This revised and expanded 2006 University of California, Berkeley dissertation examines provincial attitudes towards Rome via a selection of seven texts from post-a.d. 70 Jewish works, which J. describes as ‘reactions’ to Rome's destruction of the Jerusalem temple. Tacitus' account of Cn. Julius Agricola's description of his pacification of the Britons through Romanisation sets up J.'s critique of the popular assumption that appropriation of things Roman by provincial elites indicated their accommodation to Rome, while a stiffened grasp on local tradition indicated their resistance to Romanisation. J.'s survey of scholarship emphasises the dearth of sources for the voices of the conquered, problematising their reconstruction, and the inadequacy of ‘positive’ descriptions of Rome's impact on provincials that see Rome as benevolent and liberal, eliciting the provincials' grateful willingness to appropriate Rome's ordered culture, whose tolerance of local religious or political traditions was praised in Aelius Aristides' Roman Oration (one of many encomia enlisted as support for such positive evaluations of Roman hegemony). Yet, J. questions this equation, juxtaposing Aristides and Plutarch's Praecepta gerendae reipublicae to illustrate the ambiguity of provincial attitudes. The simplistic equation between cultural appropriation and assimilation, on the one hand, and the persistence of local tradition and resistance, on the other, is further complicated by the fact that many of the violent rebellions against Rome were led by thoroughly Romanised provincials, for example, the Roman auxiliary Tacfarinas in Africa (a.d. 17–24).
J. aims to expand both the breadth and depth of scholarship on the pseudepigraphic Jewish apocalypses, taking M. Hadas-Lebel's seminal chapter in her Jerusalem against Rome (2006) as his point of departure. J. distils two prominent tendencies from his texts: first, the tendency to render Rome impotent by making Israel's God responsible for the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, the punishment necessitated by Jewish sins; the second, to call Jews to introspection, to reinforce Jewish identity while ignoring the dominant Roman ‘other’. Josephus' accommodationist reaction to Roman domination, which relinquished any hope of Jewish restoration, recognised God's favour towards Rome in Roman domination and blamed Jewish humiliation on Jewish sin, provides J.'s counterpoint to his chosen texts.
The separate chapters for 4 Ezra, 2, 3 and 4 Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham and Sibylline Oracle 4 and 5, each contain a summary of the text, a discussion of language, versions and dating, followed by analysis and a brief conclusion. Throughout, J. deploys commonly applied criteria to determine the Jewishness of these texts, i.e. the centrality of the Mosaic Law, an emphasis on Israel's divine election, the importance of the temple cult, its priesthood and Jerusalem itself, and finally the lack of any Christian messianism. The resulting analyses reveal a spectrum of variations in Jewish response to Roman domination that generally solves the ‘Roman Question’ by turning to traditional answers, i.e. the biblical traditions about Babylon's destruction of Jerusalem and the Deuteronomic axiom that Jews suffer for their sins, the cure for which is usually greater adherence to the Mosaic Law. However, J. denies that such turning to tradition constitutes resistance, since an accommodationist like Josephus use the same tactic; ‘clinging to tradition’, writes J., ‘is not itself an indication of resistance’ (p. 277).
J.'s analysis reveals several important co-ordinations and contrasts among his texts. 4 Ezra assures the destruction of Rome by analogy with the punishment of Babylon. Meanwhile, Roman power is the fact of life to which many Jews were accommodating. Both 4 Ezra, whose writer agonises over Rome's dominance, and 2 Baruch, which expends little energy bemoaning it, counter Josephus' notion that Rome rules because of God's favour. 4 Ezra questions God's whereabouts (as does 3 Baruch), bewildered by God's unwillingness or incapacity to act, leaving only an eschatological solution carried out by the coming Messiah. J. sees no resistance to Rome here; 4 Ezra and Sib. Or. 4 seek only to change Jewish attitudes towards Rome, to focus Jews inward to their own sinfulness, to strengthen the notion of Israel's election (as also 4 Baruch) through reinforced devotion to the Mosaic Law (so also 2 Baruch, in contrast to 4 Baruch and Sib. Or. 4) and to encourage Jews to turn from preoccupation with Roman dominance, concentrating exclusively on local Jewish matters. With differing intensities authors seem concerned or unconcerned with Rome's destiny, for example, from 4 Ezra's ‘Eagle Vision’ of the messianic punishment of Rome in the days of Domitian to 2 and 4 Baruch's indifference. Similarly variegated is the intensity of isolationist solutions: 4 Ezra's, 3 and 4 Baruch's advocacy of strict isolation, or Apoc. Ab.'s functionally similar equation making accommodation to Rome a form of idolatry, thus separation becomes the core of Jewish identity, is softened by 2 Baruch's allowance for proselyte salvation and Jewish apostasy. 3 Baruch is the selection's oddity; lacking clearly Jewish attributes and unconcerned with Jewish identity, it advocates a simpler, quotidian solution to the problem of theodicy, namely, that God's sovereign control is demonstrated in the unfailing natural processes of creation, while rejecting both an intensified focus on the Mosaic Law (so 4 Baruch and Sib. Or. 4) and the eschatological solution of 4 Ezra. Sib. Or. 5 stands out for its lack of messianic salvation (like 3 Baruch) coupled with its vision of a cosmic eschatological conflagration, an oracle of destruction consumed with hatred toward Israel's enemies.
While questions could be raised about details, I shall focus on a few broader issues. The nature of tradition is extremely problematic; not only can authors reasonably included (especially on emic grounds) in the same religio-ethnic category use tradition in different ways for different purposes, they can actually invent traditions, as Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (1983) have shown, in the process of identity negotiation. Moreover, postcolonial theory predicts that the turn to ‘tradition’ can function as the negation of the dominant other, and thus, while not overt, such negation none the less constitutes resistance. We should also anticipate that by its very nature and without any purposeful compulsion, Roman hegemony expressed itself in the projection of an identity upon the dominated as an articulation of difference. J. correctly sees calls to tradition as elements in the negotiation of Jewish identity, but this realisation necessarily implies a more flexible definition of resistance than J. offers. One might consequently describe this volume as an analysis in need of a theory, in marked contrast to A.E. Portier-Young's Apocalypse against Empire (2011). While J. hints in his introduction at the possibilities of applying postcolonial critique to his texts, he returns to the question of strategies of resistance in his conclusion having at no point explored them. An understandable disappointment thus arises from the fact that had a more nuanced definition of resistance been in play, J.'s texts would beg an analysis in terms of the resistive processes of cultural mimicry, a process that appears at first glance like appropriation, but an appropriation for the purpose of usurping, i.e. resisting, the dominant. The text seems at times to undercut its title by insisting that, for example, the authors of 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch and Sib. Or. 4, while provoked by the disaster of 70 c.e., do not respond specifically to the temple's destruction, but to the enduring dominance of Rome. Though J. mentions the apostle Paul – obviously a Jewish writer – and his letter to the Romans, on this issue J. should have engaged Paul's pre-70, Josephus-like call to accommodation to Rome's power (Romans 13), because Paul shows that prior to the temple's destruction, at least one Jew prefigured Josephus' view of Rome's divinely appointed hegemony. That said, this generally well-edited volume deserves attention as an important and insightful contribution to an area of study worthy of broader discussion.
