
ginal. So, the argument goes, the rabbis’ particularism, which would have
predisposed the Jews to a state of hostile separation from Christian Roman
society, may be a mirage and in any case had little impact on the Jews in
general. The new archaeological exploration suggested that starting in the
third century the Jews, especially in Palestine, experienced a period of unprec-
edented prosperity and demographic growth, and they engaged in extensive
cultural borrowing from their pagan and Christian neighbors. This seemed to
imply that Jewish-Christian relations in late antiquity were generally
friendly—a view paradoxically strengthened by, for example, the contents of
John Chrysostom’s ferociousSermons against the Jews. These consist mainly
of the priest’s warnings to his flock to resist the attractions of the synagogues
and the Jewish festivals, combined with vituperative attacks on the Jews. One
of the harbingers of this reevaluation of the Jewish experience in late antiquity,
(^8) “Israel, the Christian Church, and the Roman Empire,”SH7 (1961): 84–86. By contrast, J.
Juster had argued (Les juifs dans l’empire romain[Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1914], 1: 44) that the
inability of the church fathers of the second and third centuries to provide concrete legal proof
for their repeated contention that the Jews were persecuted demonstrates that they were not.
(^9) Or nearly so: see S. Lieberman, “Palestine in the Third and Fourth Centuries,”Texts and
Studies(New York: Ktav, 1974), pp. 112–53 (=JQR36–37 (1946): 329–70); for a direct response
to Baer, see Lieberman, “Redifat Dat Yisrael,” in D. Rosenthal, ed.,Studies in Palestinian Talmu-
dic Literature(Jerusalem: Magnes, 1991), pp. 369–80 (=S. Baron Jubilee Volume, ed. S. Lieber-
man [Jerusalem: AAJR, 1974], 3: 213–46).
(^10) The large bibliography on this issue will be cited below as needed. The “friendly” hypothesis
underlies much non-Israeli archaeological publication; for an influential example, see E. Meyers
and J. Strange,Archaeology, the Rabbis, and Early Christianity(Nashville: Abingdon, 1981). Also
important have been several books by Robert Wilken, especiallyJohn Chrysostom and the Jews:
Rhetoric and Reality in the Late Fourth Century(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983).