Seth Schwartz's new book will gain much attention and should stimulate considerable discussion. It offers a bold and sweeping hypothesis, based on careful reading, a broad command of both Jewish sources and Roman history, and the exercise of the author's independent judgment.
The subject is important and challenging. Schwartz raises the question of whether Jews in the Second Temple and Roman periods fit the mold of an ancient Mediterranean society or stood outside it as a special community with unique values. This, of course, continues an age-old debate, conventionally (but unproductively) put in terms of a choice between assimilation and separatism.
Schwartz sharpens the issue in an interesting fashion, approaching the topic with the particular model of a “normal” Mediterranean society in mind. His touchstones include the practice of reciprocity: ongoing mutual exchanges in the forms of patronage, benefactions, assistance, or protection and the returns in the forms of honor, loyalty, or memorialization. The relationship is thus an inherently unequal one. In his conception, these liaisons lie at the heart of Mediterranean culture in antiquity—and indeed in most premodern states. The weakness of central governments meant more authority for local elites and powerful individuals who promoted bonds of dependency among the more vulnerable. The interconnections between the grandees and their subordinates produced the cohesiveness of ancient societies (9, 13). Jews, by contrast, owed allegiance to a very different kind of tradition. Biblical pronouncements and prescriptions emphasized group solidarity rather than reciprocity. Jewish cohesion rested upon the Torah and devotion to God, a relationship of equality, not one of personal dependency, and thus a veritable antithesis to “mediterraneanism” (15, 26). The question that Schwartz poses is how this Torah-based “counterculture” could survive in a world dominated by institutionalized reciprocity (19, 31). The answer he offers, broadly speaking, is that Jews managed to strike a balance through a range of accommodative techniques (32).
That seems reasonable enough in principle; but how to establish it? Schwartz looks to three very different sources: Ben Sira, Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud. The choice of texts alone is intriguing. If such diverse works converge to reflect similarly on social relations, the case has merit and plausibility.
Schwartz's close reading of Ben Sira's text provides important insights largely overlooked by previous commentators. He points to a basic tension between Ben Sira's practical advice to readers for coping with a world of injustice and social inequities and his repeated insistence on piety and adherence to the teachings of Torah. Schwartz finds a complex sociology in this author, one that blends fear of the Lord with pragmatic management of social relations (48, 53). Ben Sira, on Schwartz's novel interpretation, manages to employ the biblical language of charity and poor relief in a manner that evokes the reciprocal character of gift exchange (65). The thrust of Ben Sira's wisdom is not to subordinate “mediterraneanism” to the Torah or vice versa, but to suggest a process of adaptation that could accommodate them both (77–78).
Schwartz has a tougher proposition in fitting Josephus to this scheme. The Jewish historian's writings, especially in his later works, seem to reject forcefully the values and practices that buttress Greco-Roman society and project the principle of adherence to Mosaic law. But Schwartz discerns a subtler undertone. Josephus' references to God's benefactions and to the need to implant them in the memory of the people appears to have the resonance of euergesia in classical culture. Indeed, the historian's task of memorializing the deeds of Moses, the advantages he brought to the Israelites, and the loyalty paid to him can be interpreted as echoing the reciprocity inherent in that culture (94, 99). Even Herod, for whom Josephus's feelings are deeply mixed, can be portrayed as practicing euergetism and seeking inscription in memory—although his grandson Agrippa was more successful at this (101–103).
The rabbis present a still more formidable challenge. On the face of it, their resistance to the classical tradition was thorough and complete. The tales of the Talmud repeatedly expressed disdain for Romans, Roman leaders, and Roman principles. Yet the very fact of the rabbis' fierce rejectionism, in Schwartz's view, discloses the underlying reality that most Jews had adopted the ideology of reciprocal benefaction against which the rabbis railed (129). At the same time, however, some talmudic stories show a willingness to acknowledge the Roman sense of honor and the significance of memorialization, which thereby bring them into line with Jewish traditions (130–31, 136–38, 161–62).
Schwartz's thesis is appealing and provocative. The effort to find overlap between classical reciprocity and biblical solidarity, normally regarded as fundamentally opposed, has a distinct appeal. Is it convincing? To Schwartz's great credit, he tackles a large and central problem, pervasive in Jewish history of the Greco-Roman period (and indeed beyond). In such an ambitious endeavor (and in a relatively short book), he had to be quite selective in the texts discussed and quite streamlined in the arguments propounded. This inevitably leaves a disturbing concern about how far this small number of selections can actually make the case for his sweeping conclusions.
The case of Ben Sira is instructive. That author, heir to a strong Jewish Wisdom tradition but also conversant with Egyptian lore and Greek learning, offers a valuable instance for the argument. But how representative is Ben Sira? Schwartz quite rightly observes that, although he has universalized the traditions within which he was working into general principles of human interaction, he remains anchored in his own particular cultural, social, political, and literary environment (57). Yet we get very little in this book to put that environment itself on view. If it is to be reconstructed from Ben Sira's comments, we run the risk of circularity. And the inferences themselves are not always obvious. For example, the claim that Ben Sira (3:17–22) shows that gift giving is the conventional way of collecting friendships wrings more from the text than is warranted (59). Schwartz acknowledges quite candidly that Ben Sira's allusions to the culture of reciprocity draw on the Hebrew Bible and reflect native praxis and ideology (75). Where, then, does the Hellenic conceptualization fit in?
A similar question can be raised about Josephus. Benefactions and the memorialization of benefactors, to be sure, constitute a prominent theme in the Antiquities (99). Is this, however, a nod to the reciprocity of the classical world? The epigraphical record shows that Jews themselves frequently engaged in this form of euergetism—at least in the Diaspora. One might note, for example, the Jewish epitaph in a family tomb from Hierapolis in Phrygia that records gifts to the guilds of purple-dyers and carpet weavers who will conduct grave-crowning ceremonies on the occasions of the pagan festival of the Kalends and the Jewish celebrations of both Passover and Pentecost (Inscriptiones Judaicae Orientis, II, 196). To be sure, one can argue that the practice was borrowed from pagan institutions, but this, too, slides close to circularity. Josephus, living and writing in the Diaspora, could have drawn on the experience of Jewish as well as various non-Jewish conventions. It is noteworthy that a prime example of euergesia in Josephus for Schwartz is neither Jewish nor Roman but occurs in the tale of Queen Helena and the royal family of Adiabene (103–104).
With regard to the rabbis, Schwartz makes a vigorous case for seeing them as espousing a sense of honor akin to that of Roman aristocrats, reckoning themselves as structurally equivalent to the Roman euergetes (164). The very notion of honor in Roman terms, however, as Schwartz is well aware, carries ambiguities and complexities that are much debated. To equate the rabbinic sense of honor and disgrace to Roman pudor oversimplifies the matter (141). More broadly, one must wonder whether the few passages treated in this chapter suffice to establish the bold claim that the rabbis had internalized Roman values on this score (116). Nor is it easy to reconcile that notion with Schwartz's conclusion that the rabbis regarded Roman euergetism as so alien to their principles that they were oblivious to it (162–63).
The book has many merits, not the least of which is Schwartz's admirable effort to attack this question with a keen methodological tool. But the necessity of being highly selective in navigating the vast terrain inevitably leaves one uneasy. For example, Schwartz maintains that Josephus emphasizes reciprocity between the powerful and their subordinates in “story after story” (108; cf. 176). Yet we get only a small sample. Similarly, we hear that many passages in the Palestinian Talmud indicate the rabbis' appropriation of the euergestic economy of the Roman city (149; cf. 172). Just a few passages, however, grace these pages. And a more fundamental question arises: How peculiarly Greco-Roman is the whole convention of reciprocity and interlocking relationships between the powerful and the weak? On his last page, Schwartz makes a refreshing concession: “Inasmuch as … all human interaction features by definition elements of reciprocity, at some level the theme is found in almost every story” (177). Should we be surprised, then, that the Jews bought into “mediterraneanism”?
