own community does not map as territory for co-participation. At other
times, the conflict arises out of resentment over the non-participation of the
other in social spheres, which one’s own community either defines as being
open to all or perceives as the basis of civil society. For a minority religious
community, successfully managing this resentment is a key requisite to
success. Community members must be adequately prepared to manage
such resentment, and provided with norms for mitigating it, as they move
through the urban landscape inhabited by the other. In part, a commu-
nity’s capacity to maintain loyalty among its members and attract new
adherents depends upon its ability to do this.
As I will show, adopting the proposed conceptual framework permits
us to make sense out of hitherto confusing, ambiguous, or contradictory evi-
dence in the earliest rabbinic literature (particularly the Tosefta) from third-
centuryCEGalilee. As a result, we might better glimpse the formal
early-rabbinic social mappings, which underlie religious rivalry between
early rabbinic guild members and their non-Jewish co-inhabitants of the
south-central Levant.
- The last purpose of this chapter lies in the methodological realm,
rather than the conceptual-theoretical. I argue that the rhetorical and for-
mal traits of those rabbinic documents that are our principal sources sig-
nificantly affect the degree to which they are useful in helping us
differentiate social spheres. This is an important preliminary considera-
tion for any attempt to work within the conceptual framework here being
espoused, because the degree of social differentiation permitted by the
rules of rhetoric governing a particular document either facilitates or inhibits
the study of inter-religious relations. This is not to say that the degree and
direction of social differentiation mapped by a text is merely a matter of
rhetoric, disconnected from its author’s social mappings of the real world.
After all, what counts as persuasive and authoritative (the core definition
of rhetoric) is socially defined. The rhetoric of early rabbinic documents is
the formalized representation of the expertise demanded of the rabbinic
master, and in this sense it has everything to do with real-world spheres,
in which the master acts (see Lightstone 1994; 1997). Rather, what I mean
to suggest is that the degree of social differentiation reflected in the text is
mediated by its rules of rhetoric, which is to say, by the guild’s social def-
inition of the mastery required of the rabbi.
CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL PROBLEMS
Scholars attempting social descriptions of ancient Judaism, early Chris-
tianity, and other Greco-Roman religious communities labour within a loop
My Rival, My Fellow 87