Rome, the Greek World, and the East, Vol. 3 - The Greek World, the Jews, and the East

 Jews and Others

a Temple at which sacrifices were offered: ‘‘I wished to show that the Jews
agree with the Gentiles (i.e. pagans), except that they believe in only one
God. That is indeed peculiar to them and strange to us; since all the rest we
have in a manner in common with them—temples, sanctuaries, altars, puri-
fications and certain precepts.’’^39
In Julian’s conception of a revived paganism, sacrifice was to be the cen-
tral act; and in seeking to underline the actual or potential compatibility of
Judaism and paganism he offers what may be one of the very few attested
observations of contemporary Judaism by a (now) pagan observer. For just
before the passage quoted above he asserts that sacrifice is not entirely absent
from Judaism even now:

No doubt some sharp-sighted person will answer, ‘‘The Jews too do

not sacrifice.’’ But I will convict him of being terribly dull-sighted, for

in the first place I reply that neither do you (the Christians) observe

any one of the other customs observed by the Jews; and, secondly, that

the Jews do sacrifice in their own houses(?), and even to this day every-

thing that they eat is consecrated; and they pray before sacrificing, and

give the right shoulder to the priests as the first-fruits; but since they

have been deprived of their temple, or, as they are accustomed to call

it, their holy place, they are prevented from offering the first-fruits of

the sacrifice to God.^40

What exactly Julian means to refer to here is not immediately obvious; for
it seems certain that no regular sacrifices, conducted by priests on an altar,
persisted, or even could have persisted, after the destruction of the Temple.^41
The inability of the Jews to sacrifice without a Temple is remarked on fre-
quently by Christian authors, with considerable complacency,^42 and repre-
sented of course the central reason for Julian’s proposed restoration. The most
likely explanation, as William Horbury has pointed out to me, is that Julian
is thinking of the eating of the Paschal Lamb, as conducted by Jews in their
houses—ifen adraktoisis the right reading, and if that is what it means. For
the Pesach meal really does embody a direct transference into a domestic
context of an element derived originally from the Passover sacrifice in the

.Against the Galileans B, Loeb trans.
.Against the GalileansD–A, Loeb trans.
. A. Guttman, ‘‘The End of the Jewish Sacrificial Cult,’’Hebrew Union College Annual
 (): .
. E.g., Eusebius,Dem. Ev. , ; Augustine,Tractatio adversus Iudaeos–.