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The Joseph and Rebecca Meyerhoff Center for Jewish Studies: Studies and Texts in Jewish History and Culture
Early Judaism
This book introduces the complex reality of Judaism in ancient times using an approach grounded in the interdisciplinary framework of the comparative study of religions. The aim of the book is to immerse students in theoretical problems regarding the interpretation of religious life as they master the diverse details of the forms of Judaic religion that thrived in antiquity.
259 pages, Paperback
First published July 11, 1996
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January 23, 2020
Despite a wide gulf in halakhic observance, as well as a fantastic diversity of post-emancipation intellectual currents, most observers of Judaism would agree that its contemporary practices and beliefs constitute a single, recognizable whole. It comes as no surprise, then, that in his epochal demarcation of Judaism’s formative millennium, Martin Jaffee would seem to have no quibbles with using Judaism as a singular construction. Ancient Jews, those living from 450 BCE – 650 CE, the period upon which Jaffee turns his gaze, surely recognized as we do now Judaism as a singular reality.
Yet Jaffee’s title, Early Judaism, is to a certain extent misleading. Early Judaism—as distinguished from the largely prehistoric cultic worship of the ancient Israelites and, as well, from the entrenched forms of Rabbinic Judaism to be found in early Islamic and late medieval Christian societies—was not nearly as singular as is often assumed to be the case. Indeed, a multiplicity of Judaic worlds characterized the period, at least a few of which, when sketched persuasively with a mindfulness of the limitations of the historic record, are likely to surprise even the most ardent students of Jewish history.
“Judaism is misunderstood,” Jaffee writes, “by viewing it as a single body of doctrine and practice originating pure and whole in a flash of revelation.” There is no iconographic poster, in other words, that can tidily depict its development from some prehistoric bent-back origin to a victoriously erect modern Judaic one. A close attention to the historical record, instead, yields a remarkable number of ways in which ancient men and women found their place in very divergent Jewish worlds.
The argument is not an apologetic one, though neither is Jaffee himself a skeptic. His mission is sociological, not polemical, and his book is written as a “useful orientation” for graduate students new to the study of comparative religion and/or Jewish history. It’s a mission accomplished, fortunately, without resort to bloodless academic prose and with a sensitive concern for allowing the reader to see when cautiously constructed interpretative bridges are the only way across gaps in the historical evidence. In addition to the admirable quality of Jaffee’s prose, there are a number of other things to like about Early Judaism.
Helpfully, it is not organized chronologically, but rather by thematic subjects. The first chapter outlines the political situation that characterized the Near East from the time of the Babylonian exile in 587 BCE all the way through the destruction of the Herodean temple in 70 CE, and then the various efforts to reinvent Judaism under Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid rule. What Jaffee makes clear is just how important both Persian and Greek influences proved to be in the development of the various Judaic worlds that he sketches in subsequent chapters.
Two other important early chapters deal with the development of the holy texts that would become the Hebrew Bible and their relation to the oral traditions of the Mishnah, and with the symbolic touchstones that yoked together the various Judaic worlds of ancient times. Both are engaging, but the latter, in which he situations two dimensions of symbolic vocabulary—‘God-Torah-Israel’ vertically and ‘Exile-Messiah’ horizontally, the former focused on the spatial connections between heaven and earth, the latter on the temporal connections of past, present, and future—is particularly engaging.
What most appeals about the graphic device is its continuing relevance as a yardstick of modern Jewish philosophy. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s neo-traditionalism, for example, is patterned by a nature-revelation-holy deeds trio that rests squarely on Jaffee’s vertical axis, while modern Zionism could easily be grafted onto Jaffee’s horizontal axis. The yoke of Jaffee’s symbolic vocabulary, even more so than an extended textile metaphor that he employs in the first chapter, consistently holds together the many diverse Judaic worlds that feature across the remainder of the book.
Some of those worlds are as normative as our own contemporary forms of Judaism while others, like the monastic Therapeutae of Alexandria, exist in only in the cobweb-filled corners of the Jewish universe. Jaffee writes about the Roman Empire’s Theosebes, non-Jews whose exceptional monotheistic beliefs and rites of worship, besides bringing them into close contact with “natural” Jewish communities, made them into what he terms an “intentional” Jewish community. Jaffee also carefully notes the similarities between the Dead Sea Yakhad communities and the Jesus-following Jews of a century later. And then there’s the Samaritans, descendants of the ancient northern kingdom of Israel, whose own version of the Torah of Moses placed the holy temple on Mt. Gerizim rather than on Jerusalem’s Mt. Moria, and was eventually destroyed by agents of the Hasmonean dynasty.
The Beit HaMikdash itself, its architecture and its rituals, are the centerpiece of Jaffee’s illuminating chapter on ritual space. Any lack of clarity that you have about the temple service and its public performative aspects before reading this section will quickly be dispelled. But the temple in Jerusalem, of course, was not alone in being a Jewish holy space in ancient times. Jaffee also shows how heterodoxical ritual spaces were created in the form of synagogues, which were themselves an import from the more western parts of the Roman Empire (Egypt and Greece specifically) and were not nearly as linked to the destruction of the temple as many people commonly believe.
The discussion of ritual spaces, including the way in which mezuzahs and dietary customs transformed the home into a holy space, segways well into Jaffee’s discussion of the early Rabbinic sages, who as he points out, were not so much teachers as they were paterfamilial exemplars of Jewish practice. There were also farmers, laborers, merchants, and artisans, who by the end of the period in question would come to define the normative boundaries of the orthodox Jewish practice that has come down to our own day.
Their power to shape orthodoxy, though, was not always uncontested. Jaffee writes about a range of mystical practices that sought to make Torah learning more experiential, and perhaps more available to a less elite strata of the Jewish communities in Babylon and Galilee in the third to seventh centuries CE. Whether individual Jews sought flights of ecstasy to God’s heavenly throne-chariot, the Merkavah, or oriented their beliefs around the Sefer Yetzirah and its power to numerically recreate the world, their practices appeared to have created at least some unease among the sages themselves.
Every one of Jaffee’s Judaic worlds, without a doubt, can be explored in the kind of greater detail that a specialist would include in his monograph, and thankfully Jaffee’s generous and explicative citations go far in guiding his reader in appropriate directions. What makes his contribution most valuable, however, is the brevity and juxtapositioning of Jewish history, thought, identity, ritual, traditions, and transformative knowledge. It’s a testament to his abilities of discernment that so much can be covered so profitably in such a relatively small amount of text.
While there’s no reason, then, to read only one part of this fine book, if you were to do so, I would be remiss not recommend Jaffee’s Introduction. It is there that he not only lays out the premise of his argument, but also seeks to define its key terms. The most interesting among his definitions and related discussions is that of how to define religion. I particularly appreciated the way in which he contrasts the modern, Christian-defined “self-evident” definition of religion:
with one of his own formulation, a definition which both widens our idea of what constitutes religion and, at the same time, places Judaism itself in more appropriate confines:
It is of course possible to quibble with the exact phraseology of both definitions, the word “reality” in particular strikes me as generously connoted. But what most appeals to me about the latter definition is its deemphasis of belief and its comparatively stringent focus on patterns of behavior that structure relations between the individual and the external world, and on the way in which it sees religion’s role as being to “heightens awareness” of the subtle perceptions that inform those relations. Though just a small part of the larger book, and having little to do with Jewish history, it was for me this redefinition of religion that ultimately opened up the most new worlds for personal exploration of my own practice of faith as well as those of others around me. (c) Jeffrey L. Otto, January 21, 2020
Yet Jaffee’s title, Early Judaism, is to a certain extent misleading. Early Judaism—as distinguished from the largely prehistoric cultic worship of the ancient Israelites and, as well, from the entrenched forms of Rabbinic Judaism to be found in early Islamic and late medieval Christian societies—was not nearly as singular as is often assumed to be the case. Indeed, a multiplicity of Judaic worlds characterized the period, at least a few of which, when sketched persuasively with a mindfulness of the limitations of the historic record, are likely to surprise even the most ardent students of Jewish history.
“Judaism is misunderstood,” Jaffee writes, “by viewing it as a single body of doctrine and practice originating pure and whole in a flash of revelation.” There is no iconographic poster, in other words, that can tidily depict its development from some prehistoric bent-back origin to a victoriously erect modern Judaic one. A close attention to the historical record, instead, yields a remarkable number of ways in which ancient men and women found their place in very divergent Jewish worlds.
The argument is not an apologetic one, though neither is Jaffee himself a skeptic. His mission is sociological, not polemical, and his book is written as a “useful orientation” for graduate students new to the study of comparative religion and/or Jewish history. It’s a mission accomplished, fortunately, without resort to bloodless academic prose and with a sensitive concern for allowing the reader to see when cautiously constructed interpretative bridges are the only way across gaps in the historical evidence. In addition to the admirable quality of Jaffee’s prose, there are a number of other things to like about Early Judaism.
Helpfully, it is not organized chronologically, but rather by thematic subjects. The first chapter outlines the political situation that characterized the Near East from the time of the Babylonian exile in 587 BCE all the way through the destruction of the Herodean temple in 70 CE, and then the various efforts to reinvent Judaism under Roman, Byzantine, and Sassanid rule. What Jaffee makes clear is just how important both Persian and Greek influences proved to be in the development of the various Judaic worlds that he sketches in subsequent chapters.
Two other important early chapters deal with the development of the holy texts that would become the Hebrew Bible and their relation to the oral traditions of the Mishnah, and with the symbolic touchstones that yoked together the various Judaic worlds of ancient times. Both are engaging, but the latter, in which he situations two dimensions of symbolic vocabulary—‘God-Torah-Israel’ vertically and ‘Exile-Messiah’ horizontally, the former focused on the spatial connections between heaven and earth, the latter on the temporal connections of past, present, and future—is particularly engaging.
What most appeals about the graphic device is its continuing relevance as a yardstick of modern Jewish philosophy. Abraham Joshua Heschel’s neo-traditionalism, for example, is patterned by a nature-revelation-holy deeds trio that rests squarely on Jaffee’s vertical axis, while modern Zionism could easily be grafted onto Jaffee’s horizontal axis. The yoke of Jaffee’s symbolic vocabulary, even more so than an extended textile metaphor that he employs in the first chapter, consistently holds together the many diverse Judaic worlds that feature across the remainder of the book.
Some of those worlds are as normative as our own contemporary forms of Judaism while others, like the monastic Therapeutae of Alexandria, exist in only in the cobweb-filled corners of the Jewish universe. Jaffee writes about the Roman Empire’s Theosebes, non-Jews whose exceptional monotheistic beliefs and rites of worship, besides bringing them into close contact with “natural” Jewish communities, made them into what he terms an “intentional” Jewish community. Jaffee also carefully notes the similarities between the Dead Sea Yakhad communities and the Jesus-following Jews of a century later. And then there’s the Samaritans, descendants of the ancient northern kingdom of Israel, whose own version of the Torah of Moses placed the holy temple on Mt. Gerizim rather than on Jerusalem’s Mt. Moria, and was eventually destroyed by agents of the Hasmonean dynasty.
The Beit HaMikdash itself, its architecture and its rituals, are the centerpiece of Jaffee’s illuminating chapter on ritual space. Any lack of clarity that you have about the temple service and its public performative aspects before reading this section will quickly be dispelled. But the temple in Jerusalem, of course, was not alone in being a Jewish holy space in ancient times. Jaffee also shows how heterodoxical ritual spaces were created in the form of synagogues, which were themselves an import from the more western parts of the Roman Empire (Egypt and Greece specifically) and were not nearly as linked to the destruction of the temple as many people commonly believe.
The discussion of ritual spaces, including the way in which mezuzahs and dietary customs transformed the home into a holy space, segways well into Jaffee’s discussion of the early Rabbinic sages, who as he points out, were not so much teachers as they were paterfamilial exemplars of Jewish practice. There were also farmers, laborers, merchants, and artisans, who by the end of the period in question would come to define the normative boundaries of the orthodox Jewish practice that has come down to our own day.
Their power to shape orthodoxy, though, was not always uncontested. Jaffee writes about a range of mystical practices that sought to make Torah learning more experiential, and perhaps more available to a less elite strata of the Jewish communities in Babylon and Galilee in the third to seventh centuries CE. Whether individual Jews sought flights of ecstasy to God’s heavenly throne-chariot, the Merkavah, or oriented their beliefs around the Sefer Yetzirah and its power to numerically recreate the world, their practices appeared to have created at least some unease among the sages themselves.
Every one of Jaffee’s Judaic worlds, without a doubt, can be explored in the kind of greater detail that a specialist would include in his monograph, and thankfully Jaffee’s generous and explicative citations go far in guiding his reader in appropriate directions. What makes his contribution most valuable, however, is the brevity and juxtapositioning of Jewish history, thought, identity, ritual, traditions, and transformative knowledge. It’s a testament to his abilities of discernment that so much can be covered so profitably in such a relatively small amount of text.
While there’s no reason, then, to read only one part of this fine book, if you were to do so, I would be remiss not recommend Jaffee’s Introduction. It is there that he not only lays out the premise of his argument, but also seeks to define its key terms. The most interesting among his definitions and related discussions is that of how to define religion. I particularly appreciated the way in which he contrasts the modern, Christian-defined “self-evident” definition of religion:
“[R]eligion is a collection of beliefs about divine beings expressed in moral behavior, prayers, and various forms of communal celebration. [It is] a personal ‘creed’ expressed in public ‘worship.’”
with one of his own formulation, a definition which both widens our idea of what constitutes religion and, at the same time, places Judaism itself in more appropriate confines:
“Religion is an intense and sustained cultivation of a style of life that heightens awareness of morally binding connections between the self, the human community, and the most essential structures of reality. Religions posit various orders of reality and help individuals and groups to negotiate their relations with those orders.”
It is of course possible to quibble with the exact phraseology of both definitions, the word “reality” in particular strikes me as generously connoted. But what most appeals to me about the latter definition is its deemphasis of belief and its comparatively stringent focus on patterns of behavior that structure relations between the individual and the external world, and on the way in which it sees religion’s role as being to “heightens awareness” of the subtle perceptions that inform those relations. Though just a small part of the larger book, and having little to do with Jewish history, it was for me this redefinition of religion that ultimately opened up the most new worlds for personal exploration of my own practice of faith as well as those of others around me. (c) Jeffrey L. Otto, January 21, 2020
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