short time span, or members of the community disagree. All of these expla-
nations are possible and may account for some apparent contradictions
within the evidence. But is it methodologically or conceptually sound to rush
to these easy explanations? The implied answer is no. And this cautionary
no is my point of departure. It has significant implications for the con-
struction of conceptual and theoretical models for understanding the nature
of religious rivalries between neighbouring communities.
Let me both substantiate my negative response to this question and
argue its theoretical and conceptual implications by considering a partic-
ular body of evidence for a specific community and geographical region.
Ancient Judaism, particularly emergent Rabbinism, is my special interest,
and so I will turn principally to rabbinic evidence, which, at first glance,
often seems confusing and self-contradictory, both in its rulings about rela-
tions between Jews and non-Jews and in the attitudes and rationales some-
times attached to these rulings by their editors. Here, I am much indebted
to Reena Basser’s work (chapter 4) on early rabbinic attitudes to pagan
fairs. The Mishnahand the Tosefta,out of which much of Basser’s evidence
is taken, were both authored and promulgated in the Galilee by the rabbinic
guild, most likely within about a 75-year period. Both documents express
the social, cultural, and cosmological mappings of the worlds of their
authors by articulating rules, although the former was obviously authori-
tative for the latter. Many of the pericopes of the Tosefta,in turn, are found
in parallel, but altered, form in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds.
As Basser demonstrates, not only do the Mishnahand immediately
subsequent rabbinic works register quite different, even opposing, rules
about interacting with the religiously other, but stupefying contradictions
are found even within some particular texts (for example, the Tosefta).
Basser reviews the ways in which other modern scholars have accounted
for these contradictions. Typically, they have opted for some version of the
following stock response: Rabbinism’s attitudes toward non-Jews simply
changed, from rejection to a more benign openness (see Urbach 1959;
Lieberman 1950; also Safrai 1984; Stern 1994; Porton 1988). Basser argues
that the standard articulation of this shift is unsatisfactory, and I agree. It
smacks of the type of case-by-case made-to-measure explanation, which
lacks any of the elucidating power that otherwise derives from more appro-
priately formulated theoretical and conceptual constructs. Simply put, it
invents a particular history, to account for a particular historical datum.
In principle, I do not favour rushing to offer a unique historical expla-
nation tailored to a particular datum or set of data. It is a truism that each
historical event is unique, but the truly unique is by definition incompre-
My Rival, My Fellow 89