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Roman and Jewish Law: Looking for Interaction in all the Right Places
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 November 2019
Abstract
Malka presents convincing evidence in support of the claim that the rabbinic list is not indigenous but borrowed from the Roman legal institution of infamia, which was also attached to certain professions and also deprived persons of their eligibility for testimony. More important, she shows that this structural parallel is bolstered by a deeper conceptual parallel, for underlying both the rabbinic and the Roman disqualification is a wider Greco-Roman discourse on self-control (with Plutarch providing a four-fold list parallel to the tannaitic list in substance).
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- Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2019
References
1. Recent works include Lapin, Hayim, Rabbis as Romans: The Rabbinic Movement in Palestine, 100–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Dohrmann, Natalie and Reed, Annette Yoshiko, eds., Jews, Christians and The Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late Antiquity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013)Google Scholar. Deserving special mention in this regard is the multi-year research project headed by Katell Berthelot with funding from the European Research Council. The project, entitled “Judaism and Rome: Re-thinking Judaism's Encounter with the Roman Empire” has hosted three international conferences with corresponding conference volumes in various stages of publication.
2. Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, “Is the Mishnah a Roman Composition?” in The Faces of Torah: Studies in the Texts and Contexts of Ancient Judaism in Honor of Steven Fraade, ed. Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher, Novick, Tzvi, and Hayes, Christine (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017), 487–508CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 487.
3. Ibid., 488–89.
4. Katzoff, Ranon, “Sperber's Dictionary of Greek and Latin Terms in Rabbinic Literature—A Review Essay,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 20 (1989): 195–206CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 204–5.
5. Rosen-Zvi, “Is the Mishnah a Roman Composition?” 503–4.
6. Ibid., 508.
7. Berkowitz, Beth, Defining Jewish Difference: From Antiquity to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
8. Berthelot, Katell, “Paradoxical Similarities between the Jews and the Roman Other” in Perceiving the Other in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher, Grünstäudl, Wolfgang, and Thiessen, Matthew (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), 95–110Google Scholar. See also Dohrmann, Natalie, “Law and Imperial Idioms: Rabbinic Legalism in a Roman World,” in Jews, Christians and the Roman empire, ed. Dohrmann, Natalie B. and Reed, A. Y. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 63–78Google Scholar. Dohrmann argues that in view of the fact that the central mode of self-presentation of the dominant power—Rome—was legalism, the privileging of legalism in tannaitic discourse, in contrast to earlier and other Jewish cultural contexts, itself tells us something about the Romanization of the rabbis. She develops this thesis in “Can ‘Law’ Be Private? The Mixed Message of Rabbinic Oral Law,” in Public and Private in Ancient Mediterranean Law and Religion, ed. Clifford Ando and Jörg Rüpke, Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten 65 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 187–216. She writes, “In committing to law, the rabbis are defining themselves and building their Judaism on and through a matrix of elements collected from and filtered through the Roman world,” at 191.
9. As an example, see Hayes, Christine, “Genealogy, Illegitimacy, and Personal Status: The Yerushalmi in Comparative Perspective” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture III, ed. Schäfer, P. (Tubingen: Mohr, 2003), 73–90Google Scholar, which shows (1) that a tannaitic era halakhic controversy over the status of the offspring of a Jew and a non-Jew or slave (non-Jewish or Jewish but illegitimate) lines up with dueling determinations in second century Roman law (in some cases, the offspring of mixed unions were not Roman and in other cases they were Roman but illegitimate), and (2) that moving into the third century, Roman and rabbinic law shift in similar ways to reduce the creation of illegitimate natives, providing relief, recognition and eventual legitimation of the illegitimate offspring of native women and foreigners or slaves. As a further example, see Hayes, Christine, “The Abrogation of Torah Law: Rabbinic Taqqanah and Praetorian Edict” in The Talmud Yerushalmi and Graeco-Roman Culture, ed. Schäfer, P. (Tubingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1998), 643–74Google Scholar, which argues that the rabbinic taqqanah was likely modeled on the Roman praetorian edict in light of the many conceptual parallels between the two: both provide a legal remedy where none existed, both were vehicles of needed law reform supplanting the Torah law or the civil law respectively while not technically “abolishing” it, both were ad hoc measures, both were explicitly based on considerations of equity and good faith to correct the law, and both were justified by the claim of serving the interests of the Roman or Israelite people. There may even be a linguistic resonance of the connection between the two: taqqanah means “repair,” and the praetor's edict is described as repairing the civil law.