Introduction
A Greek inscription carved onto the long side of a limestone sarcophagus found in the southeastern necropolis of Hierapolis in Asia Minor (c. 200 CE) ends with these specific instructions: the purple-dyers guild and the carpet-weavers guild were to celebrate Passover, Pentecost, and Kalends at the grave with the 350 denaria left by Publius Aelius Glykon Zeuxiano Aelianus.Footnote 1 That is, a man we might presume to have been Jewish left funds for the celebration of two Jewish festivals and one Roman festival at his grave after his death.
Throughout late antiquity, rabbis attempted to separate Jewish temporal rhythms from those of the Roman Empire and its festivals, a distinction that not all contemporaneous Jews were willing to make, as this sarcophagus inscription demonstrates. The Mishnah's tractate Avodah Zarah, which outlines in great detail how to observe the biblical prohibition of idolatry in a Roman context, begins with a prohibition against commercial transactions with gentiles in the days preceding idolatrous festivals, and follows with a list of those festivals.Footnote 2 The rabbis do not explicitly prohibit participation in Roman festivals—that such participation is forbidden is presupposed throughout the tractate.Footnote 3 Rather, the rabbis prohibit any actions that might lead to indirect and even unintentional worship of pagan gods during festival times.Footnote 4 The need to avoid practicing idolatry, even through indirect means such as commercial transactions, is intimately connected to the broader question of communal boundaries between Jews and so-called “pagans.” The laws and narratives throughout the tractate seek to define those boundaries and determine how they might be maintained (and, indeed, when they can be blurred or crossed). At stake was not only how to fulfill God's biblical laws regarding idolatry in a narrow sense, but also how to cultivate Jewish identity and a sense of difference within an empire that was considered idolatrous.Footnote 5
In order to observe the first law of the tractate, Jews were required to keep track of the sacred days on the Roman calendar so as to avoid transactions that were forbidden around festival times. Such separation had a counterintuitive effect. By trying so deliberately to separate from the Roman calendar, the rabbis of the Mishnah paradoxically integrated the rhythms of the Roman calendar into their own daily lives, embedding Roman time into the Jewish calendar. The rabbis urged scrupulous avoidance and abstention from, rather than participation in, Roman festivals and the activities that surrounded them, but abstaining or participating had a similar effect of mapping the Roman festival calendar onto the rabbinic calendar and, as a result, merging Roman with rabbinic time.
The prohibitions laid out in the Mishnah and elaborated on in subsequent rabbinic texts present only some of the ways in which rabbinic sources engage with the Roman calendar and the challenge that a competing calendrical system posed for them. In their discussions of the Mishnah's list of Roman festivals, the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds provide elaborate stories about the origins of each Roman festival. These passages present the Jews as integral to the origins of several Roman festivals (in which Jews, nonetheless, were prohibited from participating). In the Palestinian Talmud, each explanation consistently casts a particular Roman festival in a negative light, while in the Babylonian Talmud the stories are often more ambiguous. Both sets of texts frequently appeal to moments in the Jewish past in the explanations they propose. In these later rabbinic eyes, the Roman calendar was filled with days that had Jewish stories—and indeed a long Jewish past—attached to them, even as they maintained cautious distance from them. Through this creative process, the days on the Roman calendar not only signified moments in Roman mythological and historical memory, but also in Jewish historical consciousness, as days on which certain Jews sinned, for example, or aided their Roman allies in defeating their Greek enemies and gaining Roman favor. Regardless of whether Jewish involvement is presented negatively or positively in these texts, imagining Jews as defining actors in these aetiologies inscribed Jewish history onto the Roman calendar.
Below, I analyze narrative passages from the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds—Y. Avodah Zarah 1:2 (39c) and B. Avodah Zarah 8b—that recount the origin of the Roman festival Kratesis in light of Greek and Roman texts, epigraphic material, and numismatics. I explore the following questions: What is the cultural function that these festival narratives serve in the two Talmuds? What can these passages tell us about rabbinic imaginings of a Roman past that cannot be disentangled from a Jewish past, and how did this rabbinic historical consciousness play out on the theater of the calendar and its festival times?
Kratesis is only one of the Roman festivals for which an aetiology is provided in rabbinic sources. In the Palestinian Talmud, several aetiologies are short and polemical, transforming Roman sacred days into profane and negative times rather than times for joy and celebration.Footnote 6 An anonymous passage offers an etymological explanation for the origins of the Saturnalia, proposing that the name of this festival stems from the phrase שנאה טמונה, “hidden hatred,” which, according to the text, alludes to Esau's hatred of Jacob in Genesis 27:41. The talmudic text interprets “hidden hatred” to mean that Esau “hates, takes vengeance, and punishes” (שונא נוקם ונוטר), a reference to Esau's resolve to kill his brother Jacob after losing his birthright. In a follow-up comment attributed to R. Yiẓḥak ben R. Eleazar, this connection is highlighted: “In Rome they call it Esau's Saturnalia,” tapping into the rabbinic association of Esau as Rome's biblical ancestor. While in the biblical story this passage evokes Esau's great loathing of his brother Jacob, the rabbinic text implies that it is now Esau, Jacob's nemesis and the imagined progenitor of Rome, who was also reviled; this festival thus represents not celebration of Rome's greatness but abhorrence of it. In another case, the emperor's birthday festivities are paralleled with Pharaoh's birthday feast. This explanation casts the contemporary Roman leader in the shadow of an ancient enemy of the Jews, a biblical character who epitomizes the enslavement of Israel and the denial of God. In both these cases, biblical enemies of Israel are evoked in reference to Rome and its sacred days. Both Talmuds attribute the festival of the Kalends to the biblical Adam, the Palestinian Talmud through an etymology and the Babylonian Talmud through a mythologized story about Adam's establishment and celebration of the festival at the beginning of time. In the latter, a biblical figure is responsible for the creation of a festival that was originally celebrated “for the sake of heaven” and later corrupted by the Romans and made into an idolatrous celebration.
In her work on the aetiologies of festivals, Mary Beard has pointed to how ancient Roman authors tended to layer multiple meanings on a single festival day.Footnote 7 In the case of the Parilia, a festival held annually on the twenty-first of April—the focus of Beard's thesis—Ovid, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and Plutarch couple agricultural and historical aetiologies about the foundation of Rome. Beard highlights the variety of explanations provided for this single festival and the “highly evocative power of the festival” that results.Footnote 8 It is precisely the constant generation and accumulation of interpretations that afforded the festival its relevance and allowed it to be reunderstood in various contexts, even when older aetiologies became irrelevant to those who celebrated the festival. Rather than settling on a simple interpretation, the constellation of religious, historical, civic, and natural explanations provided Roman festivals a rich significance and allowed different demographic groups to relate to the festival in ways that were most appropriate to them, much the same way that agricultural, mythological, and historical reasons are given to Jewish festivals in biblical and rabbinic sources. I understand the aetiologies of the Roman festivals presented in rabbinic sources to be a part of this same Roman phenomenon: the rabbis (re)imagined the origins of the empire's festivals in ways that were relevant to their community and its view of past and present circumstances.
There is a unique element to these rabbinic aetiologies that differentiates them from other Roman ones in a fundamental respect. As we shall see, the Palestinian and the Babylonian Talmuds present two stories about the origins of Kratesis that vary greatly from one another in their portrayal of Rome's imperial power and the role of Jews within it. Despite their differing sentiments, these two stories constitute what James C. Scott has called a “hidden transcript.”Footnote 9 While they appear to participate in the Roman practice, they challenge and undermine Roman imperial claims by replacing Romans with Jews. “The public transcript,” Scott writes of public discourse, “is unlikely to tell the whole story about power relations,” as it usually aligns with the wishes and views of the dominant class.Footnote 10 The other part of the story, the opinions of the subordinate class, is not completely absent, however. The careful reader can discern it (1) within the public transcript, (2) more explicitly and fully in a hidden transcript that takes place “offstage,” “beyond direct observation by powerholders,” and (3) in discourse that mediates between the public and hidden transcripts and manifests itself in ironic or veiled modes of expression such as rumors, gossip, folktales, jokes, songs, rituals, codes, and euphemisms.Footnote 11 The rabbinic stories of Roman festivals and their Jewish origins can be understood as examples of a hidden transcript, texts that bring to light an alternative perspective, that of the rabbis, within a Roman imperial context that the authors of these texts often interpreted as hostile or threatening.Footnote 12 So while these stories participate in a Roman project, they simultaneously resist and undermine it by telling Roman history through a Jewish lens. Following recent studies on the intersection between Romanness and Jewishness,Footnote 13 I analyze the complicated relationship that rabbis had with the empire through the ways in which they grappled with one aspect of Roman culture—its calendar and festivals.
Between Calendrical Time and Historical Memory
That the Mishnah's redactor chose to open the tractate on idolatry specifically with a discussion of the times when Jews were not allowed to interact commercially with gentiles and with a list of Roman festivals, rather than with another matter related to idolatrous practice, highlights the great cultural and religious importance of the Roman calendar for those living in the Roman Empire.Footnote 14 What role do calendars play in the construction of communal pasts, collective memories, and shared timeframes? Most basically, calendars function as instruments of social, economic, religious, and political organization and control. Emile Durkheim, in Elementary Forms of Religious Life, argues that studying the particular way in which a society constructs its calendar provides access to that society's collective rhythms—as they are imagined and experienced—and the ways those temporal rhythms interact with and shape a community's understanding of itself and its past.Footnote 15 Paul Ricoeur, in Time and Narrative, argues further that a society's calendar merges the universal “cosmic” time of the world and the personal “lived” time of the individual.Footnote 16 By grafting an individual's (or a society's) experience of specific moments in time onto the world's continual flow of time, a calendar and other “reflective instruments” “play the role of connectors between” these seemingly contradictory conceptions of time “by making a noteworthy present coincide with an anonymous instant in the axial moment of the calendar.”Footnote 17 The particular days of meaning on a calendar mediate between multiple realms of time—cosmic, historical, and personal. Calendars, along with other narrative devices such as succession lists and archives, contribute to the figuring of historical time and thus also historical consciousness and time consciousness within a community.
In his work on collective memory, Maurice Halbwachs emphasizes the role that individual days play on a calendar, making the past meaningful to those in the present. He writes that the “memory of groups … retains only those moments that are of a pedagogic character,” while those that do not fit into a grand collective narrative are no longer commemorated.Footnote 18 Though Halbwachs is primarily concerned with the role that memory plays in the mapping of a sacred topography—that is, the inscription of meaning into space and the role that space then plays in the construction of an imagined past—he hints at a similar process that occurs in the creation of a community's timescape: “To the degree, for example, that the French Revolution is the object of a cult, it can also be broken down into significant days—the fourteenth of July, the night of August fourth, etc.—and each of these days expresses a truth, an article of the Revolution's doctrine.”Footnote 19
The rabbinic calendar, through its set of commemorative days, reenacts a rabbinic narrative of the Jewish past and its central tenets through the annual cycle; the Roman calendar functions similarly to convey a Roman narrative of its collective past and ideology.Footnote 20 What happens, then, when these two calendars are synchronized, as I suggest occurs through the rabbinic laws and narratives that are actually designed to differentiate between them? And, more specifically, what are the effects of constructing and imposing Jewish memories onto one particular festival day on the Roman calendar?Footnote 21 The ways in which the rabbinic community imagined a different and seemingly competing calendar and its festivals shaped its own collective rhythms and memories. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and others have focused on how Jews remembered their pasts—the “history of their memory”Footnote 22—and the stories that Jews told about their own communities' origins.Footnote 23 Here, I ask not how the rabbis understood the Jewish past, but how they inserted themselves into the past of others, and made sense of the other in terms of their own history. In that sense, we might consider the rabbis' approach to Roman festivals either as a “counter-history,” to employ Amos Funkenstein's useful terminology, as “competitive historiography,” as John J. Collins has characterized it, or even as “integrated history” that merged Jewish with Roman history and projected it onto the very symbol of Roman identity—its calendar.Footnote 24
Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah 1:2 (39c)
One of the big shifts between the republican and imperial calendars of Rome was the imposition of festivals related to the emperor cult, such as the emperor's birthday, onto a calendar filled previously with primarily ancient agricultural and cultural festal days that harked back to the city's founding and early development.Footnote 25 These new festivals promoted imperial aims through religious rituals and wove the emperor and his family into the daily lives of those who relied on the Roman calendar. It was this layered calendar that made its way to the Galilee in the first and second centuries CE—likely brought by the local Roman army legions stationed throughout the regionFootnote 26—and with which the local Jewish religious authorities, the rabbis, had to contend in their efforts to encourage Jews to follow the Jewish calendar and its associated festivals and to avoid, as much as possible, adopting the rhythms of Roman time. The Mishnah's list of Roman festivals includes the most widely celebrated public festivals, the Kalends (of January) and Saturnalia, a series of festivals related to the imperial cult, and a set of personal festivals, including celebrations of thanksgiving and coming-of-age rituals.Footnote 27 The third festival in the Mishnah's list is the festival of Kratesis, which commemorated either the empire's victories and expansion in the East or the day of the accession of an emperor (scholars hold different views on this question).Footnote 28 The name of the festival, based on the Greek word for “power,” specifically evokes the notion of military strength, conquest, and political sovereignty. Fritz Graf argues that Kratesis must refer to a general festival in celebration of the accession of an emperor, for which there is evidence in the eastern provinces, rather than an eastern festival commemorating Augustus's conquest of Egypt, for which there is no evidence, though in the interpretation in the two Talmuds, the rabbis associate the festival with the conquest of the eastern territories, as we will see below. An exact date of the holiday is not recorded in rabbinic sources.
The Palestinian Talmud asks: What are the origins of Kratesis? An initial comment attributed to Rabbi Yose ben Rabbi Eleazar suggests that the festival commemorates the second time Rome seized power from its enemies. Rabbi Levi follows this initial explanation by offering a more elaborate story of origins. This second aetiology is one of the clearest instances in which the rabbis inscribe Judaism and the Jewish past onto the Roman calendar. In a passage that reveals familiarity with a range of Roman myths and history, the argument is made that biblical characters and their sins—rather than internal Roman developments—are to blame for the establishment and expansion of the Roman Empire. The festival of Kratesis is thus reimagined; it is no longer a day that simply alludes to the growth of the Roman Empire eastward as a Roman affair, but a day that symbolizes, as well, the Jewish sin of idolatry and its far-reaching political consequences of empowering the Jews' Roman oppressors. In marking a day on the Roman calendar with Jewish misfortune, this rabbinic story serves as a strong warning against both idolatrous practice and acculturation into Roman society.
The narrative presents the founding of Rome and the festival that commemorates Rome's imperial expansions in a completely negative light and as a result of Israelite misbehavior:
It is the day on which Solomon married into [the family of] Pharaoh Necho, king of Egypt. On that day [the angel] Michael came down and thrust a reed into the sea, and pulled up muddy alluvium [שלעטוט], and it grew to a large thicket of reeds [חורש], and this was the great city of Rome. On the day on which Jeroboam erected the two golden calves, Remus and Romulus came and built two huts in the city of Rome. On the day on which Elijah disappeared, a king was appointed in Rome: “There was no king, in Edom a deputy was king” [1 Kings 22:48].Footnote 29
It was Solomon's sin of marriage with a foreign princess and the subsequent introduction of idolatrous practices into Solomon's home that provoked the angel Michael to throw a reed into the sea, causing the geographical territory of Israel's archenemy, Rome, to arise out of it.Footnote 30 This idea develops a theme that is already present in the biblical passages about Solomon, in which his marriages cause him to pursue idolatrous practices: the description of his marriage to Pharaoh's daughter in 1 Kings 3:1–4 is coupled with an account of the continued illegitimate sacrifices that Israel brought at the open shrines prior to the building of the temple, and Solomon's marriages are again linked with his idolatrous sins in 1 Kings 11:1–10. Highlighting Solomon's intermarriages here emphasizes a related theme as well: Solomon's marriages blur the boundaries between the “us” and the “them” of Jews and gentiles more generally. While such marriages might not have been problematic in and of themselves in the biblical context, were it not for associated lapses into idolatry, in a rabbinic context such unions seem much more so.Footnote 31 It is Solomon's pining after the gods of his wives and their idolatrous tendencies, along with the practice of intermarriage that led to such idolatry, that the rabbinic text finds disturbing. Because of these two interrelated sins, Solomon is held responsible for the emergence of the geographical area that would eventually become the city of Rome, the center of an idolatrous empire that came to rule over the Jews. The reference specifically to Solomon's marriage with an Egyptian princess (and the consequent “return” to Egypt and its idolatry) in this rabbinic passage may not be accidental either: the rabbis were aware that Rome was the archenemy not only of Israel but also of Egypt. This passage may suggest that it was Solomon's union with an Egyptian that caused the founding of an empire that would later conquer both Israel and Egypt.
Why does the text describe the geological formation of the city of Rome with an image of the angel Michael sticking a reed into the sea? This vivid depiction inverts a popular account of Rome's origins, its central symbols, and characters.Footnote 32 The Tiber and the reed crown are commonly associated with Rome's origins in texts, statues, and coins. One coin from 71 CE, for example, captures the centrality of water in a particularly evocative image: Roma sits on a rock beside the seven hills of Rome alongside the she-wolf and twins of the city's founding, while the river Tiber, depicted as a traditional bearded figure, holds a reed.Footnote 33 Another coin, issued by Antoninus Pius, presents the Tiber “as an old man, half-draped and crowned with reeds, reclining either on an urn, from which water flows, or on a rock; he holds a reed in his left hand while the right rests on the prow of a ship.”Footnote 34 This numismatic evidence is important because we can assume that rabbis in Roman Palestine would have encountered this kind of iconography in their daily lives.
Coin issued by Antoninus Pius, with a personified Tiber River holding a reed into water (140–144 CE)Footnote 35
In both depictions, the personified Tiber grasps a reed, as though he is about to insert it into the water, just as the angel Michael does in our midrash. The reed, celebrated in Roman mythology and iconography, becomes a negative element in the Talmud's account, and the biblical angel Michael replaces the mythologized Tiber. As Brian Campbell has shown, the positive association between water and Rome was widespread in antiquity.Footnote 36 The name “Rome,” itself, might derive from the Etruscan word for “river” (rumon).Footnote 37 The talmudic representation of the founding of Rome from watery origins echoes these images and stories that the Romans themselves told about their city's history, but uses them to undermine Roman mythology. This rabbinic reference may thus be understood as an example of Scott's “hidden transcript,” an inversion of imperial ideology that gives voice to a different—subversive—rabbinic narrative.
The text describes the angel Michael placing a reed into the sea and pulling out of it a substance called שלעטוט, which probably refers to שלע טוט, a sediment of mud or muddy alluvium.Footnote 38 From this substance grew a large thicket of reeds, for which the text uses the word חורש, a term associated specifically with the use of reeds for construction.Footnote 39 The text has a geological phenomenon in mind in which alluvial deposits accumulate in a watery area, preventing water from running through it and eventually creating an area of land for settlement. Parts of Rome were indeed built above thick alluvial deposits,Footnote 40 and Livy, in book one of his History of Rome, incorporates these geological details, writing about a “floating cradle … left by the retreating water on dry land.”Footnote 41 Other references to the foundings of a variety of cities out of muddy alluvium appear in Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian Wars, Diodorus Siculus's Bibliotheca historica, and elsewhere.Footnote 42 The rabbinic author behind the story in the Yerushalmi accesses these geological understandings and their multivalent cultural associations about such urban development upon alluvial deposits.
The idea that the geographical origins of Rome are rooted in Israelite sin might also function on an additional polemical register, though here I am not suggesting a direct parallel but rather a contextual understanding of the passage in light of other rabbinic ideas. In contrast to Jerusalem, which was regarded as the focal point of God's actions during the world's creation (Jerusalem is presented as the center of creation and the universe in several Second Temple and rabbinic sources), the foundation on which Rome would eventually be built is created far later in history, as an afterthought and a punishment for the Jews' improper behavior.Footnote 43 The geographical origins of the great city of Rome, in other words, are not as ancient and illustrious as Jerusalem's but rather more recent.Footnote 44 Moreover, whereas Jerusalem is often characterized as the geographical location under which the watery tehom of creation is kept at bay by the city's powerful spiritual or divine presence,Footnote 45 in this story Rome is associated with a reed placed in the sea and the alluvial deposits left behind by unruly, chaotic waters, an image at odds with the positive functions that water plays in Roman myths of the city's origins and rabbinic ideas about Jerusalem.Footnote 46
The passage in the Palestinian Talmud continues by explaining that Jeroboam's sin of idolatry, in which he erected two golden calves in his territories, directly resulted in the settlement of Remus and Romulus, the twin founders of the city of Rome, in the Roman hills.Footnote 47 The Israelite king Jeroboam was motivated to set up golden calves at Bethel and Dan because of his fear that his people would return on pilgrimage to Jerusalem to offer sacrifices and decide to remain loyal to his rival, King Rehoboam of Judah, and kill their former king. As a result of this fear, Jeroboam built places of worship in his own territories that were considered idolatrous, appointed priests who were not Levites to preside over them, and established his own festival to be celebrated at these two idolatrous shrines. The biblical text then describes a “man of God” rebuking Jeroboam's actions, but even after a dramatic series of events, Jeroboam continues his idolatrous behavior. The final passages of 1 Kings 13 read: “Even after this event Jeroboam did not turn from his evil way.… This matter became a sin to the house of Jeroboam, so as to cut it off and to destroy it from the face of the earth.”Footnote 48
The rabbinic passage couples this biblical episode with the mythological story of Rome's founding by Remus and Romulus, creating a parallel between Jeroboam's two golden calves and the two founders of Rome. The popular tale of the birth of Remus and Romulus and the latter’s consequent establishment of the city of Rome is presented by Livy as the mythical origins of the empire, and also widely depicted on Roman coins through the fourth century.Footnote 49 As Solomon's sins caused the geological formation of the territory that became Rome, Jeroboam's idolatry caused the mythical founding of the city by the twin brothers. The brothers erect two huts, a reference to the establishment of the earliest community in Rome: this moment of mythological founding is associated with the beginning of Roman society, which developed once the geological parameters of Rome had been established.
The reference to Jeroboam also works intertextually. Jeroboam's idolatrous sins are discussed earlier in the tractate as well, which creates continuity on the redacted level of the text and perhaps also provides a lens into the logic of the tractate's compilation. Embedded within the Yerushalmi's discussion of the first mishnah of the tractate is a long homily about Jeroboam and his idolatrous practices, starting with the very beginning of his reign: “Once Jeroboam took up the reign over Israel, he began to entice Israel [toward idolatry], saying to them, ‘Come and let us practice idolatrous worship. The heathen deity is easygoing [ע"ז היא וותרתנית].’”Footnote 50 It details Israel's role in the process: “On the day on which Jeroboam began to reign over Israel, all Israel came to him at dusk, saying to him, ‘Rise up and make an idol.’”Footnote 51 The passage continues with Jeroboam's creation of two calves of gold at Bethel and Dan and the subsequent series of idolatrous transgressions he committed with these golden idols.Footnote 52 This homily anticipates the far briefer allusion to Jeroboam in the aetiology provided for Kratesis (it does so even with the precise language it uses, “On the day on which Jeroboam …”), in which his creation of the two golden calves causes Romulus and Remus to found the city of Rome, now considered the contemporary epicenter of idolatrous worship.
In addition to, and perhaps in conjunction with, his sin of idolatry, Jeroboam is accused of another transgression in a remark at the end of the homily attributed to R. ’Abin bar Kahana, who teaches: “Also in regard to the Sabbaths and the festivals we find that Jeroboam invented them on his own.”Footnote 53 The same rabbi then provides a prooftext from 1 Kings 12:32, about Jeroboam appointing a feast on the fifteenth day of the eighth month, on which he offered sacrifices to the calves. Thus the Israelite king brought sacrifices “in a month that he made up on his own” (1 Kings 12:33), which Jacob Neusner understands as setting up a calendar in Bethel that was at odds with the one in Jerusalem and that would have prevented the people from making their festival pilgrimages.Footnote 54 The accusation that Jeroboam instituted false festivals—indeed, idolatrous festivals—is particularly fitting within a discussion about festival times and laws constructed to limit participation in these very kinds of idolatrous celebrations. This final section about Jeroboam's sins of timing serves as the homily's climax. Moreover, in the context of the redacted chapter in the Yerushalmi, this earlier discussion of Jeroboam and his idolatrous sins regarding festivals becomes a prelude to Jeroboam's reappearance in our aetiology of Kratesis and, because of its placement after this extended discussion, the story evokes for the reader of the text all of these associations previously made in the tractate.Footnote 55
Finally, the passage about the origins of Kratesis explains that Elijah's disappearance in a whirlwind, detailed in 2 Kings 2:11, caused the final step in the founding of Rome.Footnote 56 In 1 Kings 18 – 2 Kings 1, Elijah actively combats the idolatrous practices of the Israelites and their kings.Footnote 57 Elijah's disappearance symbolizes the departure of an active attempt to root out idolatry and idolatrous practices. Indeed, immediately after Elijah's disappearance, the text describes the reign of Jehoram, son of Ahab, over Israel: “he clung to the sin of Jeroboam son of Nebat, which he caused Israel to commit; he did not depart from it….”Footnote 58 The final prooftext provided in the rabbinic story refers to an episode about Jehoshaphat, who reigned as king of Judah during part of Elijah's lifetime; Jehoshaphat also did not dismantle the idolatrous shrines set up by previous kings. According to this rabbinic passage all of the idolatry stemming from Israel and Judah's leaders, which Elijah attempted to curtail, directly caused the appointment of a king in Rome who would be equally as destructive to Israel as the idolatrous Israelite kings were in their day.Footnote 59
Does the rabbinic text have a specific Roman king in mind? And why does the text parallel Elijah's disappearance with the appointment of a Roman king? I would like to suggest that the Palestinian Talmud likely refers to Numa Pompilius,Footnote 60 the second king of Rome, who was associated with the historical founding of the city, and that the pairing of Elijah with Numa is deliberate. In his attempt to combat idolatrous practices, Elijah gathers all of the priests and people outside the city and sacrifices to God. At the end a chariot of fire and horses of fire appear and Elijah ascends to heaven in a whirlwind (2 Kings 2:11). Thereafter, Elijah can no longer be seen. In Plutarch's Life of Numa, the end of Romulus's life is told in strikingly similar terms, and it is this story that, I argue, the rabbis artfully evoke:
For thirty-seven years, now, Rome had been built and Romulus had been its king; and on the fifth of the month of July, which day they now call the Capratine Nones, Romulus was offering a public sacrifice outside the city at the so-called Goat's Marsh, in the presence of the senate and most of the people. Suddenly there was a great commotion in the air, and a cloud descended upon the earth bringing with it blasts of wind and rain. The throng of common folk were terrified and fled in all directions, but Romulus disappeared, and was never found again either alive or dead. Footnote 61
In the midst of sacrificing among all the senators and people, Romulus is taken in a cloud to the heavens and eventually made into a god. Romulus disappears, and the text remains ambiguous about whether he dies or is taken away alive, just as the biblical text never states whether Elijah dies in his ascent or is taken alive, never to reappear on earth. It was this very event that led to the appointment of a new king in Rome. According to Plutarch, the people of Rome were terrified after Romulus's ascent to the heavens and it took much negotiation and compromise to decide that Numa could adequately replace Romulus as king of Rome. Numa was said to have been born “by some divine felicity” on the day that Rome was founded by Romulus, on the twenty-first of April, and it soon becomes clear that he would make an ideal king. In Livy's account, too, Romulus's disappearance in a cloud is presented as an event about the need to fill the vacant royal seat: “A violent thunderstorm suddenly arose and enveloped the king in so dense a cloud that he was quite invisible to the assembly. From that hour Romulus was no longer seen on earth. When the fears of the Roman youth were allayed by the return of bright, calm sunshine after such fearful weather, they saw that the royal seat was vacant [ubi vacuam sedem regiam vidit].”Footnote 62 The midrash parallels Elijah's ascent in a cloud and disappearance into the heavens with Romulus's ascent and disappearance, the very event that led to the appointment of Numa as king of Rome.
This allusion is yet another remarkable example of the detail of Roman myth and history with which the rabbinic author of this story was familiar and the extent to which he sought to align biblical myth and history with it (and, again, an example of a “hidden transcript”). Perhaps not coincidentally, Romulus and Numa were the two Roman figures credited by Plutarch, Macrobius, and others with the establishment of the Roman calendar, and here they appear in a rabbinic story about one of the festivals on this very same calendar.Footnote 63
A phrase from 1 Kings 22:48 serves as a prooftext for the final line of this third section of the narrative. The rabbinic reading of this passage (ומלך אין, באדום נצב מלך) renders the punctuation as follows: “there was no king, in Edom a deputy was king,” rather than the traditional masoretic punctuation (ומלך אין באדום, נצב מלך) that translates as “there was no king in Edom, a deputy was king.” This reading allows for the interpretation that a lack of Israelite leadership coincided with (and, according to this rabbinic narrative, also caused) the installment of a king in Edom. This prooftext, moreover, also implicitly links the biblical text's Edom to Rome, a move made in other contemporaneous rabbinic texts as well.Footnote 64
The three parts of this rabbinic story blame Israel's leaders' iniquities for the geological, mythical, and historical origins of Rome: Rome rises as Israel falls, a direct result of Israel's idolatrous sins.Footnote 65 This tripartite explanation for Rome's founding is also found in Roman sources discussing their own stories of origin, making the structure of this rabbinic passage all the more intriguing. Livy, in particular, brings together the three stages outlined and undermined so clearly in the rabbinic narrative: the geological foundation upon deposits left by receding water (Ab urbe condita 1.4), the founding of the city by Remus and Romulus (Ab urbe condita 1.6–7), and the appointment of Rome's first king, Numa, after Romulus's disappearance in a whirlwind (Ab urbe condita 1.16). This rabbinic text can best be understood, I would argue, as a rereading of Livy, or of the myth that Livy preserves in his writings.Footnote 66
The story in the Palestinian Talmud blames Rome's rise on Solomon, Jeroboam, and the entire Israelite nation's adoption of idolatrous ways of life and their integration into their idolatrous surroundings. The more these ancient Israelites sinned, according to this rabbinic source, the stronger their Roman (pagan, idolatrous) enemy became. Through this rereading, the biblical past is mapped onto Roman time as the Roman festal day identified in the earlier tannaitic text becomes intertwined with the history of the Jews. The message of the story is clear: participating in idolatrous practices and intermingling with idolatrous neighbors directly led to Rome's founding, assumption of power, and oppression of the Jews; in order to overcome their enemies, Israel must reverse its actions and stay far from idolatry and, in particular, from the pagan festivals that commemorate the geographic and symbolic expansion of this pagan world. This day on the Roman calendar became a festival because of the idolatrous practices of a series of Israelite kings, insists Rabbi Levi in the Palestinian Talmud; the only appropriate way for Jews to mark this day is to abstain from any form of idolatrous practice or commercial participation that would acknowledge it as a day of celebration.
Bavli Avodah Zarah 8b
A similar process of incorporating Jewish elements into the explanations of the origins of Kratesis occurs in the Babylonian Talmud, but whereas the passage in the Palestinian Talmud blames the Jews and their idolatrous sins for the founding of Rome, the Babylonian Talmud's aetiology for this very same festival credits—positively, even proudly—the Jews and their adherence to the Torah for the success of the Roman Empire. The laws articulated in the Babylonian Talmud are unwavering in their prohibition against participating in the Roman festivals and the commercial activities surrounding them, as they are in the Palestinian Talmud. Nonetheless, the author of the narrative about Kratesis in the Babylonian Talmud is more comfortable inscribing positive moments of the Jewish past onto certain Roman calendar days, enmeshing Jewish and Roman time in ways that are markedly different from those in the Palestinian Talmud.
In the Babylonian Talmud, Rav Judah, citing Samuel, defines Kratesis as “the day on which Rome extended her dominion” and provides a brief historical explanation of the origins of the festival.Footnote 67 The passage identifies two Roman victories that lie behind the celebrations: Cleopatra's defeat at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE (“once in the days of Cleopatra the Queen,” in the language of the Talmud) and the earlier victory over the Seleucid king Antiochus III in 190 BCE (“in the days of the Greeks”). In these first few lines, the talmudic text identifies this festival with two moments in Roman history, neither of which explicitly relates to Jews or Jewish history.
For some, such a historical explanation was not sufficient. A tradition in the name of Rav Dimi, a late fourth-century Babylonian rabbi, offers a different explanation, which recounts the way Rome defeated Greece.Footnote 68 It is a strange story in which Jews play a surprisingly important role:
Thirty-two battles did the Romans fight against the Greeks and could not prevail against them until the Romans made an alliance with the Israelites. And these were the conditions made with them: if kings are [chosen] from among us, the prefects should be chosen from your midst, and if the kings are chosen from among you, prefects shall come from our midst. Then the Romans sent word to the Greeks as follows: hitherto we have been fighting matters out, now let us argue them out: of a pearl and a precious stone which shall form a setting for which? They sent the reply: The pearl for the precious stone. And of a precious stone and an onyx, which shall form a setting to the other? The precious stone to the onyx, was the reply. And of an onyx and the Torah scroll which shall serve as the setting for the other? The onyx for the Book of the Law, they replied. The Romans then sent word: in this case, the Book of the Law is in our possession, for Israel is with us. Thereupon the Greeks gave in.Footnote 69
According to Rav Dimi, the Romans were capable of defeating the Greeks only because they had the Jews and the Torah on their side. The Romans first make an alliance with the Jews, and then the Romans convince their Greek enemy to surrender by informing them that they possess the most precious object, the Torah. That is, once the Romans and Greeks cease from military activities and resort to settling their confrontation through argumentative diplomacy instead, the Romans make the case that now that they have the Jews on their side, the Greeks should surrender to them. This is the proper order of the universe, the Romans imply, as the world's most precious belonging is allied with the Romans. Not only do the Romans admit that their victory depends on the Torah; the Greeks, too, recognize the value of the Jewish alliance and immediately capitulate.Footnote 70
This rabbinic text seems to know of the alliance between the Jews and the Romans, also recorded in 1 Maccabees and Josephus (in contrast to the Palestinian Talmud, which does not refer to this alliance in its discussion of this festival).Footnote 71 By connecting this historical alliance to Rome's ultimate victory in the rendition offered by the rabbinic text, and by identifying the Jews as the reason for the festival of Kratesis, the passage insists that this festival's appearance on the Roman calendar necessarily also alludes to the Jews and even acknowledges and celebrates their most precious commodity, the Torah. The text places the Jews into the story of Rome's expansion even though that empire eventually abandoned its treaty with the Jews and began mistreating them, as the passage subsequently explains.
This story can be understood as a counterpart to one of the aetiologies that the Palestinian Talmud offers for the Kalends of January, in which Rabbi Yoḥanan attributes the origins of the Roman New Year to a moment of military victory in Roman history when the Romans engaged in battle with their Egyptian (rather than Greek) enemies without an immediately definitive victory. The explanation relies on an etymology for the words Kalendae Ianuarii:
Rabbi Yoḥanan did not hold the same opinion [as that of Rav], but [suggested the following origin of the kalendae]: the kingdom of Egypt and the kingdom of Rome were at war with one another. They said [to each other]: How long are we going to kill one another in battle? Come and let us make a rule that whichever kingdom will say to its chief general: Fall on your sword [and kill yourself], and [whose general] will listen to that command—[that kingdom] will seize the power [over both of us] first! The Egyptian [general] did not listen to them. The [general] of Rome was a certain old man with the name Januarius. He had twelve sons. They [i.e., one of the Romans] said to him: If you will listen to us [and fall on your sword], we shall make your sons commanders, prefects, and generals! So he listened to them [and fell on his sword]. That is why they call it קלנדס יינובריס [kalendas yanubris = Lat. calendae Ianuarii]! On the next day they mourned for him, [it was a] black day [מילני אימירא].Footnote 72
The Kalends of January, based on this explanation, commemorates a Roman general with the fitting name of Januarius who sacrificed his own life for the sake of his sons (twelve of them, mirroring the year's twelve months and Jacob's twelve tribes) and of the kingdom of Rome. The festival derives its name from the events that Januarius experienced on that very day, which must have been the first day of the Roman month (the Kalends).Footnote 73 Here, Rabbi Yoḥanan relies exclusively on the Roman past, not mentioning any Jewish involvement in the process.Footnote 74
A number of parallel narrative elements link the stories: two competing empires, an unresolved series of battles, a turn to a strategic plan rather than a show of force. A common word also appears in both passages (ואיפרכין in the Yerushalmi and הפרכי in the Bavli, meaning “prefects”), another intertextual link. The stories are spun in two different ways. In the Palestinian Talmud the story presents Roman victory as a purely Roman affair that does not include the Jews and moreover marks Roman origins with death and suicide, while in the Babylonian Talmud the story emphasizes that the Jews and the value of Torah can take credit for Rome's military and imperial success.
How might we make sense of the Babylonian Talmud's story about Kratesis, in which the Torah and the Jews are celebrated in light of Roman expansion? Reading this narrative in a diasporic context—in conversation with two other writers from the Diaspora, Philo and Artapanus—helps us understand its unique perspective. The affirmative perspective on Kratesis in the Babylonian Talmud mirrors, in certain ways, Philo's praise of the Roman takeover and especially his admiration of Augustus. I am not suggesting that the rabbis have Philo in mind or that they necessarily refer to Augustus in particular, but rather that they and Philo share some similar sentiments that are worth considering. Maren Niehoff has observed that Philo does not complain about Augustus, as might otherwise have been expected, but rather emphasizes the emperor's virtue, character, moderation in governance, imperial beneficence, and amiable relationship with the Jews.Footnote 75 Niehoff writes that “the cultic veneration of Augustus in the Alexandrian Caesareium was in [Philo's] view compatible with Jewish values and Jewish identity.”Footnote 76 Moreover, she writes that Augustus
appears in the pages of Philo's Legatio as a ruler most akin to the Jews. He shared “our” values and protected “our” rights … [Leg. 154] … Philo used this image to highlight the compatibility of Jews and Romans.… Augustus appeared to Philo as someone who generally respected “the native customs of each particular nation no less than of the Romans” [Leg. 153], but gave special attention to Jewish rights.… Augustus not only tolerated these Jewish customs, but also “showed such a reverence” for them that, supported by virtually his whole family, he “enriched our Temple with expensive dedications” and ordered “regular sacrifice of holocausts to be made daily in perpetuity at his own expense as an offering to the Most High God” [Leg. 157].… This description of Augustus' support for Jewish customs shows a tendency both to establish his behavior as the essence of Roman rule and to draw him spiritually near to the Jewish religion.… The affinity which Philo felt existed between the Augustan house and the Jews was so deep that he began to speak about the Roman emperor in terms akin to those of a convert to Jewish beliefs.… Augustus became a Jew in spirit and acknowledged the true nature of the Most High God.Footnote 77
Niehoff demonstrates the way in which Philo's Augustus respects and adopts Jewish customs, to the point of speaking of a conversion. The talmudic retelling of Rome's victory over the Greeks resembles Philo's depiction of Augustus: in the Babylonian Talmud, the Romans accept the Torah as powerful and central to their success in battle.
That is not to say that Philo's sentiment towards the Roman emperor is identical to those expressed in the rabbinic source. Philo and the rabbis operated under drastically different cultural conditions: Philo wrote at a time when the temple in Jerusalem still stood, while the subsequent revolt against Rome and the ensuing destruction loomed large for the rabbis even centuries after these events. It is not surprising, given the distinct political contexts in which they lived and wrote, that Philo is more generous in his praise, focusing on Augustus's character and his respect for Jewish custom, while even the most positive rabbinic passage emphasizes the greatness of the Torah itself and its utility in Roman victory, rather than the Roman virtue of recognizing its power. The respective audience of each text also differed: Philo seems ultimately to be interested in demonstrating the compatibility of Jewish and Roman values and customs to both diasporic Jews and Greek-speaking non-Jews who might have been inclined to dwell on seemingly irreconcilable cultural differences, while the rabbinic author of this story seeks to affirm the importance of the Torah in all realms of life, even those as far afield from the rabbinic study house as military battles between two foreign nations. Each text highlights the adoption of Jewish values and customs, but ultimately for different ends.
The impulse to credit the Torah in the story in the Babylonian Talmud—or, for instance, to credit the biblical Adam with establishing the Kalends of January, as is done earlier in the tractateFootnote 78—can be understood in terms of another diasporic author as well. This tale of origin that places Jews at the center of Roman history shares the predilection of Artapanus's writings on Abraham, Joseph, and Moses, in which these biblical figures are credited with inventing astrology, boats, weapons, philosophy, and other important cultural contributions valued by those far beyond their Israelite/Jewish communities.Footnote 79 Moses is even responsible, in Artapanus's account, for strengthening the Egyptian regime.Footnote 80 Artapanus, a Jew living in Egypt in the second century BCE, attempts to present the Jewish past in a way that is not only palatable in the Diaspora, but that also elevates the contribution of the Jews to the society in which they live, a form of “competitive historiography.”Footnote 81 Rather than emphasizing the tensions between Jews and Romans, as the passages in the Palestinian Talmud do, those in the Babylonian Talmud tend to highlight the positive impact and influence of Jews on the surrounding Roman culture and temporal landscape (without completely ignoring the violence and destruction of the Romans).Footnote 82 In this way, the stories in the Babylonian Talmud engage in a discourse that can also be understood as decidedly diasporic, and that had different effects on the temporal synchronization of Roman festivals with Jewish history than those that emerged from a Palestinian context.
* * * * *
Rabbinic stories about Roman festivals offer new perspectives on how the Roman Empire disseminated its ideas and built imperial concerns into the rhythms of everyday life, and how one particular minority in the eastern reaches of that empire contended with this cultural project. As we have seen, rabbis read themselves into Roman history in different contexts and for different ends in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. The rabbis' self-blame or self-credit for Roman victory fits a broader trend, found in Philo and Artapanus, but also in far more contemporary instances. In the modern period, American Jews have imagined the settlement, discovery, and founding of their new home to be a thoroughly Jewish endeavor and accomplishment: the Native Americans were regarded as members of the ten lost tribes, and thus distant relatives;Footnote 83 Christopher Columbus, the man who “discovered” the Americas, and many in his fleet were proudly claimed as Conversos, only superficially concealing their families' Jewishness;Footnote 84 and the Puritans revived originally Jewish ideals by placing the Hebrew Bible at the core of their mission.Footnote 85 Beth Wenger writes that these interpretive strategies allowed Jews across the denominational spectrum to harmonize their Jewish and American values and claim “a founding role in the creation of the nation, not only placing themselves at the birth of the country but also taking credit for transmitting (from God) its fundamental principles.… The use of both history and myth allowed Jews to tell their own story about America, a story that placed Jewish contributions at the center.”Footnote 86 The similarities between this case and the story in the Bavli are striking, even though in Babylonia the Jews were not writing about their current homeland but a previous one.
The “myth of origin” genre is typically constructed to evince positive associations and claim credit, and this is precisely the way it is employed in the Bavli narrative. The narrative from the Palestinian Talmud, on the other hand, presents an interesting twist on this literary form. In the Yerushalmi, the Jews are held responsible for creating Edom, their ultimate oppressor. It is not an association to be lauded, but a negative one wrought from sin and yielding devastating consequences. It functions as a warning to Jews to break their ties with those considered to be negative forces by not indulging in idolatrous practices. The story that is told in the Palestinian Talmud does not serve to build a bridge of commonality, but rather to make the case for severing the link to Rome through pious practice for the sake of Jewish continuity.
Tractate Avodah Zarah's laws and narratives about Roman festivals, and engagement with the Roman calendar, served an important cultural function in the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. They represent efforts to come to terms with a nonideal reality in which the Land of Israel was under Roman control, in direct contradiction to the biblical promise of Jewish sovereignty. In their present circumstances, the rabbis could not fulfill the biblical command to eradicate idolatry from the land—instead, they were surrounded by what they considered to be idolatrous practices. The Mishnah lays out a detailed set of laws for dealing with this newfound situation in practical terms. Later Palestinian and Babylonian sources further manage this tension not only by expanding on the Mish-nah's laws but also by locating Jews within this Roman “story.”
The Palestinian story conveys the message that with each sin of idolatry that the Jews commit, they allow their Roman enemy to gain still greater power and, ultimately, to conquer and oppress them. It is a story in which the Jews are held morally culpable not only for their own sins and those of their ancestors, but also for the sins of Rome. In this way, it parallels the book of Lamentations and other biblical accounts that place the blame on the Jews for the First Temple's destruction by the Babylonians.Footnote 87 Rome's fate is tied to that of Israel's: Israel's archenemy Rome, in this story, was established—geologically, mythologically, and historically—as a direct consequence of Israel's idolatrous mistakes. While the narrative in the Palestinian Talmud condemns Israel for bringing about the founding of Rome, it also legitimizes the Roman Empire; Roman rule is presented as a divinely ordained consequence of Jewish missteps.
The story in the Babylonian Talmud likewise stresses the interconnectedness of Jews and Romans, but from a competing, and generally more positive, perspective. It presents the Jews as righteous and pious, sharing their Torah with the Romans via a political alliance. Through its recognition of the power of God's Torah, Rome prevails over its foreign enemies and safeguards its Jewish allies. In this text, it is Jewish piety that preserves the Jewish community during Rome's ascent to regional dominance, rather than Jewish sin that condemns them as an oppressed minority within that empire. This discrepancy might result from chronological shifts and different geographical settings: rabbis in Roman (and later Christian) Palestine felt more strongly about their pagan neighbors and their rites, and the threat their myths and rituals might pose to the Jewish population, than those in Babylonia. Despite these differences, both texts boldly assert that the Jews were central participants in the historical events that are commemorated on the Roman festival of Kratesis.
There is a somewhat puzzling element to these passages devoted to the origins of Roman festivals in both Talmuds. While the Mishnah's concern with Roman festivals seems to stem from a geographical and cultural context in which such festivals were likely the most popular festivals observed in Roman Palestine, the religious and political landscape had changed dramatically by the time of the redaction of the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds. By the fourth century, pagan festivals were still observed in the region, but rabbis must have also been concerned about the growing and increasingly influential Christian communities, which presented their own set of competing holidays and `calendrical configurations that were at odds with, and often in direct opposition to, Jewish times of celebration. Likewise, in the Babylonian context, Roman festivals were hardly a practical issue, while Zoroastrian and other festivals celebrated by those in the Sasanian Empire might have been more attractive for Jews.
Indeed, the Talmuds are not satisfied with the Mishnah's list of forbidden festivals and expand the applicability of the Mishnah's list. In these talmudic discussions of the Roman festivals, two additional lists more relevant to those living outside the Roman Empire, in Babylonia and Media, are added.Footnote 88 What is presented, in the Mishnah, as a list of the prohibited festivals—that is, a list that limits the category of “festivals of idolaters” to a handful of particular holidays—is transformed into an incomplete list of examples of prohibited festivals that could be expanded and reapplied based on new historical and cultural circumstances. The mishnaic list served, in these later sources, as a template for non-Jewish festivals more generally; all festivals of the gentiles were now governed by the same set of commercial restrictions.Footnote 89 Nonetheless, it is the Roman festivals and their origins, rather than these additional festivals, around which both Talmuds develop aetiologies and that illuminate the many varied intersections between ancient calendars, memories, and histories in the rabbinic imagination.
The Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds give biblical or Jewish resonances to other Roman festivals as well, including Kalends, Saturnalia, and the anniversary of the emperor. In all of these stories, which seek to warn Jews to avoid idolatrous practices and maintain distance from their Roman neighbors, the narrative tactics employed effectively add Jewish meaning to Roman festival days. Were a rabbi to glance at a Roman calendar, for instance, he would encounter a list of festal days that resonated with Jewish historical significance—festivals that were instituted by biblical characters, established as a result of the sins of Israelite kings, or that commemorated political alliances between the Romans and the Jews. By intertwining Roman and Jewish pasts, the days on the Roman calendar become associated with Judaism: a Jewish past is mapped onto the Roman calendar as the rabbis imagined it. To evoke Ricoeur, these rabbinic stories present the Roman calendar as a document that encapsulates a historical time that is not exclusively Roman, but also Jewish. If the mishnaic prohibitions against participating in Roman festivals demanded or presupposed an acute awareness of Roman time within the Jewish calendar, the Talmuds' aetiologies of Roman festivals imposed Jewish history on the Roman calendar.
