Mishnah Avodah Zarah: A Focus on Imperial Rome
Ephraim Urbach argued long ago that the Mishnah’s legislation against idolatry mainly focuses on the imperial cult. While we should not understand this as the Mishnah’s only concern, Urbach’s view, endorsed by Goldenberg, is largely accurate (See Urbach (1959) 238–9. Urbach’s position has been confirmed by Goldenberg (1997) 94–6, and by the Talmud Yerushalmi – representative of the Mishnah’s earliest historical audience). First, Rabbi Meir would like to prohibit any image, arguing that they all play a role in a pagan act of worship. Then, “the sages” – the anonymous rabbinic majority – drastically restrict this class of prohibited images. For them, for an image to qualify as idolatrous, it must depict a person and feature “a stick, or a bird or a ball” – according to another manuscript, “the image,” i. e. the depicted person, must “hold” these objects “in his hand”. Shim‘on prohibits images that carry anything in their hand, not just the three objects the sages had specified.
Goldenberg suggests five reasons for the phenomenon that the rabbis’ view of idolatry was shaped by the imperial cult: the stories about the worship of human likenesses in biblical stories, the fact that an image of the emperor likely continued to stand on the Temple Mount, the pervasiveness of imperial images in the public sphere, the irreducibly cultic character of these images, and, at least up to the second century, the social exclusion that Jews experienced as a result of their refusal to worship the emperor.16 In addition, Goldenberg argues that the Mishnah’s list of pagan festivals also focuses largely on the imperial cult, prohibiting dealings with the pagans around the festival of the Kalendae Ianuariae, the accession (of Caesar, i. e. Augustus), the anniversary (of the current emperor), and the imperial memorial day.17 Graf’s brilliant analysis of the Mishnah, written independently of Goldenberg, confirms that the rabbis’ calendrical regulations focus on the imperial cult. The only one of these festivals that is not connected with the imperial cult is the Saturnalia; yet, as Graf points out, the Saturnalia would have been celebrated by the soldiers stationed in Palestine, whose actions could hardly have been missed by the rabbis.
The Imperial Cult after Constantine
Much has been written about the slow Christianisation of the Roman Empire (See e. g. MacMullen (1986) and, on Palestine, Stemberger 2000). The rabbis who resided in the Galilee, as well as in Caesarea Maritima, would have experienced at least the most public aspects of Rome’s Christianisation: visits of the Christian emperors or members of their families, the transformation of Jewish and pagan sites into churches, anti-Jewish legislation, and the slow demise of Roman paganism. For an extensive bibliography on the Christianisation of Jerusalem up to 1988, see Purvis (1988) 267–81. For a more recent summary, see Irshai (2009). For the Galilee, see Aviam (1999). Seth Schwartz has described the ways in which Christians’ destruction of paganism must have perplexed witnessing rabbis, among them the editors of the Yerushalmi. While Schwartz may have partially overestimated the archaeological evidence, his conclusions hold true. On the one hand, by the end of the fourth century, traditional paganism was indeed “uprooted” from parts of the land of Israel. On the other hand, while the smashing of idols and temples looms large in some Christian stories such as those of Mark the Deacon, Epiphanius, and Eusebius, there is recent scholarship demonstrating that paganism survived well beyond the fourth century in some places. The study of Doron Bar shows persuasively that the cult centres in urban Palestine physically survived up to the fifth century, and much longer in rural Palestine; see idem (2008) and Tsafrir (1998). See also Parker (1999) and Wilkinson (1993).
Many pagan temples did become churches, leading the rabbis to a nuanced halakhic response and a modified blessing when seeing partially modified or incompletely uprooted places of pagan worship, as Rachel Neis has persuasively suggested. In her view, the Yerushalmi’s commentary on the appropriate blessing for idolatry that is wiped out only from one place, or that is uprooted in one place to be re-established in another, reflects “a time of removal and replacement (and sometimes recycling) of “pagan” objects with Christian ones” (Neis (2013) 194). At the heart of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire we find the slow Christianisation of the imperial cult. The cult of the emperor was continued in a modified, yet robust, way by the emperor who eventually became Divus Constantinus, as well as by his successors.
Many pagan temples did become churches, leading the rabbis to a nuanced halakhic response and a modified blessing when seeing partially modified or incompletely uprooted places of pagan worship, as Rachel Neis has persuasively suggested. In her view, the Yerushalmi’s commentary on the appropriate blessing for idolatry that is wiped out only from one place, or that is uprooted in one place to be re-established in another, reflects “a time of removal and replacement (and sometimes recycling) of “pagan” objects with Christian ones” (Neis (2013) 194). At the heart of the Christianisation of the Roman Empire we find the slow Christianisation of the imperial cult. The cult of the emperor was continued in a modified, yet robust, way by the emperor who eventually became Divus Constantinus, as well as by his successors.
The Cult of the Emperor in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah: A Late Roman Aggiornamento?
My argument in this section will focus on the plausible early Byzantine context of the Yerushalmi’s discussion of the Mishnah. I first emphasise that the Yerushalmi, in Avodah Zarah 3:1, 42b (lines 54–60), explicates what the Mishnah had conveyed symbolically, namely that the imperial cult features centrally in rabbinic legislation on idolatry. The Yerushalmi also explicates that the imperial cult is connected to the city of “Rome”, which in its time designated either Rome or Constantinople. Secondly, I maintain that the subsequent passage in Yerushalmi Avodah Zarah 3:1, 42b (lines 61–62) should likewise be read in its early Byzantine context. The passage focuses on the burning of incense for the imperial images. We can see a similar focus on this practice in patristic descriptions of the early Byzantine imperial cult. I maintain a degree of caution regarding the verifiability of the Christian target of the rabbis’ hidden halakhic polemics, while confidently asserting that the Yerushalmi’s aggadic commentary solidifies my reading of the rabbis’ polemics against the imperial cult.
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