This excellent and very welcome book is by far the most sustained, complete, careful and successful effort yet to locate the Rabbis of late antique Palestine more firmly in the context of the Roman Empire in which they lived and worked and in which the rabbinic movement was formed. Building on and further nuancing Seth Schwartz's now ascendant view of the place of the Rabbis in Palestine's shattered Jewish society during the first centuries after the wars against Rome, Lapin undertakes to tell the early story of the Rabbis as that of a Roman provincial sub-elite comprised of well-off city dwelling pietists and ritual specialists who were organized much like other Roman associations and schools, and who shaped the texts by which we know them, as well as their the stances as Roman provincials, using the tools of other Roman provincial groups.
Lapin thus sets out, as a “corrective” to the scholarly tendency to see the Jews as unique in the ancient world, to “shift the frame of reference” through which the Rabbis' situation in the Empire is understood, from one in which they respond to some extent to a broader world from a place outside it to one in which they are “fundamentally embedded” within that broader world. In light of earlier work by Lapin and others that also located the Rabbis in their Roman context, this may seem closer to a modification than to a shift, but Lapin's argument is so well developed and his change of emphasis is so clear that his claim to a shift may well be accepted.
Perhaps in order to avoid comparison of his work with the mountain of books on the often vague idea of “Hellenization,” Lapin lays out three specific ways the Rabbis might have been “Romanized”: (1) as a simple result of their embeddedness within a fabric of social, economic, and political relations that was largely imposed on them from the outside, and in which the power of Rome far outweighed the power of the Rabbis or of any other Jewish group; (2) by ideological legitimation of Roman rule or by the identification of an individual's persona with that person's place in the dominant political system; (3) by adoption of “imported” cultural practices, to an extent that falls short of explicit identification.
To address the issues raised in connection with these alternatives, Lapin studies a group of rabbinic texts to reveal rabbinic attitudes to sites of possible Romanization, to public baths, to gendered comportment, to Christianization, and to the Roman military, providing an effective and complex presentation of the extent to which the Rabbis may have been Romanized in the second and third ways he defines.
His approach, with its emphasis on embeddedness and Romanization more generally, and the way he applies this approach, are the most significant and the best parts of this outstanding book. His conclusion regarding the Rabbis' position “as Romans” is both sophisticated and convincing. In summary, he believes that the Rabbis were culturally hybridized in a way that was characteristic of them in particular, but that was perhaps more generally a feature of a provincial subjectivity that cobbled together local and imperial identities. (Lapin's style is dense, which may account for the fact that Rabbis as Romans has been misread to claim that the Rabbis identified with Rome. Close reading of the book is necessary, but the effort is well rewarded.) Here and elsewhere, Lapin presents the Rabbis as a potential exemplar of similar provincial groups, in opposition to the older exceptionalist interpretation of their place in the Empire and in the world, but he leaves the task of comparing the experience of other such groups with the Rabbis' experience to specialists.
Lapin is bold enough to raise the question of why the Rabbis eventually succeeded in becoming what they always claimed to be, the leaders of the Jewish people, but his discussion does not extend beyond observing that the status of the Jews of the Empire favored the formation of highly bounded, exclusive Jewish communities, while noting other “religious” Jewish groupings that did not succeed or long survive.
Lapin tempers what he calls his “reductive” efforts to “correct” the idea of the Rabbis' uniqueness by recognizing their differences from others in many ways, although in the course of his discussion of the Rabbis' particular characteristics he oddly claims that these do not account for rabbinic Judaism's survival to today; his book says nothing that leads to that conclusion, but then survival is not his topic.
Early in the book, Lapin offers a brief, moderately revisionist account of the rabbinic movement's beginnings and eventual institutionalization, without respect to its embeddedness, that is both brilliant and learned. Based largely on the same rabbinic materials that everyone else uses, including those who still disagree with Schwartz, and presented as geared to readers without a Jewish Studies background who need essential facts about the rabbinic movement, it is, in my judgment, quite simply the best such account now available. The book's long study of actual cases decided by named Rabbis, according to the literature, along with the related appendix, is invaluable for those who wish to learn more about Rabbis as judges, although it is something of a digression from the main theme of rabbinic embeddedness.
As one of those who have sought, in Lapin's words, “to uncover the [Rabbis'] ‘hidden transcripts’” (4), I welcome his insistence that the Jews, and any other occupied people, should not be neatly dichotomized as those who resist and those who cooperate with the ruling power. And I thoroughly agree with Lapin's conclusion that the Rabbis, although politically conformist, constituted an autonomous group able to fashion domains of power over others within a world not of their own making. But I wish he had addressed the extent to which he has concluded that rabbinic literature can, or cannot, be read as a literature of resistance. He makes the subtle point that the Rabbis organized “as Romans” to express their non-Romanness. Might the literature they thus produced have been a literature of resistance to foreign, differently “Roman,” rule? Might their expression of non-Romanness itself have been a form of resistance? I also wish he had engaged with postcolonial theory – perhaps no longer the fashionable topic it was a while ago – beyond his passing mentions of Ranajit Guha's and Gayatri Spivak's versions of the idea of the subaltern and references, via Cynthia Baker, to Homi Bhabha's idea of colonial mimicry.
A note on historiographical method: Lapin's approach is clearly strongly structuralist, but unlike many of our contemporaries in these perhaps overly theory-centric times, he also stresses, explicitly and otherwise, the contingency, if not quite the randomness, of history and the need to explain events as they happened in terms of particular facts and circumstances. This is an approach too rarely articulated and employed.
I disagree with Lapin on several small points––including his ideas that the Patriarch Judah Nesiah's appointment of R. Hiyya bar Abbah as his apostle has something to do with minui and that there is meaningful evidence of rabbinic hostility to Palmyra––and doubtless he disagrees with me on points other than these. But this is trivial, since Lapin's is a big book.
Rabbis as Romans should be read by everyone interested in the rabbinic movement and in late antique Jewry, and also by everyone interested more generally in the history and politics of the provinces of the Empire, especially those in the east. I hope Oxford University Press is making the book known outside its Jewish Studies audiences. It is a book that should be not only read but owned by all of us who also try to write the history of the Jews in late antiquity, since we will want to go back to it again and again to see what Lapin has to say about each of the issues we address.
