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Judaism, monotheistic religion developed among the ancient Hebrews. Judaism is characterized by a belief in one transcendent God who revealed himself to Abraham, Moses, and the Hebrew prophets and by a religious life in accordance with Scriptures and rabbinic traditions. Judaism is the complex phenomenon of a total way of life for the Jewish people, comprising theology, law, and innumerable cultural traditions.
The first section of this article treats the history of Judaism in the broadest and most complete sense, from the early ancestral beginnings of the Jewish people to contemporary times. In the second section the beliefs, practices, and culture of Judaism are discussed.
The history of Judaism
It is history that provides the key to an understanding of Judaism, for its primal affirmations appear in early historical narratives. Thus, the Bible reports contemporary events and activities for essentially religious reasons. The biblical authors believed that the divine presence is encountered primarily within history. God's presence is also experienced within the natural realm, but the more immediate or intimate disclosure occurs in human actions. Although other ancient communities also perceived a divine presence in history, the understanding of the ancient Israelites proved to be the most lasting and influential. It is this particular claim—to have experienced God's presence in human events—and its subsequent development that is the differentiating factor in Jewish thought.
Moreover, the ancient Israelites' entire mode of existence was affected by their belief that throughout history they stood in a unique relationship with the divine. The people of Israel believed that their response to the divine presence in history was central not only for themselves but for all humankind. Furthermore, God—as person—had revealed in a particular encounter the pattern and structure of communal and individual life to this people. Claiming sovereignty over the people because of his continuing action in history on their behalf, he had established a covenant (berit) with them and required from them obedience to his teaching, or law (Torah). This obedience was a further means by which the divine presence was made manifest—expressed in concrete human existence. The corporate life of the chosen community was thus a summons to the rest of humankind to recognize God's presence, sovereignty, and purpose—the establishment of peace and well-being in the universe and in humankind.
History, moreover, disclosed not only God's purpose but also humankind's inability to live in accord with it. Even the chosen community failed in its obligation and had to be summoned back, time and again, to its responsibility by the prophets—the divinely called spokespersons who warned of retribution within history and argued and reargued the case for affirmative human response. Israel's role in the divine economy and thus Israel's particular culpability were dominant themes sounded against the motif of fulfillment, the ultimate triumph of the divine purpose, and the establishment of divine sovereignty over all humankind.
General observations
Nature and characteristics
In nearly 4,000 years of historical development, the Jewish people and their religion have displayed a remarkable adaptability and continuity. In their encounter with the great civilizations, from ancient Babylonia and Egypt to Western Christendom and modern secular culture, they have assimilated foreign elements and integrated them into their own social and religious systems, thus maintaining an unbroken religious and cultural tradition. Furthermore, each period of Jewish history has left behind it a specific element of a Judaic heritage that continued to influence subsequent developments, so that the total Jewish heritage at any given time is a combination of all these successive elements along with whatever adjustments and accretions have occurred in each new age.
The various teachings of Judaism have often been regarded as specifications of the central idea of monotheism. One God, the creator of the world, has freely elected the Jewish people for a unique covenantal relationship with himself. This one and only God has been affirmed by virtually all professing Jews in a variety of ways throughout the ages.
Jewish monotheism has had both universalistic and particularistic features. Along universal lines, it has affirmed a God who created and rules the entire world and who at the end of history will redeem all Israel (the classical name for the Jewish people), all humankind, and indeed the whole world. The ultimate goal of all nature and history is an unending reign of cosmic intimacy with God, entailing universal justice and peace. Between creation and redemption lies the particularistic designation of the Jewish people as the locus of God's activity in the world, as the people chosen by God to be "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (Exodus 19:6). This arrangement is designated a covenant and is structured by an elaborate and intricate law. Thus, the Jewish people are both entitled to special privileges and burdened with special responsibilities from God. As the prophet Amos (8th century bce) expressed it: "You alone have I intimately known of all the families of the earth; therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities" (Amos 3:2). The universal goal of the Jewish people has frequently expressed itself in messianism—the idea of a universal, political realm of justice and peace. In one form or another, messianism has permeated Jewish thinking and action throughout the ages, and it has strongly influenced the outlook of many secular-minded Jews (see also eschatology).
Law embraces practically all domains of Jewish life, and it became the principle means by which Judaism was to bring about the reign of God on earth. It is a total guide to religious and ethical conduct, involving ritualistic observance as well as individual and social ethics. It is a liturgical and ethical way constantly expatiated on by the prophets and priests, by rabbinic sages, and by philosophers. Such conduct was to be performed in the service of God, the transcendent and immanent ruler of the universe, the Creator and the propelling force of nature, and the one giving guidance and purpose to history. According to Judaic belief, this divine guidance is manifested through the history of the Jewish people, which will culminate in the messianic age. Judaism, whether in its "normative" form or in its sectarian deviations, never completely departed from this basic ethical and historical monotheism.Salo Wittmayer Baron Lou Hackett Silberman
The division of the millennia of Jewish history into periods is a procedure frequently dependent on philosophical predilections. The Christian world long believed that until the rise of Christianity the history of Judaism was but a "preparation for the Gospel" (preparatio evangelica) that was followed by the "manifestation of the Gospel" (demonstratio evangelica) as revealed by Christ and the Apostles. This formulation could be theologically reconciled with the assumption that Christianity had been preordained even before the creation of the world.
In the 19th century, biblical scholars moved the decisive division back to the period of the Babylonian Exile and the restoration of the Jews to the kingdom of Judah (6th–5th century bce). They asserted that after the first fall of Jerusalem (586 bce) the ancient "Israelitic" religion gave way to a new form of the "Jewish" faith, or Judaism, as formulated by the reformer Ezra (5th century bce) and his school. In Die Entstehung des Judentums (1896; "The Origin of Judaism") the German historian Eduard Meyer argued that Judaism originated in the Persian period, or the days of Ezra and Nehemiah (5th century bce); indeed, he attributed an important role in shaping the emergent religion to Persian imperialism.
These theories, however, have been discarded by most scholars in the light of a more comprehensive knowledge of the ancient Middle East and the abandonment of a theory of gradual evolutionary development that was dominant at the beginning of the 20th century. Most Jews share a long-accepted notion that there never was a real break in continuity and that Mosaic-prophetic-priestly Judaism was continued, with only a few modifications, in the work of the Pharisaic and rabbinic sages well into the modern period. Even today the various Jewish groups—whether Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform—all claim direct spiritual descent from the Pharisees and the rabbinic sages. In fact, however, many developments have occurred within so-called normative or Rabbinic Judaism.
In any event, the history of Judaism can be divided into the following major periods: biblical Judaism (c. 20th–4th century bce), Hellenistic Judaism (4th century bce–2nd century ce), Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century ce), and modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present).Salo Wittmayer Baron
Biblical Judaism (20th–4th century bce)
The ancient Middle Eastern setting
The Bible depicts the family of the Hebrew patriarchs—Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (all early 2nd millennium bce)—as having its chief seat in the northern Mesopotamian town of Harran, which then belonged to the Hurrian kingdom of Mitanni. From there Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew people, is said to have migrated to Canaan (comprising roughly the region of modern Israel and Lebanon), which was a vortex of west Asian, Egyptian, and east Mediterranean cultures throughout the biblical period and later ages. From Canaan the Hebrew ancestors of the people of Israel (named after the patriarch Jacob, also called Israel) migrated to Egypt, where they lived in servitude; a few generations later they returned to occupy part of Canaan.
Israelite culture initially resembled that of its surroundings; it was neither wholly original nor wholly primitive. The Hebrews were seminomadic herdsmen and occasionally farmers. Their tribal structure resembled that of the West Semitic steppe dwellers known from the 18th-century-bce tablets excavated at the north-central Mesopotamian city of Mari; their family customs and law have parallels in the Old Babylonian and Hurro-Semite law of the early and middle 2nd millennium. The conception of a messenger of God that underlies biblical prophecy was Amorite (West Semitic) and also found in the tablets at Mari. Mesopotamian religious and cultural conceptions are reflected in biblical cosmogony, primeval history (including the Flood story in Genesis 6:9–8:22), and law collections. The Canaanite component of Israelite culture consisted of the Hebrew language and a rich literary heritage—whose Ugaritic form (which flourished in the northern Syrian city of Ugarit from the mid-15th century to approximately 1200 bce) illuminates the Bible's poetry, style, mythological allusions, and religious or cultic terms. Egypt provides many analogues for Hebrew hymnody and wisdom literature. All the cultures among which the patriarchs lived had cosmic gods who fashioned the world and preserved its order, all had a developed ethical system expressed in law and moral admonitions, and all had elaborate religious rites and myths.
Although plainer when compared with some of the learned literary creations of Mesopotamia, Canaan, and Egypt, the earliest biblical writings are so imbued with contemporary ancient Middle Eastern elements that the once-held assumption that Israelite religion began on a preliterate level must be rejected. Late-born amid high civilizations, the Israelite religion had from the start features characteristic of all the known religions of the area. Implanted on the land bridge between Africa and Asia, it was exposed to crosscurrents of foreign thought throughout its history.
The pre-Mosaic period: the religion of the patriarchs
Israelite tradition identified YHWH (by scholarly convention pronounced Yahweh), the God of Israel, with the creator of the world, who had been known and worshipped from the beginning of time. Abraham did not discover this God but entered into a new covenantal relationship with him, in which Abraham was promised the land of Canaan and numerous progeny. God fulfilled that promise, it is believed, through the actions of the Hebrew leader Moses (14th–13th century bce): he liberated the people of Israel from Egypt, imposed covenantal obligations on them at Mt. Sinai, and brought them to the Promised Land.
Historical and anthropological studies present formidable objections to the continuity of YHWH worship from Adam (the biblical first man) to Moses. The Hebrew tradition itself, moreover, does not unanimously support even the more modest claim of the continuity of YHWH worship from Abraham to Moses. This lack of continuity is demonstrated in Exodus 6:3, which says that God revealed himself to the patriarchs not as YHWH but as El Shaddai—an archaic epithet of unknown meaning that is not specifically Israelite but is found throughout the patriarchal narratives and in the Book of Job. The epithet El Elyon (God Most High) also appears frequently in the patriarchal narratives. Neither of these epithets is used in postpatriarchal narratives (excepting the Book of Ruth). Other compounds with El are unique to Genesis: El Olam (God the Everlasting One), El Bethel (God Bethel), and El Roʾi (God of Vision). An additional peculiarity of the patriarchal stories is their use of the phrase "God of my [your, his] father." All these epithets have been taken as evidence that patriarchal religion differed from the worship of YHWH that began with Moses. A relation to a patron god was defined by revelations starting with Abraham (who never refers to the God of his father) and continuing with a succession of "founders" of his worship. Attached to the founder and his family, as befits the patron of wanderers, this unnamed deity acquired various Canaanite epithets (El, Elyon, Olam, Bethel, Qone Eretz ["Possessor of the Land"]) only after their immigration into Canaan. Whether the name of YHWH was known to the patriarchs is doubtful. It is significant that while the epithets Shaddai and El occur frequently in pre-Mosaic and Mosaic-age names, YHWH appears as an element only in the names of Yehoshuaʿ (Joshua) and perhaps of Jochebed—persons who were closely associated with Moses.
The patriarchs are depicted as objects of God's blessing, protection, and providential care. Their response is loyalty and obedience and observance of a cult (i.e., a system of religious beliefs and practices) whose ordinary expression is sacrifice, vow, and prayer at an altar, stone pillar, or sacred tree. Circumcision was a distinctive mark of the cult community. The eschatology (doctrine of ultimate destiny) of their faith was God's promise of land and a great progeny. Any flagrant contradictions between patriarchal and later mores have presumably been censored; yet distinctive features of the post-Mosaic religion are absent. The God of the patriarchs shows nothing of YHWH's "jealousy"; no religious tension or contrast with their neighbours appears, and idolatry is scarcely an issue. The patriarchal covenant differed from the Mosaic, Sinaitic covenant in that it was modeled upon a royal grant to favourites and imposed no obligations as conditions of the people's happiness. Evidently not the same as the later religion of Israel, the patriarchal religion prepared the way for the later one through its familial basis, its personal call by the Deity, and its response of loyalty and obedience to him.
Little can be said of the relation between the religion of the patriarchs and the religions of Canaan. Known points of contact between them are the divine epithets mentioned above. Like the God of the fathers, El, the head of the Ugaritic pantheon, was depicted as both a judgmental and a compassionate deity. Baal (Lord), the aggressive young agricultural deity of Ugarit, is remarkably absent from Genesis. Yet the socioeconomic situation of the patriarchs was so different from the urban, mercantile, and monarchical background of the Ugaritic myths as to render any comparisons highly questionable.
The Mosaic period: foundations of the Israelite religion
The Egyptian sojourn
According to Hebrew tradition, a famine caused the migration to Egypt of the band of 12 Hebrew families that later made up a tribal league in the land of Israel. The schematic character of this tradition does not impair the historicity of a migration to Egypt, an enslavement by Egyptians, and an escape from Egypt under an inspired leader by some component of the later Israelite tribes. To disallow these events, it can be argued, would make their centrality as articles of faith in the later religious beliefs of Israel inexplicable.
Tradition gives the following account of the birth of the nation. At the Exodus from Egypt (13th century bce), YHWH showed his faithfulness and power by liberating the Israelites from bondage and punishing their oppressors with plagues and drowning them in the sea. At Sinai he made the Israelites his people and gave them the terms of his covenant, regulating their conduct toward him and each other so as to make them a holy nation. After sustaining them miraculously during their 40-year trek in the wilderness, he enabled them to take the land that he had promised to their fathers, the patriarchs. Central to these events is Moses, who was commissioned by God to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, mediate God's covenant with them, and bring them to Canaan.
Behind the legends and the multiform law collections, it is possible to discern a historical figure to whom the legends and the legislative activity can be attached. And it is precisely Moses' unusual combination of roles that makes him credible as a historical figure. Like Muhammad (c. 570–632 ce) at the birth of Islam, Moses fills oracular, legislative, executive, and military functions. He shapes the main institutions of Israel: the priesthood and the sacred shrine, the covenant and its rules, and the administrative apparatus of the tribal league. Although Moses is compared to a prophet in various texts in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible), he is never designated as one—the term being evidently unsuited for so comprehensive and unique a figure.
Mosaic religion
The distinctive features of Israelite religion appear with Moses. The proper name of Israel's God, YHWH, was revealed and interpreted to Moses as meaning ehye asher ehye—an enigmatic phrase of infinite suggestiveness, literally meaning "I am/shall be what I am/shall be." The covenant, defining Israel's obligations, is ascribed to Moses' mediation. It is impossible to determine what rulings go back to Moses, but the Decalogue, or Ten Commandments, presented in chapter 20 of Exodus and chapter 5 of Deuteronomy, and the larger and smaller covenant codes in Exodus 20:22–23:33 and 34:11–26 are held by critics to contain early covenant law. From them the following features may be noted: the rules are formulated as God's utterances—i.e., expressions of his sovereign will, directed toward and often explicitly addressed to the people at large, Moses merely conveying the sovereign's message to his subjects—and, publication being of the essence of the rules, the people as a whole are held responsible for their observance.
The liberation from Egypt laid upon Israel the obligation of exclusive loyalty to YHWH. This meant eschewing all other gods—including idols venerated as such—and the elimination of all magical recourses. The worship of YHWH was aniconic (without images); even figures that might serve in his worship were banned, apparently because their use suggested theurgy (the art or technique of influencing or controlling a god by fixing his presence in a particular place and making him accessible). Although there is a mythological background behind some cultic terminology (e.g., "a pleasing odour to YHWH" and "my bread"), sacrifice is conceived as tribute or is regarded (in priestly writings) as purely a sacrament—i.e., as a material means of interacting with or making a connection to God. Hebrew festivals also have no mythological basis; they either celebrate God's bounty (e.g., at the ingathering of the harvest) or his saving acts (e.g., at the festival of unleavened bread, which is a memorial of the Exodus).
The values of life and limb, labour, and social solidarity were protected in the rules governing interpersonal relations. The involuntary perpetual slavery of Hebrews was abolished, and a seven-year limit was set on bondage. The humanity of slaves was defended: one who beat his slave to death was liable to death; if he maimed a slave, he was required to set the slave free. Murderers were denied asylum and could not ransom themselves from death, and for deliberate and severe bodily injuries the lex talionis—the principle of "an eye for an eye"—was ordained (see talion). Theft and harm to property were punished monetarily rather than by death.
Moral exhortations called for solidarity with the poor and the helpless and for brotherly assistance to those in need. Institutions were created—e.g., the sabbatical, or seventh, fallow year, in which land was not cultivated—to embody such exhortations in practice.
Since the goal of the Israelites was the conquest of a land, their religion had warlike features. Organized as an army (called "the hosts of YHWH" in Exodus 12:41), they encamped in a protective square around their palladium—the tent housing the ark in which rested the stone "Tablets of the Covenant." When journeying, the sacred objects were carried and guarded by the Levite tribe or clan, whose rivals, the Aaronites, exercised a monopoly on the priesthood. God, sometimes called "the warrior," marched with the army; in war, part of the booty was delivered to his ministers.
The period of the conquest and settlement of Canaan
The conquest of Canaan was remembered as a continuation of God's marvels at the Exodus. The Jordan River was split asunder, the walls of Jericho fell at Israel's shout, the enemy was seized with divinely inspired terror, and the sun stood still in order to enable Israel to exploit its victory. Such stories are not necessarily the work of a later age; they reflect rather the impact of these victories on the actors in the drama, who felt themselves successful by the grace of God.
A complex process of occupation, involving both battles of annihilation and treaty agreements with indigenous peoples, has been simplified in the biblical account of the wars of Joshua (13th century bce). Gradually, the unity of the invaders dissolved (most scholars believe that the invading element was only part of the Hebrew settlement in Canaan; other Hebrews, long since settled in Canaan from patriarchal times, then joined the invaders' covenant league). Individual tribes made their way with varying success against the residue of Canaanite resistance. New enemies, Israel's neighbours to the east and west, appeared, and the period of the judges (leaders, or champions) began.
The Book of Judges, the main witness for the period, does not speak with one voice on the religious situation. Its editorial framework describes repeated cycles of apostasy, oppression, appeal to God, and relief through a champion sent by God. Israel's troubles prior to the institution of the monarchy under Saul (11th century bce) were caused by the weakness of the disunited tribes and were thus accounted for by the covenantal sin of apostasy. The individual stories, however, present a different picture. Apostasy does not figure in the exploits of the judges Ehud, Deborah, Jephthah, and Samson; YHWH has no rival, and faith in him is periodically confirmed by the saviours he sends to rescue Israel from its neighbours. This faith is shared by all the tribes; it is owing to their common cult that a Levite from Bethlehem could serve first at an Ephraimite and later also at a Danite sanctuary. The religious bond, preserved by the common cult, enabled the tribes to work together under the leadership of elders or an inspired champion in time of danger or religious scandal.
Both written and archaeological testimonies, however, point to the Hebrews' adoption of Canaanite cults—the Baal worship of Gideon's family and neighbours in Ophrah in Judges, chapter 6, is an example. The many cultic figurines (usually female) found in Israelite levels of Palestinian archaeological sites also give colour to the sweeping indictments of the framework of the Book of Judges. But these phenomena belonged to the private, popular religion; the national God, YHWH, remained one—Baal sent no prophets to Israel—though YHWH's claim to exclusive worship was obviously not effectual. Nor did his cult conform with later orthodoxy; Micah's idol in Judges, chapter 17, and Gideon's ephod (priestly or religious garment) were considered apostasies by the editor, in accord with the dogma that whatever is not orthodoxy is apostasy—heterodoxy (nonconformity) being unrecognized and simply equated with apostasy.
To the earliest sanctuaries and altars honoured as patriarchal foundations—at Shechem, Bethel, Beersheba, and Hebron in Cisjordan (west of the Jordan); and at Mahanaim, Penuel, and Mizpah in Transjordan (east of the Jordan)—were added new sanctuaries and altars at Dan, Shiloh, Ramah, Gibeon, and elsewhere. A single priestly family could not operate all these establishments, and so Levites rose to the priesthood; at private sanctuaries even non-Levites might be consecrated as priests. The Ark of the Covenant was housed in the Shiloh sanctuary, staffed by priests of the house of Eli, who traced their consecration back to Egypt. But the ark remained a portable palladium in wartime; Shiloh was not regarded as its final resting place. The law in Exodus 20:24–26, which authorized a plurality of altar sites and the simplest forms of construction (earth and rough stone), suited the plain conditions of this period.
The period of the united monarchy
The religious and political problem
The decentralized tribal league could not cope with the constant pressure of external enemies—camel-riding desert marauders who pillaged harvests annually and iron-weaponed Philistines (an Aegean people settling coastal Palestine c. 12th century bce) who controlled key points in the hill country occupied by the Israelites. In the face of such threats, a central authority that could mobilize the forces of the entire league and create a standing army had to be established. Two attitudes were distilled in the crisis—one conservative and anti-monarchic, the other radical and pro-monarchic. The conservative attitude appears first in Gideon's refusal to found a dynasty in Judges 8:23: "I will not rule you," he tells the people, "my son will not rule over you; YHWH will…!" This theocratic view pervades one of the two contrasting accounts of the founding of the monarchy fused in chapters 8–12 of the First Book of Samuel (see Samuel, books of). The popular demand for a king was viewed as a rejection of the kingship of God, and in response to the demand there appeared a series of inspired saviours, from Moses and Aaron (14th–13th century bce) through Jerubbaal, Bedan, and Jephthah to Samuel (11th century bce) himself. The other, more radical account depicts the monarchy as a gift of God, designed to rescue his people from the Philistines (1 Samuel 9:16). Both accounts represent the seer-judge Samuel as the key figure in the founding of Israel's monarchy, and it is not unlikely that the two attitudes struggled within him.
The Benjaminite Saul was made king (c. 1020 bce) by divine election and by popular acclamation after his victory over the Ammonites (a Transjordanian Semitic people), but his career was clouded by conflict with Samuel, the major representative of the old order. Saul's kingship was bestowed by Samuel and had to be accommodated to the ongoing authority of that man of God. The two accounts of Saul's rejection by God (through Samuel) involve his usurpation of the prophet's authority. King David (10th century bce), whose forcefulness and religious and political genius established the monarchy on an independent spiritual footing, resolved the conflict.
The Davidic monarchy
The essence of the Davidic innovation was the idea that, in addition to divine election through Samuel and public acclamation, David had received God's promise of an eternal dynasty; a conditional (perhaps earlier) and an unconditional (perhaps later) form of this promise exist in Psalms, chapter 132 and 2 Samuel, chapter 7, respectively. In its developed form, the promise was conceived of as a covenant with David, paralleling the covenant with Israel and instrumental in the latter's fulfillment—the covenant being that God would channel his benefactions to Israel through the chosen dynasty of David. With this new status came the inviolability of the person of God's anointed (a characteristically Davidic idea) and a court rhetoric—adapted from pagan models—in which the king was styled "the [firstborn] son of God." An index of the king's sanctity was his occasional performance of priestly duties. Yet the king's mortality was never forgotten: he was never deified, and, although prayers and hymns might be said on his behalf, they were never addressed to him as a god.
David captured the Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem and made it the seat of a national monarchy (Saul had never moved the seat of his government from his birthplace, the Benjaminite town of Gibeah, about three miles north of Jerusalem). Then, fetching the ark from an obscure retreat, David installed it in his capital, asserting his royal prerogative (and obligation) to build a shrine for the national God and thus at the same time joining the symbols of the dynastic and the national covenants. This move of political genius linked the God of Israel, the chosen dynasty of David, and the chosen city of Jerusalem in a henceforth indissoluble union.
David planned to build a temple to house the ark, but the tenacious tradition of the ark's portability in a tent shrine forced the postponement of the project to the reign of his son Solomon. As part of his extensive building program, Solomon erected the Temple on a Jebusite threshing floor, located on a hill north of Jerusalem, which David had purchased to mark the spot where a plague had been halted. The ground plan of the Temple—a porch with two freestanding pillars before it, a sanctuary, and an inner sanctum—followed Syrian and Phoenician sanctuary models. A bronze "sea" resting on bulls and placed in the Temple court had a Babylonian analogue. The Temple of Jerusalem resembled Canaanite and other Middle Eastern religious structures but was also different from them: notably, in the inner sanctum of the Temple there was no image of God but only the ancient ark covered by the wings of large cherubim. YHWH, who was enthroned upon celestial cherubim, was thus symbolically present in the Temple.
Alongside a brief inaugural poem in 1 Kings 8:12–13, an extensive (and, in its present form, later) prayer expresses the distinctively biblical view of the Temple as a vehicle through which God provided for his people's needs. Since no reference to sacrifice is made, not a trace appears of the standard pagan conception of temple as a vehicle through which humans provided for the gods.
The quality of the preserved narrative of the reign of David, which gives every indication of having come from the hand of a contemporary eyewitness, demonstrates that literature flourished under the aegis of the court. Attached to the royally sponsored Temple must have been a library and a school (in keeping with the universally attested practice of the ancient Middle East), among whose products would have been not only royal psalms but also liturgical pieces intended for the common people that eventually found their way into the book of Psalms.
The latest historical allusions in the Torah literature (the Pentateuch) are to the period of the united monarchy—e.g., the defeat and subjugation of the peoples of Amalek, Moab (see Moabite), and Edom by Saul and David, in Numbers 24:17–20. On the other hand, the polity reflected in the laws is tribal and decentralized, with no bureaucracy. Its economy is agricultural and pastoral; class distinctions—apart from slave and free—are lacking; and commerce and urban life are rudimentary. A pre-monarchic background is evident, with only rare explicit reflections of the later monarchy—e.g., in Deuteronomy 17:14–20. The groundwork of the Torah literature most likely crystallized under the united monarchy.
In this period the traditional wisdom cultivated among the learned in neighbouring cultures came to be prized in Israel. Solomon is represented as the author of an extensive literature comparable to that of other sages in the region. His wisdom is expressly attributed to YHWH in the account of his night oracle at Gibeon (in which he asked not for power or riches but for wisdom), thus marking the adaptation to biblical thought of this common Middle Eastern genre. As set forth in Proverbs 2:5, "It is YHWH who grants wisdom; knowledge and understanding are by his command." Patronage of wisdom literature is ascribed to the later Judahite king, Hezekiah (8th–7th century bce); the connection of wisdom with kings is also common in extra-biblical cultures.
Domination of all of Palestine entailed the absorption of "the rest of the Amorites"—the pre-Israelite population that lived chiefly in the valleys and on the coast. Their impact on Israelite religion is unknown, though some scholars contend that there was a "royally sponsored syncretism" aimed at fusing the two populations. Because popular religion incorporated pagan elements, it is likely that it did not meet the standards of the biblical writers; such elements may have increased as a result of intercourse with the newly absorbed Amorites. The court itself welcomed foreigners—Philistines, Cretans, Hittites, and Ishmaelites are named, among others—and made use of their service. Their effect on the court religion may be surmised from what is recorded concerning Solomon's many diplomatic marriages: foreign princesses whom Solomon married brought with them the apparatus of their native cults. The king even had shrines to their gods built and maintained on the Mount of Olives. Yet such private cults, while indeed royally sponsored, did not make the religion of the people syncretistic.
Such compromise with the pagan world, entailed by the widening horizons of the monarchy, violated the sanctity of the holy land of YHWH and turned the king into an idolator in the eyes of zealots. Religious opposition, combined with grievances against the organization of forced labour for state projects, led to the secession of the northern tribes (headed by the Joseph tribes) after Solomon's death.
The period of the divided kingdom
Jeroboam I (10th century bce), the first king of the north, now called Israel (the kingdom in the south was called Judah), appreciated the inextricable link of Jerusalem and its sanctuary with the Davidic claim to divine election to kingship over all of Israel (the whole people, north and south). He therefore founded rival sanctuaries at the ancient cult sites of Dan and Bethel and staffed them with non-Levite priests whose symbol of YHWH's presence was a golden calf—a pedestal of divine images in ancient iconography and the equivalent of the cherubim of Jerusalem's Temple. He also moved the autumn ingathering festival one month ahead so as to foreclose celebrating this most popular of all festivals simultaneously with Judah.
The Book of Kings (later divided into two books; see Kings, books of) remains the almost exclusive source for the evaluation of Jeroboam's innovations and the subsequent official religion of the north down to the mid-8th century. However, this work has severe limitations as a source for religious history. It is dominated by a dogmatic historiography that regards the whole enterprise of the north as one long apostasy ending in a deserved disaster. The culmination of Kings' history with the exile of Judah shows that it came from the northern kingdom. Yet the evaluation of Judah's official religion is subject to an equally dogmatic standard: namely, the royal adherence to the Deuteronomic rule of a single cult site. The author considered the Temple of Solomon to be the cult site chosen by God, according to Deuteronomy, chapter 12, the existence of which rendered all other sites illegitimate. Every king of Judah is judged according to whether or not he did away with all places of worship outside Jerusalem. The date of this criterion may be inferred from the indifference toward it of all persons prior to Hezekiah—e.g., the prophets Elijah and Elisha and Jehoiada, a priest of Jerusalem (all 9th century bce).
Another serious limitation is the restriction of Kings' purview: excepting the Elijah-Elisha stories, it recognizes only the royally sponsored cult and pays scant attention to popular religion. In the mid-8th century the writings of the classical prophets, starting with Amos, first appeared. These take in the people as a whole, in contrast to Kings; on the other hand, their interest in theodicy (the problem of reconciling the presumed goodness of God with the existence of evil in the world) and their polemical tendency to exaggerate and generalize what they deem evil must be taken into consideration before accepting their statements as history per se (see also evil, problem of).
For half a century after the north's secession (c. 922 bce), the religious situation in Jerusalem was unchanged. The distaff side of the royal household perpetuated, and even augmented, the pagan cults. King Asa (reigned c. 908–867 bce) is credited with a general purge, including the destruction of an image made for the goddess Asherah by the queen mother, granddaughter of an Aramaean princess. He also purged the qedeshim ("consecrated men"—conventionally rendered as "sodomites," or "male sacred prostitutes").
Foreign cults entered the north with the marriage of King Ahab (reigned 874–853 bce) to the Tyrian princess Jezebel (died c. 843 bce). Jezebel was accompanied by a large entourage of sacred personnel to staff the temple of Baal and Asherah that Ahab built for her in Samaria, the capital of the northern kingdom of Israel. Although Ahab's orthodoxy was in every other respect irreproachable, some members of his court may have worshipped the gods of the foreign princess. Jezebel's persecution of the prophets of YWHW—conduct untypical of a polytheist except in self-defense—was probably prompted by the fierce opposition to non-YHWH cults in Israel. Elijah's assertion that the whole country apostatized is a piece of hyperbole based on the view that whoever did not actively fight Jezebel was implicated in her polluted cult. Such must have been the view of the prophets, whose fallen were the first martyrs to die for the glory of God. The quality of their opposition may be gauged by Elijah's summary execution of the foreign Baal cultists after they failed at the contest on Mt. Carmel (Elijah and the priests of Baal appealed respectively to YHWH and Baal to set a pile of wood ablaze to prove whose god was truly God). A three-year drought (attested also in Phoenician sources), declared by Elijah to be punishment for the sin of apostasy, did much to kindle the prophets' zeal.
To judge from the stories of Elisha, devotion to the cult of Baal existed in the capital city, Samaria, but was not felt in the countryside. The religious tone there was set by the popular prophets and their adherents ("the sons of the prophets"). In popular consciousness these men were wonder-workers—healing the sick and reviving the dead, foretelling the future, and helping to find lost objects. To the biblical narrator, they witnessed the working of God in Israel. Elijah's rage at the Israelite king Ahaziah's recourse to the pagan god Baalzebub, Elisha's cure of the Syrian military leader Naaman's leprosy, and anonymous prophets' directives and predictions in matters of peace and war all served to glorify God. Indeed, the equation of Israel's prosperity with God's interest generated the first appearance of the issue of "true" and "false" prophecy. The fact that prophecy of success could turn out to be a snare is exemplified in a story of conflict between the prophet of doom Micaiah (9th century bce) and 400 unanimous prophets of victory who lured King Ahab to his death. The poignancy of the issue is highlighted by Micaiah's acknowledgment that the 400 were also prophets of YHWH—but inspired by him deliberately with a "lying spirit."
The period of classical prophecy and cult reform
The emergence of the literary prophets
By the mid-8th century, one hundred years of chronic warfare between Israel and Aram had finally ended—the Aramaeans having suffered heavy blows from the Assyrians. King Jeroboam II (8th century bce) undertook to restore the imperial sway of the north over its neighbour, and Jonah's prophecy that Jeroboam would extend Israel's borders from the Dead Sea to the entrance to Hamath (Syria) was borne out. The well-to-do expressed their relief in lavish attentions to the institutions of worship and to their private mansions. But the strain of the prolonged warfare showed in the polarization of society between the wealthy few who had profited from the war and the masses whom it had ravaged and impoverished. Dismay at the dissolution of Israelite society animated a new breed of prophets—the literary or classical prophets, the first of whom was Amos (8th century bce), a Judahite who went north to Bethel.
The point that apostasy would set God against the community was made in early prophecy; the idea that violation of the social and ethical injunctions of the covenant would have the same result was first proclaimed by Amos. Amos almost ignored idolatry, denouncing instead the corruption and callousness of the oligarchy and rulers. He proclaimed the religious exercises of such villains to be loathsome to God; on their account Israel would be oppressed from the entrance of Hamath to the Dead Sea and exiled from its land.
The westward push of the Neo-Assyrian empire in the mid-8th century bce soon brought Aram and Israel to their knees. In 733–732 Assyria took Gilead and Galilee from Israel and captured Aramaean Damascus; in 721 Samaria, the Israelite capital, fell. The northern kingdom sought to survive through alliances with Assyria and Egypt; its kings came and went in rapid succession. The troubled society's malaise was interpreted by Hosea, a prophet of the northern kingdom (Israel), as a forgetting of God (see Hosea, Book of). As a result, in his view, all authority had evaporated: the king was scoffed at, priests became hypocrites, and pleasure seeking became the order of the day. The monarchy was godless, putting its trust in arms, fortifications, and alliances with great powers. Salvation, however, lay in none of these but in repentance and reliance upon God.
Prophecy in the southern kingdom
Judah was subjected to such intense pressure to join an Israelite-Aramaean coalition against Assyria that its king Ahaz (8th century bce) instead submitted to Assyria in return for relief. Ahaz introduced a new Aramaean-style altar in the Temple of Jerusalem and adopted other foreign customs that are counted against him in the Book of Kings. It was at this time that Isaiah prophesied in Jerusalem (see also Isaiah, Book of). At first (under Uzziah, Ahaz's prosperous grandfather) his message emphasized the social and religious corruption of Judah, stressing the new prophetic themes of indifference to God (which went hand in hand with a thriving cult) and the fateful importance of social morality. Under Ahaz the political crisis evoked Isaiah's appeals for trust in God, with the warning that the "hired razor from across the Euphrates" would shave Judah clean as well. Isaiah interpreted the inexorable advance of Assyria as God's chastisement. The "rod of God's wrath," Assyria would be broken on Judah's mountains because of its insolence when God was finished with his purgative work. Then the nations of the world, which had been subjugated by Assyria, would recognize the God of Israel as the lord of history. A renewed Israel would prosper under the reign of an ideal Davidic king, all humanity would flock to Zion (the hill symbolizing Jerusalem) to learn the ways of YHWH and to submit to his adjudication, and universal peace would prevail (see also eschatology).
The prophecy of Micah (8th century bce), also from Judah, was contemporary with that of Isaiah and touched on similar themes—e.g., the vision of universal peace is found in both their books (see Micah, Book of). Unlike Isaiah, however, who believed in the inviolability of Jerusalem, Micah shocked his audience with the announcement that the wickedness of its rulers would cause Zion to become a plowed field, Jerusalem a heap of ruins, and the Temple Mount a wooded height. Moreover, from the precedence of social morality over the cult, Micah drew the extreme conclusion that the cult had no ultimate value and that God's requirement of humanity could be summed up as "to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God."
Reforms in the southern kingdom
According to the Book of Jeremiah (about 100 years later), Micah's prophetic threat to Jerusalem had caused King Hezekiah (reigned c. 715–c. 686 bce) to placate God—possibly an allusion to the cult reform instituted by the king in order to cleanse Judah of various pagan practices. A heightened concern over assimilatory trends resulted in his also outlawing certain practices considered legitimate up to his time. Thus, in addition to removing the bronze serpent that had been ascribed to Moses (and that had become a fetish), the reform did away with the local altars and stone pillars, the venerable (patriarchal) antiquity of which did not save them from the taint of imitation of Canaanite practice. Hezekiah's reform, part of a policy of restoration that had political as well as religious implications, was the most significant effect of the fall of the northern kingdom on official religion. The outlook of the reformers is suggested by the catalog in 2 Kings, chapter 17, of religious offenses that had caused the fall; the objects of Hezekiah's purge closely resembled them. Hezekiah's reform is the first historical evidence for Deuteronomy's doctrine of cult centralization. Similarities between Deuteronomy and the Book of Hosea lend colour to the supposition that the reform movement in Judah, which culminated a century later under King Josiah, was sparked by attitudes inherited from the north.
Hezekiah was the leading figure in a western coalition of states that joined with the Babylonian king Merodach-Baladan II in a rebellion against the Assyrian king Sennacherib shortly after the Assyrian's accession in 705 bce. When Sennacherib appeared in the west in 701, the rebellion collapsed; Egypt sent a force to aid the rebels but was defeated. His kingdom overwhelmed, Hezekiah offered tribute to Sennacherib; the Assyrian, however, pressed for the surrender of Jerusalem. In despair, Hezekiah turned to the prophet Isaiah for an oracle. While condemning the king's reliance upon Egyptian help, Isaiah stood firm in his faith that Jerusalem's destiny precluded its fall into heathen hands. The king held fast, and Sennacherib, for reasons still obscure, suddenly retired from Judah and returned home. This unlooked-for deliverance of the city may have been regarded as a vindication of the prophet's faith and was doubtless an inspiration to the rebels against Babylonia a century later. For the present, although Jerusalem was intact, the country had been devastated and the kingdom turned into a vassal state of Assyria.
During the long and peaceful reign of Manasseh in the 7th century bce, Judah was a submissive ally of Assyria. Manasseh's forces served in the building and military operations of the Assyrian kings Esarhaddon (reigned 680–669 bce) and Ashurbanipal (reigned 668–627 bce). Judah benefitted from the increase in commerce that resulted from the political unification of the entire Middle East. The prophet Zephaniah (7th century bce) attests to heavy foreign influence on the mores of Jerusalem—merchants who adopted foreign dress, cynics who lost faith in the power of YHWH to do anything, and people who worshipped the pagan host of heaven on their roofs (see also Zephaniah, Book of). Manasseh's court was the centre of such influences. The royal sanctuary became the home of a congeries of foreign gods; the sun, astral deities, and Asherah (the female fertility deity) all had their cults alongside YHWH. The countryside also was provided with pagan altars and priests, alongside local YHWH altars that were revived. Presumably, at least some of the blood that Manasseh is said to have spilled freely in Jerusalem must have belonged to YHWH's devotees. No prophecy is dated to his long reign.
With the death of Ashurbanipal, Assyria's power faded quickly. The young king of Judah, Josiah (reigned c. 640–609 bce), had already set in motion a vigorous movement of independence and restoration, a cardinal aspect of which was religious. First came the purge of foreign cults in Jerusalem under the aegis of the high priest Hilkiah; then the countryside was cleansed. In the course of renovating the Temple, a scroll of Moses' Torah (by scholarly consensus an edition of Deuteronomy) was found. Anxious to abide by its injunctions, Josiah had the local YHWH altars polluted to render them unusable and collected their priests in Jerusalem. The celebration of the Passover that year was concentrated in the Temple, as it had not been "since the days of the judges who judged Israel," according to 2 Kings 23:22, or since the days of Samuel, according to 2 Chronicles 35:18; both references reflect the theory of the Deuteronomic (Josianic) reformers that the Shiloh sanctuary was the precursor of the Jerusalem Temple as the sole legitimate site of worship in Israel (as demanded by Deuteronomy, chapter 12). To seal the reform, the king convoked a representative assembly and directed it to enter into a covenant with God over the newfound Torah. For the first time, the power of the state was enlisted on behalf of the ancient covenant and in obedience to a covenant document. It was a major step toward the establishment of a sacred canon.
Josiah envisaged the restoration of Davidic authority over the entire domain of ancient Israel, and the retreat of Assyria facilitated his ambitions—until he became fatally embroiled in the struggle of the powers over the dying empire. His death in 609 was doubtless a setback for his religious policy as well as his political program. To be sure, the royally sponsored syncretism of Manasseh's time was not revived, but there is evidence of a recrudescence of unofficial local altars. Whether references in the Book of Jeremiah and the Book of Ezekiel to child sacrifice to YHWH reflect post-Josianic practices is uncertain. Yet there is stronger indication of private recourse to pagan cults in the worsening political situation.
The unsettled conditions following Assyria's fall dismayed the devotees of YHWH, who had not been prepared for it by prophecy. Their mood finds expression in the oracles of the prophet Habakkuk in the last years of the 7th century bce (see Habakkuk, Book of). Confessing perplexity at God's toleration of the success of the wicked in subjugating the righteous, the prophet affirms his faith in the coming salvation of YHWH, tarry though it might. And in the meantime, "the righteous must live in his faith."
Despite these expectations of salvation, the situation grew worse as Judah was caught in the Babylonian-Egyptian rivalry. Some attributed the deterioration to Manasseh's sin of moving toward polytheism. For the prophet Jeremiah (c. 650–c. 570 bce), the Josianic era was only an interlude in Israel's career of guilt, which went back to its origins. His pre-reform prophecies denounced Israel as a faithless wife and warned of imminent retribution at the hands of a nameless northerner. After Nebuchadrezzar II (reigned c. 605–c. 561 bce) decisively defeated Egypt at Carchemish (605 bce), Jeremiah identified the scourge as Babylonia. King Jehoiakim's attempt to be free of Babylonia ended with the exile of his successor, Jehoiachin, along with Judah's elite (597 bce); yet the court of the new king, Zedekiah (reigned 597–587/586 bce), persisted in plotting new revolts, relying—against all experience—on Egyptian support. Jeremiah now proclaimed a scandalous doctrine of the duty of all nations, Judah included, to submit to the divinely appointed world ruler, Nebuchadrezzar, as the only hope of avoiding destruction; a term of 70 years of submission had been set to humiliate all nations beneath Babylonia. Imprisoned for demoralizing the people, Jeremiah persisted in what was viewed as his traitorous message; Judah's leaders, on their part, persisted in their policy, confident of Egypt and the saving power of Jerusalem's Temple to the bitter end.
Jeremiah also had a message of comfort for his hearers. He foresaw the restoration of the entire people—north and south—under a new David. And since events had shown that human beings were incapable of achieving a lasting reconciliation with God on their own, he envisioned the penitent of the future being met halfway by God, who would remake their nature so that doing his will would come naturally to them. God's new covenant with Israel would be written on their hearts, so that they should no longer need to teach each other obedience, for young and old would know YHWH.
Among the exiles in Babylonia, the prophet Ezekiel, Jeremiah's contemporary, was haunted by the burden of Israel's sin. He saw the defiled Temple of Manasseh's time as present before his eyes and described God as abandoning it and Jerusalem to their fates. Although Jeremiah offered hope through submission, Ezekiel prophesied an inexorable, total destruction as the condition of reconciliation with God. The majesty of God was too grossly offended for any lesser satisfaction. The glory of God demanded Israel's ruin, but the same cause required its restoration. Israel's fall disgraced YHWH among the nations; to save his reputation, he must therefore restore Israel to its land. The dried bones of Israel must revive, so that they and all the nations should know that he was YHWH (Ezekiel 37). Ezekiel too foresaw the remaking of human nature, but as a necessity of God's glorification; the concatenation of Israel's sin, exile, and consequent defamation of God's name must never be repeated. In 587/586 bce the doom prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel came true. Rebellious Jerusalem was reduced by Nebuchadrezzar, the Temple was burned, and much of Judah's population was dispersed or deported to Babylonia.
The Babylonian Exile
The survival of the religious community of exiles in Babylonia demonstrates how rooted and widespread the religion of YHWH was. Abandonment of the national religion as an outcome of the disaster is recorded of only a minority. There were some cries of despair, but the persistence of prophecy among the exiles shows that their religious vitality had not flagged. The Babylonian Jewish community, in which the cream of Judah lived, had no sanctuary or altar (in contrast to the Jewish garrison of Elephantine in Egypt); what developed in their place can be surmised from new postexilic religious forms: fixed prayer; public fasts and confessions; and assembly for the study of the Torah, which may have developed from visits to the prophets for oracular edification. The absence of a local or territorial focus must also have spurred the formation of a literary centre of communal life—the sacred canon of covenant documents that came to be the core of the present Pentateuch. Observance of the Sabbath—a peculiarly public feature of communal life—achieved a significance among the exiles virtually equivalent to all the rest of the covenant rules together. Notwithstanding its political impotence, the exile community possessed such high spirits that foreigners were attracted to its ranks, hopeful of sharing in its future glory. This moment marks the origin of conversion to Judaism for distinctly religious reasons rather than for reasons of politics, culture, or nationalism.
Assurance of that future glory was given not only by Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's consolations, which were made credible by the fulfillment of the prophecies of doom, but also by the great comforter of the exile, the writer or writers of what is known as Deutero-Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66), who perceived the instrument of God's salvation in the rise and progress of the Persian king Cyrus II (the Great; reigned 550–529 bce; see Isaiah, Book of). Going beyond the national hopes of Ezekiel and animated by the universal spirit of the pre-exilic Isaiah, Deutero-Isaiah saw in the miraculous restoration of Israel a means of converting the whole world to faith in Israel's God. Israel would thus serve as "a light for the nations, that YHWH's salvation may reach to the end of the earth." In his conception of the vicarious suffering of God's servant—through which atonement is made for the ignorant heathen—Deutero-Isaiah found a handle by which to grasp the enigma of faithful Israel's lowly state among the Gentiles. The idea was destined to play a decisive role in the self-understanding of the Jewish martyrs persecuted by the Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes (reigned 175–164 bce)—as recounted in the Book of Daniel—and later again in the Christian appreciation of the death of Jesus.
The period of the restoration
After conquering Babylonia, Cyrus allowed those Jews who wished to do so to return and rebuild their Temple. Although some 40,000 eventually made their way back, they were soon disillusioned and ceased their rebuilding as the glories of the restoration failed to materialize and as controversy arose with the Samaritans, who opposed the reconstruction. (The Samaritans were a Judaized mixture of native north Israelites and Gentile deportees settled by the Assyrians in the erstwhile northern kingdom.) A new religious inspiration attended the governorship of Zerubbabel (6th century bce), a member of the Davidic line, who became the centre of messianic expectations during the anarchy attendant upon the accession to the Persian throne of Darius I (522 bce). The prophets Haggai and Zechariah understood the disturbances as heralds of the imminent overthrow of the Persian empire, as a worldwide manifestation of God, and as a glorification of Zerubbabel (see Haggai, Book of; Zechariah, Book of). Against the day of the empire's fall, they urged the people to quickly complete the building of the Temple. The labour was resumed and completed in 516, but the prophecies remained unfulfilled. Zerubbabel then disappears from the biblical narrative, and the spirit of the community flags again.
The one religious constant in the vicissitudes of the restored community was the mood of repentance and the desire to win back God's favour by adherence to the rules of his covenant. The anxiety that underlay this mood produced a hostility to strangers and encouraged a lasting conflict with the Samaritans, who asked permission to take part in rebuilding the Temple of the God whom they too worshipped. The Jews rejected the Samaritans on ill-specified but apparently ethnic and religious grounds: they felt the Samaritans to be alien to the Jewish historical community of faith and especially to its messianic hopes. Nonetheless, intermarriage between the two peoples occurred, precipitating a new crisis in 458, when the priest Ezra arrived from Babylon, intent on enforcing the regimen of the Torah. By reviving ancient laws excluding Canaanites and others and applying them to their own times and neighbours, the leaders of the Jews brought about the divorce and expulsion of several dozen non-Jewish wives and their children. Tension between the xenophobic and xenophilic in postexilic Judaism was finally resolved some two centuries later with the development of a formality of religious conversion, whereby Gentiles who so wished could be taken into the Jewish community by a single, simple procedure.
The decisive constitutional event of the new community was the covenant subscribed to by its leaders in 444, which made the Torah the law of the land. A charter granted to Ezra by the Persian king Artaxerxes I empowered the latter to enforce the Torah as the imperial law for the Jews of the province Avar-nahra ("Beyond the River"), in which the district of Judah (now reduced to a small area) was located. The charter required the publication of the Torah, which in turn entailed its final editing—now plausibly ascribed to Ezra and his circle. The survival in the Torah of patent inconsistencies and disagreements with the postexilic situation indicate that its materials were by then sacrosanct, to be compiled but no longer created. But these survivals made necessary the immediate invention of a harmonizing and creative method of textual interpretation to adjust the Torah to the needs of the times. The Levites were trained in the art of interpreting the text to the people; the first product of the creative exegesis later known as Midrash (meaning "investigation" or "interpretation"; plural Midrashim) is to be found in the covenant document of Nehemiah, chapter 9—every item of which shows development, not reproduction, of a ruling of the Torah (see Ezra and Nehemiah, books of). Thus, the publication of the Torah as the law of the Jews laid the basis of the vast edifice of Oral Law so characteristic of later Judaism.
Concern over observance of the Torah was raised by the stark contrast between messianic expectations and the harsh reality of the restoration. The contrast signified God's continued displeasure, and the only way to regain his favour was to do his will. Thus, the Book of Malachi, named after the last of the prophets, concludes with an admonition to be mindful of the Torah of Moses. God's displeasure, however, had always been signaled by a break in communication with him. As time passed and messianic hopes remained unfulfilled, the sense of a permanent suspension of normal relations with God took hold, and prophecy died out. God, it was believed, would some day be reconciled with his people, and a glorious revival of prophecy would then occur. For the present, however, religious vitality expressed itself in dedication to the development of institutions that would make the Torah effective in life. The course of this development is hidden from view by the dearth of sources from the Persian period. But the community that emerged into the light of history in Hellenistic times had been radically transformed by this momentous, quiet process.Moshe Greenberg
Hellenistic Judaism (4th century bce–2nd century ce)
The Greek period (332–63 bce)
Hellenism and Judaism
Contact between Greeks and Semites goes back to Minoan and Mycenaean times and is reflected in certain terms used by Homer and other early Greek authors. It is not until the end of the 4th century, however, that Jews are first mentioned by Greek writers, who praise them as brave, self-disciplined, and philosophical.
After being conquered by Alexander the Great (332 bce), Palestine became part of the Hellenistic kingdom of Ptolemaic Egypt, the policy of which was to permit the Jews considerable cultural and religious freedom. When in 198 Palestine was conquered by King Antiochus III (reigned 223–187 bce) of the Syrian Seleucid dynasty, the Jews were treated even more liberally, being granted a charter to govern themselves by their own constitution—namely, the Torah. Greek influence, however, was already apparent. Some of the 29 Greek cities of Palestine attained a high level of Hellenistic culture. The mid-3rd century-bce Zenon papyri, which contain the correspondence of the business manager of a high Ptolemaic official, present a picture of a wealthy Jew, Tobiah, who through commercial contact with the Ptolemies acquired a veneer of Hellenism, to judge at least from the pagan and religious expressions in his Greek letters. His son and especially his grandsons became ardent Hellenists. By the beginning of the 2nd century, the influence of the Hellenistic Age in Judaea was quite strong; indeed, it has been argued that, if the Seleucids had not forcibly intervened in Jewish affairs, Judaean Judaism would have become even more syncretistic than Alexandrian Judaism. The apocryphal writer Jesus ben Sirach so bitterly denounced the Hellenizers in Jerusalem (c. 180 bce) that he was forced by the authorities to temper his words.
In the early part of the 2nd century bce, Hellenizing Jews took control of the high priesthood itself. As high priest from 175 to 172, Jason established Jerusalem as a Greek city, with Greek educational institutions. His ouster by an even more extreme Hellenizing faction, which established Menelaus (died 162 bce) as high priest, occasioned a civil war in which Menelaus was supported by the wealthy aristocrats and Jason by the masses. The Syrian king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who initially granted exemptions and privileges to the Jews, intervened at the request of Menelaus's party. Antiochus's promulgation of decrees against the practice of Judaism led in 167 bce to the successful revolt of the priest Mattathias (died 166 bce) and his five sons—the Maccabees (Hasmoneans; see also Hasmonean dynasty). It has been conjectured that one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, The War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness, mirrors the fierceness of this struggle.
The extreme tactics employed by the Hasmoneans in their struggle with Hellenizing Jews, whose children they forcibly circumcised, indicate the inroads that Hellenism had already made. On the whole, the chief supporters of the Hellenizers were members of the wealthy urban population, while the Maccabees were supported by the peasants and the urban masses. Yet there is evidence that the ruthlessness exhibited by the Hasmoneans toward the Greek cities of Palestine had political rather than cultural origins and that in fact they were fighting for personal power no less than for the Torah. Indeed, some of the Jews who fought on the side of the Maccabees were idol worshippers. In any event, the Maccabees soon reached a modus vivendi with Hellenism: thus, Jonathan (died 143/142 bce), according to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (c. 38–c. 100 ce), negotiated a treaty of friendship with Sparta; Aristobulus I (died 103 bce) actually called himself Philhellene (a lover of Hellenism); and Alexander Jannaeus (died 76 bce) hired Greek mercenaries and inscribed his coins in Greek as well as in Hebrew. Greek influence reached its peak under King Herod I of Judaea (reigned 37–4 bce), who built a Greek theatre, amphitheatre, and hippodrome in or near Jerusalem.
Social, political, and religious divisions
During the Hellenistic period the priests were both the wealthiest class and the strongest political group among the Jews of Jerusalem. The wealthiest of the priests were the members of the Oniad family, who held the hereditary office of high priest until they were replaced by the Hasmoneans; the Temple that they supervised also functioned as a bank, where the wealth of the Temple was stored and where private individuals also deposited their money. From a social and economic point of view, therefore, Josephus is justified in calling the government of Judaea a theocracy. Opposition to the priests' oppressive rule arose among an urban middle-class group known as scribes (soferim), who based their interpretation of and instruction in the Torah on an oral tradition probably going back to the time of the return from the Babylonian Exile (538 bce and after). A special group of scribes known as Hasidim, or "Pietists," became the forerunners of the Pharisees, or "Separatists"—middle-class Jewish scholars who reinterpreted the Torah and the prophetic writings to meet the needs of their times. The Hasidim joined the Hasmoneans in the struggle against the Hellenizers, though on religious rather than political grounds.
Josephus held that the Pharisees and the other Jewish parties were philosophical schools, and some modern scholars have argued that the groupings were primarily along economic and social lines; but the chief distinctions among them were religious and go back well before the Maccabean revolt. Some modern scholars have sought to interpret the Pharisees' opposition to the Sadducees—wealthy, conservative Jews who accepted the Torah alone as authoritative—as based on an urban-rural dichotomy, but a very large share of Pharisaic concern was with agricultural matters. To associate the rabbis with urbanization seems a distortion. The chief support for the Pharisees came from the lower classes, whether in the country or in the city.
The equation of Pharisaic with "normative" Judaism can no longer be supported, at any rate not before the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. According to the Palestinian Talmud (the annotations and interpretations of the Oral Law compiled by Palestinian Jewish scholars in the 3rd and 4th centuries ce), there were 24 types of "heretics" in Palestine in 70 ce, thus indicating much divergence among Jews; this picture is confirmed by Josephus, who notes numerous instances of religious leaders who claimed to be prophets and who obtained considerable followings.
The chief doctrine of the Pharisees was that the Oral Law had been revealed to Moses at the same time as the Written Law. In their exegesis and interpretation of this oral tradition, particularly under the rabbi Hillel (1st century bce–1st century ce), the Pharisees were flexible, and their regard for the public won them considerable support. That the Maccabean ruler John Hyrcanus I (reigned 135–104 bce) broke with them and that Josephus set their number at merely "more than 6,000" at the time of King Herod indicates that they were less numerous and less influential than Josephus would have his readers believe. The Pharisees stressed the importance of performing all the commandments, including those that appeared to be of only minor significance; those who were particularly strict in their observance of the Levitical rules were known as ḥaverim ("companions"). They believed in the providential guidance of the universe, in angels, in reward and punishment in the world to come, and in resurrection of the dead, all of which were opposed by the Sadducees. However, in finding a modus vivendi with Hellenism, at least in form and in terminology, the Pharisees did not differ greatly from the Sadducees. Indeed, the supreme council of the Great Synagogue (or Great Assembly) of the Pharisees was modeled on Hellenistic religious and social associations. Because they did not take an active role in fostering the rebellion against Rome in 66–70 ce, their leader, Johanan ben Zakkai, obtained Roman permission to establish an academy at Yavneh (Jamnia), where in effect the Pharisees replaced the cult of the Temple with a regimen of study and prayer.
The Sadducees and their subsidiary group, the Boethusians (Boethosaeans), who were identified with the great landowners and priestly families, were more deeply influenced by Hellenization. The rise of the Pharisees may thus be seen, in a sense, as a reaction against the more profound Hellenization favoured by the Sadducees, who were allied with the philhellenic Hasmoneans. From the time of John Hyrcanus the Sadducees generally held a higher position than the Pharisees and were favoured by the Jewish rulers. Religiously more circumscribed than the Pharisees, they rejected the idea of a revealed oral interpretation of the Torah, even though they had their own tradition, the sefer gezerot ("book of decrees" or "decisions"). They similarly rejected the inspiration of the prophetic books of the Bible, as well as the Pharisaic beliefs in angels, rewards and punishments in the world to come, providential governance of human events, and resurrection of the dead. For them Judaism centred on the Temple; but, about 10 years before the Temple's destruction in 70 ce, the Pharisees prevented the Sadducees from entering it, and in effect the Sadducees disappeared from Jewish life.
Not constituting any particular party were the unlearned rural masses known as ʿamme ha-aretz ("people of the land"), who were found among both the Pharisees and the Sadducees and even among the Samaritans. The ʿamme ha-aretz did not give the prescribed tithes, did not observe the laws of purity, and were neglectful of the laws of prayer; so great was the antagonism between them and the learned Pharisees that the biblical verse "Cursed be he who lies with any kind of beast" was applied to their daughters. The antipathy was reciprocated, for in the same passage in the Babylonian Talmud (the annotations and interpretations of the Oral Law compiled by Babylonian Jewish scholars in the 5th century ce) are added the words, "Greater is the hatred wherewith the ʿamme ha-aretz hate the scholar than the hatred wherewith the heathens hate Israel." That there was social mobility, however, is clear from the Talmudic dictum, "Heed the sons of the ʿamme ha-aretz, for they will be the living source of the Torah."
Proselytes (converts) to Judaism, though not constituting a class, became increasingly numerous in Palestine and especially in the Diaspora (the Jews living beyond Palestine). Scholarly estimates of the Jewish population of this era range from 700,000 to 5,000,000 in Palestine and from 2,000,000 to 5,000,000 in the Diaspora, the prevailing opinion being that about one-tenth of the population of the Mediterranean world at the beginning of the Christian era was Jewish. Such numbers represent a considerable increase from previous eras and must have included large numbers of proselytes. In a probable allusion to proselytism, in 139 bce the Jews of Rome were charged by the praetor with attempting to contaminate Roman morals with their religion. The first large-scale conversions were conducted by John Hyrcanus and Aristobulus I, who in 130 and 103 bce, respectively, forced the people of Idumaea in southern Palestine and the people of Ituraea in northern Palestine to become Jews. The eagerness of the Pharisees to win converts is attested in The Gospel According to Matthew (23:15), which states that the Pharisees would "traverse sea and land to make a single proselyte." To be sure, some of the proselytes, according to Josephus, did return to their pagan ways, but the majority apparently remained true to their new religion. In addition, there were many "sympathizers" with Judaism (known as sebomenoi, "fearers of the Lord"), who observed one or more Jewish practices without being fully converted.
Outside the pale of Judaism in most, though not all, respects were the Samaritans, who, like the Sadducees, refused to recognize the validity of the Oral Law; in fact, the break between the Sadducees and the Samaritans did not occur until the conquest of Shechem by John Hyrcanus (128 bce). Like the later so-called Qumrān covenanters (the monastic group associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls), they were opposed to the Jewish priesthood and the cult of the Temple, regarded Moses as a messianic figure, and forbade the revelation of esoteric doctrines to outsiders.
Scholars have revised the conception of a "normative" Pharisaic Judaism dominant in Palestine and a deviant Judaism dominant in the Diaspora. On the one hand, the picture of normative Judaism is broader than at first believed, and it is clear that there were many differences of emphasis within the Pharisaic party. On the other hand, supposed differences between Alexandrian and Palestinian Judaism are not as great as had been formerly thought. In Palestine, no less than in the Diaspora, there were deviations from Pharisaic standards.
Despite the attempts of the Pharisaic leaders to restrain the wave of Greek influence, they themselves showed at least superficial Hellenization. In the first place, as many as 2,500 to 3,000 words of Greek origin are found in the Talmudic corpus, and they supply important terms in the fields of law, government, science, religion, technology, and everyday life, especially in the popular sermons preached by the rabbis. When preaching, the Talmudic rabbis often gave the Greek translation of biblical verses for the benefit of those who understood only Greek. The prevalence of Greek in ossuary (burial) inscriptions and the discovery of Greek papyri in the Dead Sea caves confirm the widespread use of Greek, though it seems few Jews really mastered it. Again, there was a superficial Hellenization in the frequent adoption of Greek names, even by the rabbis; and there is evidence (Talmud, Soṭa [a tractate in the Mishna]) of a school at the beginning of the 2nd century ce that had 500 students of "Greek wisdom." At the end of the 2nd century, long after the rabbis prohibited the people from teaching their sons Greek (117), Rabbi Judah ha-Nasi (135–220), the editor of the Mishna, the authoritative compilation of the Oral Law, could still remark, "Why talk Syriac in Palestine? Talk either Hebrew or Greek." The synagogues of the period are modeled after Hellenistic-Roman basilicas, with inscriptions in Greek and even pagan motifs. Many of the anecdotes told about the rabbis have Socratic and Cynic parallels. There is evidence of discussions between rabbis and Athenians, Alexandrians, Roman philosophers, and even the emperor Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161); despite all of these discussions, only one rabbi, Elisha ben Abuyah (early 2nd century), appears to have embraced gnosticism, accepting certain esoteric religious dualistic views. The rabbis never mention the Greek philosophers Plato (428/427–348/347 bce) and Aristotle (384–322 bce) or the Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo Judaeus (c. 15 bce–c. 45 ce), and they never use any Greek philosophical terms; the only Greek author whom they name is Homer. Again, the parallels between Hellenistic rhetoric and rabbinic hermeneutics are in the realm of terminology rather than of substance, and those between Roman and Talmudic law are inconclusive. Part of the explanation of this may be that, although there were 29 Greek cities in Palestine, none was in Judaea, the real stronghold of the Jews.
Religious rites and customs in Palestine: the Temple and the synagogues
Until its destruction in 70 ce, the most important religious institution of the Jews was the Temple in Jerusalem (the Second Temple, erected 538–516 bce). Although services were interrupted for three years by Antiochus IV Epiphanes (167–164 bce) and although the Roman general Pompey (106–48 bce) desecrated the Temple in 63 bce, Herod lavished great expense in rebuilding it. The high priesthood itself became degraded by the extreme Hellenism of high priests such as Jason and Menelaus, and the institution declined when Herod began the custom of appointing high priests for political and financial considerations. That not only the multitude of Jews but the priesthood itself suffered from sharp divisions is clear from the bitter class warfare that ultimately erupted in 59 ce between the high priests on the one hand and the ordinary priests and the leaders of the populace of Jerusalem on the other.
Although the Temple remained central in Jewish worship, synagogues had already emerged as places for Torah reading and communal prayer and worship during the Babylonian Exile in the 6th century bce, if not even earlier. In any case, in the following century Ezra stood upon a pulpit of wood and read from the Torah to the people (Nehemiah). Some scholars maintain that a synagogue existed even within the precincts of the Temple; certainly by the time of Jesus, to judge from the references to Galilean synagogues in the Christian Scriptures, synagogues were common in Palestine. Hence, when the Temple was destroyed in 70, the spiritual vacuum was hardly as great as it had been after the destruction of the First Temple (586 bce).
The chief legislative, judicial, and educational body of the Palestinian Jews during the period of the Second Temple was the Great Sanhedrin (council court), consisting of 71 members, among whom the Sadducees were an important party. The members shared the government with the king during the early years of the Hasmonean dynasty, but, beginning with Herod's reign, their authority was restricted to religious matters. In addition, there seems to have been a Sanhedrin, set up by the high priest, which served as a court of political council, as well as a kind of grand jury.
Religious and cultural life in the Diaspora
During the Hellenistic-Roman period the chief centres of Jewish population outside Palestine were in Syria, Asia Minor, Babylonia, and Egypt, each of which is estimated to have had at least one million Jews. The large Jewish community of Antioch—which, according to Josephus, had been given all the rights of citizenship by the Seleucid founder-king, Seleucus I Nicator (died 280 bce)—attracted a particularly large number of converts to Judaism. In Antioch the apocryphal book of Tobit was probably composed in the 2nd century bce to encourage wayward Diaspora Jews to return to their Judaism. As for the Jews of Asia Minor, whose large numbers were mentioned by Cicero (106–43 bce), their not joining in the Jewish revolts against the Roman emperors Nero (reigned 54–68 ce), Trajan (reigned 98–117), and Hadrian (reigned 117–138) would indicate that they had sunk deep roots into their environment. In Babylonia in the early part of the 1st century ce, two Jewish brothers, Asinaeus and Anilaeus, established an independent minor state; their followers were so meticulous in observing the Sabbath that they assumed that it would not be possible to violate it even in order to save themselves from a Parthian attack. In the early 1st century ce, according to Josephus, the royal house and many of their entourage in the district of Adiabene in northern Mesopotamia were converted to Judaism; some of the Adiabenian Jews distinguished themselves in the revolt against Rome in 66.
The largest and most important Jewish settlement in the Diaspora was in Egypt. There is evidence (papyri) of a Jewish military colony at Elephantine (Yeb), Upper Egypt, as early as the 6th century bce. These papyri reveal the existence of a Jewish temple—which most certainly would be considered heterodox—and some syncretism (mixture) with pagan cults. Alexandria, the most populous and most influential Hellenistic Jewish community in the Diaspora, originated when Alexander the Great assigned a quarter of the city to the Jews. Until about the 3rd century bce the papyri of the Egyptian Jewish community were written in Aramaic; after that, with the exception of the Nash papyrus in Hebrew, all papyri until 400 ce were written in Greek. Similarly, of the 116 Jewish inscriptions from Egypt, all but five are written in Greek. The process of Hellenistic acculturation is thus obvious.
The most important work of the early Hellenistic period—dating, according to tradition, from the 3rd century bce—is the Septuagint, a translation into Greek of the Hebrew Scriptures, including some works not found in the traditional Hebrew canon. The name of the work (from the Latin septuaginta, "70") derived from the belief that 72 translators, 6 from each of the 12 tribes, worked independently on the entire text and produced identical translations. As revealed in the Letter of Aristeas and the works of Philo and Josephus, the Septuagint was itself regarded by many Hellenized Jews as divinely inspired. The translation shows some knowledge of Palestinian exegesis and the tradition of Halakhah (the Oral Law); but the rabbis themselves, noting that the translation diverged from the Hebrew text, apparently had ambivalent feelings about it, as is evidenced in their alternate praise and condemnation of it, as well as in their belief that another translation of the Scriptures into Greek was needed. The fact that "Torah" was translated as nomos ("law") and tzedaqa as dikaiosynē ("justice") indicates how deeply the authors of the Septuagint believed that Judaism could be accurately expressed using Greek concepts.
The fact that the temple at Leontopolis in Egypt was established (c. 145 bce) by a deposed high priest, Onias IV, clearly indicates that it was heterodox; as merely the temple of a military colony, it never really offered a challenge to the Temple in Jerusalem. It is significant that the Palestinian rabbis ruled that a sacrifice intended for the temple of Onias might be offered in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias made little impact upon Egyptian Jewry, as can be seen from the silence about it on the part of Philo, who often mentions the Temple in Jerusalem. The temple of Onias, however, continued until it was closed by the Roman emperor Vespasian (reigned 69–79 ce) in 73.
The chief religious institutions of the Egyptian Diaspora were synagogues. As early as the 3rd century bce, there were inscriptions mentioning two proseuchai, or Jewish prayer houses. In Alexandria there were numerous synagogues throughout the city, of which the largest was so famous that it is said in the Talmud that he who has not seen it has never seen the glory of Israel.
Egyptian Jewish literature
In Egypt the Jews produced a considerable literature (most of it now lost), intended to inculcate in Greek-speaking Jews a pride in their past and to counteract a sense of inferiority that some of them felt about Jewish cultural achievements. In the field of history, Demetrius near the end of the 3rd century bce wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; perhaps intended to refute an anti-Semitic Egyptian priest and author, it shows considerable concern for chronology. In the 2nd century bce a Jew who used the name Hecataeus wrote On the Jews. Another, Eupolemus (c. 150 bce), like Demetrius, wrote a work titled On the Kings in Judaea; an indication of its apologetic nature may be seen from the fragment asserting that Moses taught the alphabet not only to the Jews but also to the Phoenicians and to the Greeks. Artapanus (c. 100 bce), in his own book On the Jews, went even further in romanticizing Moses—by identifying him with Musaeus, the semi-mythical Greek poet, and Thoth, the Egyptian god of writing and culture, by asserting that Moses was the real originator of Egyptian civilization, and by claiming that Moses taught the Egyptians the worship of Apis (the sacred bull) and the ibis (sacred bird). Cleodemus (Malchus), in an attempt to win for the Jews the regard of the Greeks, asserted in his history that two sons of Abraham had joined Heracles in his expedition in Africa and that the Greek hero had married the daughter of one of them. On the other hand, Jason of Cyrene (c. 100 bce) wrote a history, of which 2 Maccabees is a summary, glorifying the Temple and violently attacking the Jewish Hellenizers, but his manner of writing history is typically Hellenistic. In addition, 3 Maccabees (1st century bce) is a work of propaganda intended to counteract those Jews who sought to win citizenship in Alexandria. The Letter of Aristeas, though ascribed to the Egyptian king Ptolemy II Philadelphus (308–246 bce), was probably composed by an Alexandrian Jew about 100 bce to defend Judaism and its practices against detractors.
Egyptian Jews also composed poems and plays, now extant only in fragments, to glorify their history. Philo the Elder (c. 100 bce) wrote an epic, On Jerusalem, in Homeric hexameters. Theodotus (c. 100 bce) also wrote an epic, On Shechem; it was quite clearly apologetic, to judge from the fragment connecting the name of Shechem with Sikimios, the son of the Greek god Hermes. At about the same time, a Jewish poet wrote a didactic poem, ascribing it to the pagan Phocylides, though closely following the Bible in some details; the author disguised his Jewish origin by omitting any attack against idolatry from his moralizing. A collection known as The Sibylline Oracles, containing Jewish and Christian prophecies in pagan disguise, includes some material composed by a 2nd-century-bce Alexandrian Jew who intended to glorify pious Jews and perhaps win converts.
A Jewish dramatist of the period, Ezekiel (c. 100 bce), composed tragedies in Greek. Fragments of one of them, The Exodus, show how deeply he was influenced by the Greek dramatist Euripides (484–406 bce). Whether or not such plays were actually presented on the stage, they edified Jews and showed pagans that the Jews had as much material for drama as they did.
The greatest achievements of Alexandrian Judaism were in the realm of wisdom literature and philosophy. In a work on the analogical interpretation of the Law of Moses, Aristobulus of Paneas (2nd century bce) anticipated Philo in attempting to harmonize Greek philosophy and the Torah. He used allegory to explain anthropomorphisms in the Bible and asserted that the Greek philosophers were indebted to Moses. The Wisdom of Solomon, dating from the 1st century bce, shows an acquaintance with the Platonic doctrine of the preexistence of the soul and with a method of argument known as sorites, which was favoured by the Stoics (see Stoicism). During the same period, the author of 4 Maccabees showed an intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy, particularly of Stoicism.
By far the greatest figure in Alexandrian Jewish literature is Philo, who has come to be recognized as the first Jewish theologian. His use of Greek philosophy, particularly that of Plato, to explicate the ideas of the Torah and his formulation of the Logos (Word, or Divine Reason) as an intermediary between God and the world helped lay the foundations of Neoplatonism, gnosticism, and the philosophical outlook of the early Church Fathers. Philo was a devotee of Judaism neither as a mystic cult nor as a collateral branch of Pharisaic Judaism. With his profound knowledge of Greek literature—and despite his almost total ignorance of Hebrew—he tried to find a way in which Judaism could appropriate Hellenic thought.
There was also a Jewish community in Rome, which numbered perhaps 50,000. To judge from the inscriptions in the Jewish catacombs, it was predominantly Greek-speaking. References by Roman writers, particularly Tacitus (56–120 ce) and the satirists, have led scholars to conclude that the community was influential, that it observed the Sabbath and the dietary laws, and that it actively sought converts.
The Hellenization of the Diaspora Jews is reflected not merely in their literature but even more in various papyri and art objects. As early as 290 bce, Hecataeus of Abdera, a Greek living in Egypt, had remarked that under the Persians and Macedonians the Jews had greatly modified the traditions of their fathers. Other papyri indicate that at least three-fourths of Egyptian Jews had personal names of Greek rather than Hebrew origin. The only schools mentioned are Sabbath schools intended for adults; this suggests that Jews were extremely eager to gain admittance for their children to Greek gymnasia, where quite obviously they would have had to make compromises with their Judaism. Again, there are a number of violations from the norms of Halakhah (which precluded the charging of interest for a loan): most notably, 9 of 11 extant loan documents charge interest. There are often striking similarities between Jewish and Greek documents of sale, marriage, and divorce in Egypt, though some of this—as with the documents of the Elephantine Jewish community—may be due to a common origin in the law of ancient Mesopotamia. The charms and apotropaic amulets are often syncretistic, and the Jews can hardly have been unaware of the religious significance of symbols that were still very much filled with meaning in pagan cults. The fact that the Jewish community of Alexandria was preoccupied in the 1st century bce and the 1st century ce with obtaining rights as citizens—which certainly involved compromises with Judaism, including participation in pagan festivals and sacrifices—shows how far they were ready to deviate from earlier norms. Philo mentions Jews who scoffed at the Bible, which they insisted on interpreting literally, and others who failed to adhere to biblical laws that they regarded as mere allegory; he writes too of Jews who observed nothing of Judaism except the holiday of Yom Kippur. But despite such deviations, pagan writers constantly accused the Diaspora Jews of being "haters of mankind" and of being absurdly superstitious. Christian writers later similarly attacked the Jews for refusing to give up the Torah. The Jews of Egypt were at least loyal in their contributions of the Temple tax and in their pilgrimages to Jerusalem on the three festivals. Virulent anti-Semitism and massacres perpetrated by non-Jews in Egypt apparently discouraged actual apostasy and intermarriage, which were not common.
Palestinian literature
During this period, literature was composed in Palestine in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek; the original language of many of these texts remains disputed by scholars, and the works that have survived were apparently composed by more than one author over a considerable period of time. Of the works originally composed in Hebrew, many—including Ecclesiasticus, 1 Maccabees, Judith, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Baruch, Psalms of Solomon—existed only in Greek during the remainder of the Hellenistic period. They and many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are generally conscious imitations of biblical books, often reflecting the dramatic events of the Maccabean struggle and often tinged with apocalyptic themes (involving the dramatic intervention of God in history). The literature in Aramaic consists of biblical or Bible-like legends or Midrashic (interpretive) additions (Testament of Job, Martyrdom of Isaiah [see Isaiah, Ascension of], Paralipomena of Jeremiah, Life of Adam and Eve, Genesis Apocryphon [from the Dead Sea Scrolls], book of Tobit, History of Susanna, and the story of Bel and the Dragon) and of apocalypses (the First Book of Enoch [perhaps originally written in Hebrew], Assumption of Moses, Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch, Second Book of Esdras, and Apocalypse of Abraham). In Greek the chief works by Palestinians are histories of the Jewish war against Rome and of the Jewish kings by Justus of Tiberias (both are lost) and, by Josephus, History of the Jewish War, originally in Aramaic, and Jewish Antiquities (both written in Rome).
Of the wisdom literature composed in Hebrew, the book of the Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach, or Ecclesiasticus (c. 180–175 bce), modeled on the book of Proverbs, identified Wisdom with the observance of the Torah. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, probably written in the latter half of the 2nd century bce, patterned on Jacob's blessings to his sons, is thought to belong to eschatological literature related to the Dead Sea Scrolls. The identification of Wisdom and Torah is stressed in the Mishnaic tract Pirqe Avot ("Sayings of the Fathers"), which, though edited about 200 ce, contains the aphorisms of rabbis dating back to 300 bce.
Books such as the Testament of Job, Genesis Apocryphon, the Book of Jubilees (now known to have been composed in Hebrew, as seen by its appearance among the Dead Sea Scrolls), and Biblical Antiquities (falsely attributed to Philo; originally written in Hebrew, then translated into Greek, but now extant only in Latin), as well as the first half of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities, often show affinities with rabbinic Midrashim (interpretive works) in their legendary accretions of biblical details. Sometimes, as in Jubilees and in the Pseudo-Philo work, these accretions are intended to answer the questions of heretics, but often, particularly in the case of Josephus, they are apologetic in presenting biblical heroes in a guise that would appeal to a Hellenized audience.
Apocalyptic trends, given considerable impetus by the victory of the Maccabees over the Syrian Greeks, were not (as was formerly thought) restricted to Pharisaic circles. They were (as is clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls) found in other groups as well and are of particular importance for their influence on both Jewish mysticism and early Christianity. These books, which have a close connection with the biblical Book of Daniel, stress the impossibility of a rational solution to the problem of theodicy. They also stress the imminence of the day of salvation, which is to be preceded by terrible hardships, and presumably reflected the current historical setting. In the First Book of Enoch there is stress on the terrible punishment inflicted upon sinners in the Last Judgment, the imminent coming of the messiah and his kingdom, and the role of angels.
The sole Palestinian Jewish author writing in Greek whose works are preserved is Josephus. His account of the war against the Romans in his Life—and, to a lesser degree, in the Jewish War—is largely a defense of his own questionable behaviour as the commander of Jewish forces in Galilee. But these works, especially Against Apion and Jewish Antiquities, are also defenses of Judaism against anti-Semitic attacks. The Jewish War often quite deliberately parallels the History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides (c. 460–c. 404 bce); and the Jewish Antiquities quite deliberately parallels the Roman Antiquities by Dionysius of Halicarnassus (c. 20 bce), a work that dates from earlier in the same century.
The Roman period (63 bce–135 ce)
New parties and sects
Under Roman rule a number of new groups, largely political, emerged in Palestine. Their common aim was to seek an independent Jewish state. They were also zealous for, and strict in their observance of, the Torah.
After the death of King Herod, a political group known as the Herodians, who apparently regarded Herod as the messiah, sought to reestablish the rule of Herod's descendants over an independent Palestine as a prerequisite for Jewish preservation. Unlike the Zealots, however, they did not refuse to pay taxes to the Romans.
The Zealots, whose appearance was traditionally dated to 6 ce, were one of five groups that emerged at the outset of the first Jewish war against Rome (66–73 ce), which began when the Jews expelled the Romans from Jerusalem, the client king Agrippa II fled the city, and a revolutionary government was established. The Zealots were a mixture of bandits, insurgents from Jerusalem, and priests, who advocated egalitarianism and independence from Rome. In 68 they overthrew the government established by the original leaders of the revolt and took control of the Temple during the civil war that followed; many of them perished in the sack of Jerusalem by the Roman general (and later emperor) Titus (reigned 79–81) or in fighting after the city's fall. The Sicarii (Assassins), so-called because of the daggers (sica) they carried, arose about 54 ce, according to Josephus, as a group of bandits who kidnapped or murdered those who had found a modus vivendi with the Romans. It was they who made a stand at the fortress of Masada, near the Dead Sea, committing suicide rather than allowing themselves to be captured by the Romans (73).
A number of other parties—various types of Essenes, Damascus covenanters, and the Qumrān–Dead Sea groups—were distinguished by their pursuit of an ascetic monastic life, disdain for material goods and sensual gratification, sharing of material possessions, concern for eschatology, strong apocalyptic views in anticipation of the coming of the messiah, practice of ablutions to attain greater sexual and ritual purity, prayer, contemplation, and study. The Essenes differed from the Therapeutae, a Jewish religious group that had flourished in Egypt two centuries earlier, in that the latter actively sought "wisdom" whereas the former were anti-intellectual. Only some of the Essenes were celibate. The Essenes have been termed "gnosticizing Pharisees" because of their belief, shared with the gnostics, that the world of matter is evil.
The Damascus sect (New Covenanters) was a group of Pharisees who went beyond the letter of the Pharisaic Halakha. Like the Essenes and the Dead Sea sects, they adopted a monastic lifestyle and opposed the way in which sacrifices were offered in the Temple.
The discoveries of scrolls in the caves of Qumrān, near the Dead Sea, beginning in 1947, focused attention on the groups that had lived there. On the basis of paleography, carbon-14 testing, and the coins discovered in the caves, most scholars accept a 1st-century date for them. A theoretical relationship of the communities with John the Baptist and the nascent Christian groups remains in dispute, however. The sectaries have been identified variously as Zealots, an unnamed anti-Roman group, and especially Essenes. That the groups had secret, presumably apocalyptic teachings is clear from the fact that some of the scrolls are in cryptographic script and reversed writing; yet, despite the sectaries' extreme piety and legalistic conservatism, they apparently were not unaware of Hellenism, to judge from the presence of Greek books at Qumrān.
It has long been debated whether gnosticism originated in the apocalyptic strains of Judaism that were prevalent when the Temple was destroyed in 70. Although it is doubtful that there is any direct Jewish source of gnosticism, some characteristic gnostic doctrines are found in certain groups of particularly apocalyptic 1st-century Jews—the dichotomy of body and soul and a disdain for the material world, a notion of esoteric knowledge, and an intense interest in angels and in problems of creation.
Origin of Christianity: the early Christians and the Jewish community
Although it attracted little attention among pagans and Jews in its early years, the rise of Christianity was by far the most important "sectarian" development of the Roman period. Largely owing to the discoveries at Qumrān, many scholars now regard primitive Christianity, with its apocalyptic and eschatological interests, as part of a broad spectrum of attitudes within Judaism itself, rather than as peripheral to Jewish development or to the norm set by Pharisaic Judaism. Indeed, Jesus himself may now be classified as an apocalyptic prophet whose announced intentions were not to abrogate the Torah but to fulfill it. It is possible to envision a direct line between Jewish currents, both in Palestine and the Diaspora in the Hellenistic Age, and Christianity—particularly in the traditions of martyrdom, proselytism, monasticism, mysticism, liturgy, and theology and especially with the doctrine of the Logos (Word) as an intermediary between God and the world and as the connection of faith and reason. The Septuagint in particular played an important role both theoretically, in the transformation of Greek philosophy into the theology of the Church Fathers, and practically, in converting Jews and Jewish "sympathizers" to Christianity. In general, moreover, Christianity was more positively disposed toward Hellenism than was Pharisaism, particularly under the leadership of Paul, a thoroughly Hellenized Jew.
Even after Paul proclaimed his opposition to observance of the Torah as a means of salvation, many Jewish Christians continued the practice. Among them were two main groups: the Ebionites—probably the people called minim, or "sectaries," in the Talmud—who accepted Jesus as the messiah but denied his divinity; and the Nazarenes, who regarded Jesus as both messiah and God yet still regarded the Torah as binding upon Jews.
The number of Jews converted to any form of Christianity was extremely small, as can be seen from the frequent criticisms of Jews for their stubbornness by Christian writers. In the Diaspora, despite the strong influence of Hellenism, there were relatively few Jewish converts, though the Christian movement had some success in winning over Alexandrian Jews.
There were four major stages in the final break between Christianity and Judaism: (1) the flight of the Jewish Christians from Jerusalem to Pella across the Jordan in 70 and their refusal to continue the struggle against the Romans, (2) the institution by the patriarch Gamaliel II of a prayer in the Eighteen Benedictions against such heretics (c. 100), and (3 and 4) the failure of the Christians to join the messianic leaders Lukuas-Andreas and Bar Kokhba in the revolts against Trajan and Hadrian in 115–117 and 132–135, respectively.
Judaism under Roman rule
When Pompey entered the Temple in 63 bce as an arbiter both in the civil war between John Hyrcanus II and Aristobulus I and in the struggle of the Pharisees against both Jewish rulers, Judaea in effect became a puppet state of the Romans. During the civil war between Pompey and Julius Caesar (c. 49–45 bce), the Idumaean Antipater (died 43 bce) ingratiated himself with Caesar and was rewarded by being made governor of Judaea; the Jews were rewarded through the promulgation of a number of decrees favourable to them, which were reaffirmed by Augustus (reigned 27 bce–14 ce) and later emperors. Antipater's son Herod, king of Judaea, an admirer of Greek culture, supported a cult worshipping the emperor and built temples to Augustus in non-Jewish cities. Because he was by origin an Idumaean, he was regarded by many Jews as a foreigner. (The Idumaeans, or Edomites, had been forcibly converted to Judaism by John Hyrcanus.) On several occasions during and after Herod's reign, Pharisaic delegations sought to convince the Romans to end the quasi-independent Jewish government. After the death of Herod's son and successor, Archelaus, in 6 ce, Herod's realms were ruled by Roman procurators, the most famous (or infamous) of whom, Pontius Pilate (died 36), attempted to introduce busts of the Roman emperor into Jerusalem and discovered the intense religious zeal of the Jews in opposing this measure. When the emperor Caligula (reigned 37–41) ordered that a statue of himself be erected in the Temple, a large number of Jews proclaimed that they would suffer death rather than permit such a desecration. In response, the governor of Syria, Petronius, succeeded in getting the emperor to delay. The procurators of Judaea, being of equestrian (knightly) rank and often of Oriental Greek stock, were more anti-Jewish than the governors of Syria, who were of the higher senatorial order. The last procurators in particular were indifferent to Jewish religious sensibilities; and various patriotic groups, to whom nationalism was an integral part of their religion, succeeded in polarizing the Jewish population and bringing on the first war with Rome in 66. The climax of the war, as noted earlier, was the destruction of the Temple in 70, though, according to Josephus, Titus sought to spare it.
The papyri indicate that the war against Trajan—involving the Jews of Egypt, Cyrenaica, Cyprus, and Mesopotamia (though only to a minor degree those of Palestine)—was a widespread revolt under a Cyrenian king-messiah, Lukuas-Andreas, aimed at freeing Palestine from Roman rule. In 132–135 the same spirit of freedom inspired another uprising, the Second Jewish Revolt, led by Bar Kokhba, who may have had the support of the greatest rabbi of the time, Akiba ben Joseph (40–c. 135). The result was Hadrian's decrees prohibiting circumcision and public instruction in the Torah, though these were soon revoked by Antoninus Pius (reigned 138–161). Having suffered such tremendous losses on the field of battle, Judaism turned its dynamism to the continued development of the Talmud.Louis H. Feldman
Rabbinic Judaism (2nd–18th century)
The age of the tannaim (135–c. 200)
The role of the rabbis
After the defeat of Bar Kokhba and the ensuing collapse of active Jewish resistance to Roman rule (135–136), politically moderate and quietist rabbinic elements remained the only cohesive group in Jewish society. With Jerusalem off-limits to the Jews, rabbinic ideology and practice, which were not dependent on the Temple, priesthood, or political independence for their vitality, provided a viable program for autonomous community life and thus filled the vacuum created by the suppression of all other Jewish leadership. The Romans, confident that the will for insurrection had been shattered, soon relaxed the Hadrianic prohibitions of Jewish ordination, public assembly, and regulation of the calendar and permitted rabbis who had fled the country to return and reestablish an academy in the town of Usha in Galilee.
The strength of the rabbinate lay in its ability to represent simultaneously the interests of the Jews and the Romans, whose religious and political needs, respectively, now chanced to coincide. The rabbis were regarded favourably by the Romans as a politically submissive class, which, with its wide influence over the Jewish masses, could translate the Pax Romana (the peace imposed by Roman rule) into Jewish religious precepts. To the Jews, on the other hand, the rabbinic ideology gave the appearance of continuity to Jewish self-rule and freedom from alien interference. The rabbinic program fashioned by Johanan ben Zakkai and his circle replaced sacrifice and pilgrimage to the Temple with the study of Scripture, prayer, and works of piety, thus eliminating the need for a central sanctuary (in Jerusalem) and making Judaism a religion capable of practice anywhere. Judaism was now, for all intents and purposes, a Diaspora religion, even on its home soil. Any sense of real break with the past was mitigated by continued adherence to purity laws (dietary and bodily) and by assiduous study of Scripture, including the legal elements that historical developments had now made inoperable. The reward held out for scrupulous study and fulfillment was the promise of messianic deliverance—i.e., the divine restoration of all those institutions that had become central in Jewish notions of national independence, including the Davidic monarchy, Temple service, and the ingathering of Diaspora Jewry. Above all these rewards was the assurance of personal resurrection and participation in the national rebirth.
Apart from the right to teach Scripture publicly, the most pressing need felt by the surviving rabbis was for the reorganization of a body that would revive the functions of the former Sanhedrin and pass judgment on disputed questions of law and dogma. Accordingly, a high court was organized under the leadership of Simeon ben Gamaliel (reigned c. 135–c. 175), the son of the previous patriarch (the Roman term for the head of the Palestinian Jewish community) of the house of Hillel, in association with rabbis representing other schools and interests. In the ensuing struggle for power, Gamaliel managed to concentrate all communal authority in his office. The reign of Gamaliel's son and successor, Judah the Prince, marked the climax of this period of rabbinic activity, otherwise known as the "age of the tannaim" (teachers). Armed with wealth, Roman backing, and dynastic legitimacy (which the patriarch now traced to the house of David), Judah sought to standardize Jewish practice through a corpus of legal norms that would reflect accepted views of the rabbinate on every aspect of life. The Mishna that soon emerged became the primary reference work in all rabbinic schools and constituted the core around which the Talmud was later compiled (see Talmud and Midrash). It thus remains the best single introduction to the complex of rabbinic values and practices as they evolved in Roman Palestine.
The making of the Mishna
Although the promulgation of an official corpus represented a break with rabbinic precedent, Judah's Mishna did have antecedents. During the 1st and 2nd centuries ce, rabbinic schools had compiled for their own use collections of Midrashim (singular Midrash, meaning "investigation" or "interpretation"), in which the results of their exegesis and application of Scripture to problematic situations were recorded in terse legal form. By 200 ce several such compilations were circulating in Jewish schools and were being utilized by judges. While adhering to the structural form of these earlier collections, Judah compiled a new one in which universally accepted views were recorded alongside those still in dispute, thereby largely reducing the margin for individual discretion in the interpretation of the law. Although his action aroused opposition and some rabbis continued to invoke their own collections, the authority of his office and the obvious advantages of a unified system of law soon outweighed centrifugal tendencies, and his Mishna attained quasi-canonical status, becoming known as "The Mishna" or "Our Mishna." Yet, for all its clarity and comprehensiveness, its phraseology was often obscure or too terse to satisfy all needs, and a companion work known as the Tosefta ("Additions"), in which omitted traditions and explanatory notes were recorded, was compiled shortly thereafter. Neither compilation elucidated the processes by which decisions had been elicited, and various authorities therefore set about collecting the Midrashic discussions of their schools and recording them in the order of the verses of Scripture. During the 3rd and 4th centuries, Midrashim on the Pentateuch were compiled and introduced as school texts.
Fundamentally legal in character, this literature regulated every aspect of life; the six divisions of the Mishna—on agriculture, festivals, family life, civil law, sacrificial and dietary laws, and purity—encompass virtually every area of Jewish experience. Accordingly, the Mishna also recorded the principal Pharisaic and rabbinic definitions and goals of the religious life. One tract, Pirqe Avot ("Sayings of the Fathers"), treated the meaning and posture of a life according to the Torah, while other passages made reference to the mystical studies into which only the most advanced and religiously worthy were initiated—e.g., the activities of the Merkava, or divine "Chariot," and the doctrines of creation. The rabbinic program of a life dedicated to study and fulfillment of the will of God was thus a graded structure in which the canons of morality and piety were attainable on various levels, from the popular and practical to the esoteric and metaphysical. Innumerable sermons and homilies preserved in the Midrashic collections, liturgical compositions for daily and festival services, and mystical tracts circulated among initiates all testify to the deep spirituality that informed Rabbinic Judaism.
The age of the amoraim: the making of the Talmuds (3rd–6th century)
Palestine (c. 220–c. 400)
The promulgation of the Mishna initiated the period of the (lecturers or interpreters), teachers who made the Mishna the basic text of legal exegesis. The curriculum now centred on the elucidation of the text of the standard compilation, harmonization of its decisions with extra-Mishnaic traditions recorded in other collections, and the application of its principles to new situations. Amoraic studies have been preserved in two running commentaries on the Mishna, known as the Palestinian (or Jerusalem) Talmud and the Babylonian Talmud, reflecting the study and legislation of the academies of the two principal Jewish centres in the Roman and Persian empires. (Talmud is also the comprehensive term for the whole collections, Palestinian and Babylonian, containing Mishna, commentaries, and other matter.)
The schools were the primary agencies through which the rabbinic way of life and literature was communicated to the masses. The types of schools ranged from the primary school to the advanced "house of study" and more formal academy (yeshiva), the synagogue, and the Jewish court. Primary schools had long been available in the villages and cities of Palestine, and tannaitic law made education of male children a religious duty. Introduced at the age of five or six to Scripture, the student advanced at the age of 10 to Mishna and finally in midadolescence to Talmud, or the processes of legal reasoning. Regular reading of Scripture in the synagogue on Mondays, Thursdays, Sabbaths, and festivals, coupled with concurrent translations into the Aramaic vernacular and frequent sermons, provided for lifelong instruction in the literature and the various teachings elicited from it. The amoraic emphasis on the moral and spiritual aims of Scripture and its ritual is reflected in their Midrashic collections, which are predominantly homileticalrather than legal in character.
An amoraic sermon conceded that, of every 1,000 beginners in primary school, only one would be expected to continue as far as Talmud. In the 4th century, however, there were enough advanced students to warrant academies in Lydda, Caesarea, Sepphoris, and Tiberias (in Palestine), where leading scholars trained disciples for communal service as teachers and judges. In Caesarea—the principal port and seat of the Roman administration of Palestine, where pagans, Christians, and Samaritans maintained renowned cultural institutions—the Jews too established an academy that was singularly free of patriarchal control. The outstanding rabbinic scholar there, Abbahu (c. 279–320), wielded great influence with the Roman authorities. Because he combined learning with personal wealth and political power, he attracted some of the most gifted students of the day to the city. About 350 the studies and decisions of the authorities in Caesarea were compiled as a tract on the civil law of the Mishna. Half a century later, the academy of Tiberias issued a similar collection on other tracts of the Mishna, and this compilation, in conjunction with the Caesarean material, constituted the Palestinian Talmud.
Despite increasing tensions between some rabbinic circles and the patriarch, his office was the agency that provided a basic unity to the Jews of the Roman Empire. Officially recognized as a Roman prefect, the patriarch at the same time sent representatives to Jewish communities to inform them of the Jewish calendar and other decisions of general concern and to collect an annual tax of a half shekel, paid by male Jews for his treasury. As titular head of the Jewish community of Palestine and as a vestigial heir of the Davidic monarchy, the patriarch was a reminder of a glorious past and a symbol of hope for a brighter future. How enduring these hopes were may be seen from the efforts to gain permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Although reconstruction of the Temple was authorized by the emperor Julian (reigned 361–363), it came to naught because of a disastrous fire on the sacred site and the emperor's subsequent death.
The adoption of Christianity as the religion of the empire had no direct effect on the religious freedom of the Jews. The ever-mounting hostility between the two religions, however, resulted in severe curtailment of Jewish disciplinary rights over their coreligionists, interference in the collection of patriarchal taxes, restriction of the right to build synagogues, and, finally, upon the death of the patriarch Gamaliel VI about 425, the abolition of the patriarchate and the diversion of the Jewish tax to the imperial treasury. Mediterranean Jewry was now fragmented into disjointed communities and synagogues. But the principles of the regulation of the Jewish calendar had been committed to writing in approximately 359 by the patriarch Hillel II, and this, coupled with the widespread presence of rabbis, ensured the continuity of Jewish adherence. Even the restrictions on synagogal worship and preaching imposed by the Eastern emperor Justinian I (reigned 527–565) apparently had no devastating effect. A new genre of liturgical poetry, combining ecstatic prayer with didactic motifs, developed in this period of political decline and won acceptance in synagogues in Asia Minor as well as beyond the Euphrates.
Babylonia (200–650)
In the increasingly unfriendly climate of Christendom, Jews were consoled by the knowledge that in nearby Babylonia (then under Persian rule) a vast population of Jews lived under a network of effective and autonomous Jewish institutions and officials. Steadily worsening conditions in Palestine drew many Jews to Persian domains, where economic opportunities and the Jewish communal structure enabled them to gain a better livelihood while living in accordance with their ancestral traditions. To regulate internal Jewish affairs and ensure the steady flow of taxes, the Parthian, or Arsacid, rulers (247 bce–224 ce) had appointed in approximately 100 ce an exilarch, or "head of the [Jews in] exile"—who claimed more direct Davidic descent than the Palestinian patriarch—to rule over the Jews as a quasi-prince. About 220, two Babylonian disciples of Judah ha-Nasi, Abba Arika (known as Rav) and Samuel bar Abba, began to propagate the Mishna and related tannaitic literature as normative standards. As heads of the academies at Sura and Nehardea, respectively, Rav and Samuel cultivated a native Babylonian rabbinate, which increasingly provided the manpower for local Jewish courts and other communal services. While the usual tensions between temporal and religious arms frequently existed in Babylonia, the symbiosis of exilarchate and rabbinate endured until the middle of the 11th century.
Paradoxically, Babylonian rabbinism derived its theological and political strength from its fundamentally unoriginal character. As a transplant of Palestinian Judaism, it asserted its historical legitimacy to the Sāsānian dynasty (224–651), who protected Jewish practices against interference from fanatical Magian priests, and to native Jewish officials, who argued for the validity of indigenous Babylonian deviations from Palestinian norms. But ultimately the historical importance of this transplantation lay in Babylonia's serving as the proving ground for the adaptability of Palestinian Judaism to a Diaspora situation. Legal and theological adaptations generated by the new locale and the needs of the times inevitably produced changes in the religious tradition. The laws of agriculture, purity, and sacrifices all of necessity fell into disuse. The principles embodied in these laws, however, and the core of the legal and theological system—consisting of faith in the revelation and election of Israel, the requirement that the individual live by the canons of Jewish civil and family law, and the network of communal institutions modeled on those of Palestinian Judaism—remained intact, thereby ensuring a basic continuity and uniformity among rabbinically oriented communities everywhere. Because historical circumstances made Babylonia the mediator of this tradition to all Jewish communities in the High Middle Ages (9th–12th centuries), the Babylonian version of Jewish religion became synonymous with normative Judaism and the measure of Judaic authenticity everywhere.
"The law of the [Gentile] government is binding"—the principle formulated by Samuel (died 254), head of the academy at Nehardea—summarizes the essential novelty in rabbinic reorientation to life on foreign soil. Whereas Palestinian rabbis had complied with imperial decrees of taxation as legitimate de facto—and this was all that Samuel had in mind—Babylonian teachers now rationalized governmental authority in this respect as legitimate de jure, thus enjoining upon the Jews political quietism and submissiveness as part of their religious doctrine. In all other areas of civil law, the Jews were instructed by their rabbis to file suit in Jewish courts and thus to conduct their businesses as well as their family lives by rabbinic law.
While the rabbis could impose their discipline more effectively in matters of public law than in private religious practice, the density of the Jewish population in many areas of Parthia (northeastern Iran) and Babylonia facilitated the application of moral and disciplinary pressures. The most effective vehicle for the dissemination of their teachings was the academies, where judges and communal teachers were trained; among these institutions, those of Sura and Pumbedita remained preeminent. Frequent public lectures in the synagogues of the academies on Sabbaths and festivals were capped by public kalla (study-course) assemblies for alumni of the schools during the two months, Adar (February–March) and Elul (August–September), when the lull in agricultural work freed many to attend semiannual refresher instruction. These meetings were followed by regular popular lectures during the festival seasons that soon followed. Thus, while rabbis constituted a distinct class within the community, their efforts were oriented toward making as much of the community as possible members of a learned and religious elite. The harmonious relations that obtained with but few interruptions over the centuries between the Sāsānian rulers and their Jewish subjects gave the Jewish population the air of a quasi-state, which the Jewish leadership frequently extolled as superior to the Jewish community of Palestine.
The dissemination of the Palestinian Talmud probably stimulated the Babylonians to follow suit by collecting and arranging the records of study and decisions of their own academies and courts. The Babylonian Talmud, which apparently underwent several stages of redaction (c. 500–650) on the basis of the proto-Talmuds—the early collections of commentaries on the Mishna used in the academies—accordingly became the standard of reference for judicial precedent and theological doctrine for all of Babylonian Jewry and all those communities under its influence. Some scholars have postulated a group of anonymous editors of these earlier materials, calling them stammaim ("anonymous ones"). As had been the case with the Mishna, the redaction of the Babylonian Talmud was later designated by authorities as marking the end of a period in Jewish history. The scholars who added the finishing stylistic touches, known as savoraʾim ("explicators"), were classified as a transitional stage between the amoraim and the geonim.
The enduring vigour of Jewish faith during these centuries is graphically demonstrated by the missionary activity of Jews throughout the ancient Middle East, especially in the Arabian Peninsula. Proud Jewish tribes living in close proximity to each other in the vicinity of Yathrib (later Medina, Muhammad's home city) engaged in agriculture and commerce and proclaimed the superiority of their monotheistic ethos and eschatology. In Yemen (southwestern Arabia) the last of the Ḥimyarite rulers (reigned from c. 2nd century ce), Dhu Nuwas, proclaimed himself a Jew and finally suffered defeat in approximately 525 as a consequence of Christian influence on the Abyssinian armies. Jewish missionaries, however, continued to compete with Christian missionaries and thus helped to lay the groundwork for the birth of an indigenous Arabic monotheism—Islam—that was to alter the course of world history.
The age of the geonim (c. 640–1038)
Triumph of the Babylonian rabbinate
The lightning conquests in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula by the armies of Islam (7th–8th century) created a political framework for the basically uniform (i.e., Babylonian) character of medieval Judaism. As a "people of the Book" (i.e., of the Bible), the Jews were permitted by the Muslims to live under the same autonomous structure that had developed under Arsacid and Sāsānian rule. The heads of the two principal academies were now formally recognized by the exilarch, and through him by the Muslim caliphs (the civil and religious heads of the Muslim state), as the official arbiters of all questions of religious law and as the religious heads of all Jewish communities that came under Muslim sway. Known as geonim (plural of gaon, "excellency"), they conducted high courts manned by scholars of graded ranks, and they received financial support from Jewish communities assigned to them by the exilarch. Religious questions and contributions were solicited from all Jewish communities, and these, along with formal gaonic replies (responsa), were regularly publicized at the semiannual kalla convocations. Under the strong leadership of Yehudai, gaon of Sura (presided 760–763), the Babylonian rabbinate made vigorous efforts to replace Palestinian usage wherever it was still in vogue—including the study of Palestinian amoraic legal literature—with Babylonian practice and texts, thus making the Babylonian Talmud the unrivalled standard of Jewish norms. The campaign's success is indicated by the usage of the term Talmud, which, when unqualified, has ever since meant the Babylonian Talmud. Indeed, even in Palestine the Babylonian corpus displaced its older rival and caused the study of Palestinian Talmudic literature to be confined to circles of legal specialists.
Anti-rabbinic reactions
The firm—and occasionally oppressive—tactics of exilarchs and geonim generated anti-rabbinic reactions in the form of sectarian and messianic revolts, especially in outlying areas where enforcement was difficult. Inspired in part by ancient Palestinian sectarian doctrines and in part by Muslim usage, the sects were by and large quickly and forcefully suppressed. In the 8th century, according to the traditional Rabbinite account, Anan ben David, a disaffected member of the exilarchic family, founded a dissident group, the Ananites, later known as the Karaites (Scripturalists). The exact relationship between the followers of Anan and the later Karaites, however, remains unclear. The term itself first appeared in the 9th century, when various dissident groups coalesced and ultimately adopted Anan as their founder, though they rejected several of his teachings. The new group advocated a threefold program of rejection of rabbinic law as a human fabrication and therefore as an unwarranted, unauthoritative addition to Scripture; a return to Palestine to hasten the messianic redemption; and a reexamination of Scripture to retrieve authentic law and doctrine. Under the leadership of Daniel al-Qumisi (c. 850?), a Karaite settlement prospered in the Holy Land, from which it spread as far as northwestern Africa and Christian Spain. A barrage of Karaite treatises presenting new views of scriptural exegesis stimulated renewed study of the Bible and the Hebrew language in Rabbinite circles as well. The most momentous consequence of these new studies was the invention of several systems of vocalization for the text of the Hebrew Bible in Babylonia and Tiberias in the 9th and 10th centuries. The annotation of the Masoretic (traditional, or authorized) text of the Bible with vocalic, musical, and grammatical accents in the Tiberian schools of the 10th-century scholars Ben Naftali and Ben Asher fixed the Masoretic text permanently and, through it, the morphology of the Hebrew language for Karaites as well as Rabbinites.
In the face of sectarian challenges, the geonim intensified their efforts against any deviation from Rabbinite norms. They began to issue handbooks of Jewish law that set forth in concise and unequivocal terms the standards for correct practice. A number of these codes, notably the Halakhot gedolot ("Great Laws"), Siddur Rav Amram Gaon ("The Prayer Book of Rav Amram Gaon"; on liturgical practice), and Sheʾeltot ("Disquisitions") by Aḥa of Shabḥa (c. 680–c. 752), attained authoritative status in local schools and further unified medieval Judaism.
The geonim, however, were powerless to halt several social developments in the 9th century that progressively undermined their hold even on Rabbinite communities. A renaissance of Greek philosophy and sciences in Arabic translation, coupled with the progressive urbanization of the upper classes of all religious and ethnic groups in the centres of political, commercial, and cultural activity, generated a new intelligentsia that cut across religious and ethnic lines. Widespread skepticism concerning basic doctrines of faith such as creation, revelation, and retribution was most poignantly represented by latitudinarianism (the tendency to be flexible and tolerant about deviations from orthodox beliefs and doctrines) and by antinomian gnostic groups that denied divine providence and omniscience (see antinomianism). Ḥiwi al-Balkhī, a 9th-century skeptical Jewish pamphleteer, scandalized the faithful by openly attacking the morality of Scripture and by issuing for schools an expurgated edition of the Bible that omitted "offensive" material (e.g., alleged stories of God acting dishonestly). A mystifying Hebrew tract titled Sefer yetzira ("Book of Creation") posited in terse and enigmatic epigrams a novel theory of creation that betrayed Neoplatonic influence. Karaites joined philosophically oriented intellectuals in heaping scorn on popular Rabbinite customs that smacked of superstition and, above all, on Talmudic homilies that referred to God in anthropomorphic terms.
Gaonic difficulties were compounded by the rise in North Africa and Spain of populous and wealthy Jewish communities that, thanks to the development of their own local schools and talent, ignored the Babylonian academies or favoured one over the other with religious queries and, in consequence, with financial contributions. To the delight of dissidents and the chagrin of the faithful, competition between the Babylonian academies turned to internecine hostility. Occasional revolts against exilarchic taxation and administration in outlying areas of Persia had to be quelled with armed force. The Palestinian Rabbinites had revived their own academies, and their presidents now not only appealed for support in other Diaspora lands but challenged the authority of the Babylonians to serve as final arbiters on matters of public import, such as the regulation of the calendar. By 900 the Rabbinite community of Babylonia was in a state of chaos and dissolution.
The gaonate of Saʿadia ben Joseph
In a bold effort to restore discipline and respect for the gaonate, the exilarch David ben Zakkai (916/917–940) bypassed the families from whom the geonim had traditionally been selected and in 928 appointed Saʿadia ben Joseph (882–942) to head the academy of Sura. Of Egyptian birth, Saʿadia had gained wide acclaim for his scholarly retorts to Karaites, heretics, and Palestinian Rabbinites. Politically, Saʿadia's brief presidency was a fiasco and aggravated the chaos by a communal civil war. His gaonate, however, gave an official stamp to his many works, which responded to the ideological challenges to Rabbinism by restating traditional Judaism in intellectually cogent terms. Saʿadia thus became the pioneer of a Judeo-Arabic culture that would blossom fully in Andalusian Spain a century later. His translation of the Bible into Arabic and his Arabic commentaries on Scripture made the rabbinic understanding of the Bible accessible to masses of Jews. His poetic compositions for liturgical use provided the stimulus for the revival of Hebrew poetry. Above all, his rationalist commentary on the puzzling Sefer yetzira and his brilliant treatise on philosophical theology, The Book of Beliefs and Opinions, synthesized the Torah (understood as the divine law in the Five Books of Moses together with the rabbinic understanding of this revelation) and "Greek wisdom" in accordance with the dominant Muslim philosophical school of kalām. His efforts made Judaism philosophically respectable and the study of philosophy a religiously acceptable pursuit.
Far from tightening the gaonic hold over the Jewish communities of the Arabic world, Saʿadia's works actually provided the wherewithal for ever-greater intellectual and religious self-sufficiency. While economic, political, and military upheavals progressively weakened various institutions in the Middle East, concurrent prosperity and consolidation in the West stimulated the maturation of indigenous leadership in Egypt, Al-Qayrawān (Kairouan; in present-day Tunisia), and Muslim Spain. To be sure, able geonim such as Sherira and his son Hai (939–1038) exercised enormous influence over the Judeo-Arabic world through hundreds of legal responsa issued in the course of their successive terms (968–1038) at Pumbedita. Circumstances beyond anyone's control, however, were gradually undermining the effectiveness of exilarchate and gaonate. But by 1038, the year of Hai's death, the consequences of four centuries of gaonic activity had become indelible: the Babylonian Talmud had become the agent of basic Jewish uniformity; the synthesis of philosophy and tradition had become the hallmark of the Jewish intelligentsia; and the Hebrew classics of the past had become the texts of study in Jewish schools everywhere.
Medieval European Judaism (950–1750)
The two major branches
Despite the fundamental uniformity of medieval Jewish culture, distinctive Jewish subcultures were shaped by the cultural and political divisions within the Mediterranean basin, in which Arabic Muslim and Latin Christian civilizations coexisted as discrete and self-contained societies. Two major branches of rabbinic civilization developed in Europe: the Ashkenazic, or Franco-German, and the Sephardic, or Andalusian-Spanish. Distinguished most conspicuously by their varying pronunciation of Hebrew, the numerous differences between them in religious orientation and practice derived, in the first instance, from the geographical fountainheads of their culture—the Ashkenazim (plural of Ashkenazi) tracing their cultural filiation to Italy and Palestine and the Sephardim (plural of Sephardi) to Babylonia—and from the influences of their respective immediate milieus. While the Jews of Christian Europe wrote for internal use almost exclusively in Hebrew, those of Muslim areas regularly employed Arabic for prose works and Hebrew for poetic composition. Whereas the literature of Jews in Latin areas was overwhelmingly religious in content, that of the Jews of Spain was well endowed with secular poetry and scientific works inspired by the cultural tastes of the Arabic literati. Most significantly, the two forms of European Judaism differed in their approaches to the identical rabbinic base that they had inherited from the East and in their attitudes to Gentile culture and politics.
Sephardic developments
In Muslim Spain, Jews frequently served the government in official capacities and, therefore, not only took an active interest in political affairs but engaged in considerable social and intellectual intercourse with influential circles of the Muslim population. Since the support of letters and scholarship was part of state policy in Muslim Spain, and since Muslim savants traced the source of Muslim power to the vitality of the Arabic language, scripture, and poetry, Jews looked at Arabic culture with undisguised admiration and unabashedly attempted to adapt themselves to its canons of scholarship and good taste. The cultured Jew accordingly demonstrated command of Arabic style and the ability to display the beauty of his own heritage through a philological mastery of the text of the Hebrew Bible and through the composition of Hebrew verse, now set to an Arabic metre. Since Arabic philosophers and scientists promulgated the compatibility of Greek philosophy with the revelation to Muhammad, rationalist study of the Jewish classics and defense of rabbinic faith in philosophical terms became dominant motifs in the Andalusian Jewish schools (in southern Spain).
The period of feverish literary creativity in classical Jewish disciplines as well as in the sciences in Spain has been called the golden age of Hebrew literature (c. 1000–1148). Jewish culture of this age was distinguished by the supreme literary merit of its Hebrew poetry, the new spirit of relatively free and rationalist examination of hallowed texts and doctrines, and the extension of Jewish cultural perspectives to totally new horizons—mathematics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy, political theory, aesthetics, and belles-lettres. Noteworthy too was the frequent overlapping of the Sephardic religious leadership with the new Jewish courtier class. The unprecedented heights that the latter attained—Ḥisdai ibn Shaprut (c. 915–975) as counsellor to the caliphs of Córdoba; the Ibn Nagrelas as viziers of Granada; the Ibn Ezras (Moses ibn Ezra, c. 1060–1139; and Abraham ben Meir ibn Ezra, c. 1092–1167), the Ibn Megashs, and the Ibn Albalias as high officials in Granada and Sevilla (Seville)—and the distinctions of these men and their protégés in Jewish and worldly letters restored the ancient integration of culture and practical life and expressed the identification of the Jewish elite with the biblical age of Jewish power and artistic creativity. The effort to recapture the vitality and beauty of biblical poetry stimulated comparative philological and fresh exegetical research that yielded new insights into the morphology of the Hebrew language and into the historical soil of biblical prophecy. Judah ibn Ḥayyuj and Abū al-Walīd Marwān ibn Janāḥ produced manuals on biblical grammar that applied the results of Arabic philology to their own tongue and provided the principles of Hebrew grammatical study down to modern times. The anticipations of modern higher biblical criticism by Judah ibn Balaʿam and Moses ibn Gikatilla (11th century) were popularized in Hebrew a few generations later by Abraham ibn Ezra. In the revival of Hebrew poetry, liturgical as well as secular, that translated the new preoccupation with language and beauty into art, Andalusian Jewry saw its greatest achievements. Solomon ibn Gabirol (c. 1022–c. 1058), Moses ibn Ezra, and Judah ha-Levi (c. 1075–1141) were the acknowledged supreme geniuses of a form of expression that became a passion with thousands the length and breadth of Spain. But the most enduring consequence of the new temper was the redefinition of religious faith in the light of Greco-Arabic philosophical theories. The exposition of faith in Neoplatonic terms by Solomon ibn Gabirol, the defense of Rabbinism using Aristotelian categories by Abraham ibn Daud (c. 1110–c. 1180), the attack on the religious inadequacy of philosophy by Judah ha-Levi, and the epoch-making Aristotelian philosophical theology by Moses Maimonides (1135–1204) fixed philosophical inquiry as an enduring subject on the agenda of rabbinic concerns. Beginning in the 13th century, a new class of philosophers sponsored the translation of Arabic literature into Hebrew and of Hebrew and Arabic literature into Latin; they brought Jews and their thought into the mainstream of Western philosophy and gained for them the position of middlemen of culture between East and West.
The salient trends of Sephardic Judaism did not imply relegation of the rabbinic class to a secondary role. Rather, they shaped a fresh approach to rabbinic texts that paralleled in many respects those adopted in biblical exegesis. Strict adherence to consistency, systematization, and philological exactitude yielded new codes that often diverged from gaonic judgments. A digest of Talmudic law by Isaac Alfasi (1013–1103) placed the Sephardic rabbinate on a self-reliant footing and epitomized its method of getting at the essentials of Talmudic law by sidestepping contingent discussions. In this area too, it was Moses Maimonides who brought the Sephardic principles of comprehensiveness, lucidity, and logical arrangement to their apex through his code of Jewish law, Mishne Torah. Written in Mishnaic Hebrew, the work remains the only comprehensive treatment of all of Jewish law, including those fields that are not applicable in the Diaspora (agriculture, purity, sacrifices, Temple procedure).
With Maimonides, however, the pure Sephardic tradition came to an end, for the Almohad (Amazigh [Berber] Muslim reformers) invasion of Spain in 1147–48 wiped out the Jewish communities of Andalusia and drove thousands to northern Spain and Provence (a province of southeastern France) or, as in the case of Maimonides' family, to North Africa and Egypt. Sephardic Jewry suddenly encountered a discrete, mature, Jewish culture that for centuries had been developing independently and along quite different lines.
Ashkenazic developments
The Ashkenazic Jewry, into whose communities the Sephardim had been thrust by political events, regarded their own heritage and the Christian world in which they lived from a perspective shaped exclusively by rabbinic categories. They drew their school texts and the values that determined their judgments from the Talmud and the Midrash. Sensing no intellectual challenge in Christian faith, which they regarded with thinly concealed contempt, they constituted for the most part a merchant class that lived in urban centres under the protection of ecclesiastical and temporal rulers but also under their own complex of laws and institutions. Except for mercantile relations, Christian society was closed to them, thanks largely to age-old ecclesiastical prohibitions forbidding all social intercourse with Jews. With the Arab conquest of Spain and the rise of the Carolingians (the dynasty that ruled western Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries), the 12-decade interlude of suppression by the Visigoths (589–711) came to an end, and the Roman precedent of toleration and autonomy again became the rule. Merchants and rabbis moved from Italy to France and the Rhineland and infused new energies into the Jewish communities there. An indigenous religious leadership began to emerge at the very time that Andalusian Jewry was entering its golden age. The First Crusade (1096–99) unleashed a tide of hatred, periodic violence, and progressive restrictions on Jewish activities in the Rhineland, but the communities affected had attained sufficient resilience to reestablish their communal institutions shortly afterward and to continue the cultivation of their deeply ingrained traditions.
By 1150 Ashkenazic Jewry had established a culture of its own, with an indigenous literature that ranged from the popular homily to the esoteric tract on the nature of the divine glory. Study of the Bible and the Talmud was oriented toward a mystical pietism in which prayer and contemplation of the secrets embedded in the liturgy were to lead to religious experience. Significantly, the fathers of the Ashkenazic tradition were remembered as liturgical poets and initiates into divine mysteries, and the early codes of the Franco-German schools were heavily weighted with discussions of liturgical usage. After the Second Crusade (1147–49), the German Jewish mystics (also called Hasidim, or pietists) placed heavy emphasis on the merits of asceticism, martyrdom, and penitence, thus adapting to a Jewish idiom the features of saintliness then current in Christian Europe. For the masses of Jews, the cultural fare consisted principally of biblical tales and instruction as interpreted by rabbinic Midrash, the lives of scholars and saints, and liturgical poetry reaffirming the election of Israel and faith in messianic redemption. The chief vehicle of popular instruction consisted of anthologies from the rabbinic writings and commentaries on Scripture, of which the most popular was that of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac of Troyes (1040–1105), known as Rashi, the acronym formed from the initials of his name in Hebrew. For the more advanced student, Rashi composed a succinct commentary on the Talmud that achieved an authority approaching that of the text itself.
As living sources of law and values, the Bible and the Talmud had an impact on public and private, as well as secular and religious, affairs. Taking their cue from Talmudic precedent and from Christian ecclesiastical procedures of their own times, the Ashkenazic rabbis occasionally gathered in regional synods to enact legislation on problems of a general nature for which there was no adequate precedent in the literature. Among the most enduring of these measures were the prohibition of bigamy and arbitrary divorce and severe economic penalties for abandonment of wives. Of far more immediate concern to the average Jew were the circumvention of Talmudic prohibitions against usury, relaxation of prohibitions regarding traffic with Gentiles in wines, and adoption of severe disciplinary measures, such as excommunication, against informers or those appealing, in cases involving Jews, to the Gentile authorities.
A new religious trend began in Provence in the 13th century with the introduction into the Talmudic academies of a novel form of mystical study known as Kabbala (literally, "tradition"), which soon spread to northern Spain. Expressing gnostic doctrines in rabbinic guise, the devotees of Kabbala devised an esoteric vocabulary that reinterpreted the Bible and rabbinic law as allegories of the various modes in which God is manifested in a spiritual universe, access to which was reserved for initiates. The most renowned literary product of this new circle was the Zohar ("The Book of Splendour"), a vast mystical commentary on the Pentateuch by Moses de León (c. 1250–1305); with later additions it became the Bible of Jewish mystics everywhere. Although some of the theological notions of the Kabbalists deviated from basic postulates of Jewish monotheism, the insistence of the mystics on unflagging ritual orthodoxy and on a nominal acceptance of the biblical text as divine revelation helped them avert the suspicions aroused by Jewish Aristotelians and Averroists—followers of the 12th-century Arabic Aristotelian philosopher Averroës (1126–98)—and, in time, even won for them the status of a rabbinic elite. Indeed, in the early 13th century some of the mystics lent their support to a campaign that condemned the study of philosophy as generating skepticism, latitudinarianism, and disrespect for traditional literature.
Marginalization and expulsion
Developments within the two major Jewish communities of medieval Europe were complicated by their uncertain relationship with the Christian community surrounding them. By all accounts, Christians and Jews had been on relatively good terms until the 11th century. In the early Middle Ages there were frequent contacts between Christians and Jews, who intermarried and shared language and culture. In the Carolingian era some bishops even complained that the Jews were favoured too much by Carolingian rulers. The situation became more complicated after about the year 1000, as Christian society began a process of reorganization that contributed to the marginalization of the Jews and other groups. Although the Jews did not endure unrelenting persecution and even enjoyed a cultural renaissance in the 12th century that paralleled a Christian one, they faced an increasingly hostile community that created a new theological image of the Jews and undermined the place of the Jews in society.
In the opening decade of the 11th century, Jews in various parts of Europe faced violent attacks and forced conversions that led some, according to one account, to commit suicide rather than accept baptism. Attacks against the Jews and full-scale massacres of Jews would occur throughout the rest of the Middle Ages, most notably at Mainz in the Rhineland in 1096, in England in 1198–90, in Franconia in 1298, and in France in 1320. The image of the Jews among Christians worsened, and numerous anti-Semitic stereotypes appeared in the 12th century. The most notorious example of these was the blood libel, which alleged that the Jews killed Christian boys and used their blood to make unleavened bread.
Meanwhile, official legislation of the church confirmed the declining position of the Jews. Pope Innocent III issued a decretal declaring the Jews to be in perpetual servitude for the killing of Christ, and at the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 the Jews were ordered to wear distinctive clothing, forbidden to hold public office, and prohibited from appearing in public during the last three days of the Easter season. With the discovery and burning of the Talmud by Christians in the 13th century, the church's view of the Jews worsened, because the church thus became aware that contemporary Jews were different from biblical Jews. The acceptance of the Talmud by the Jews was understood as heretical by the church, which had already launched a Crusade and the Inquisition against Christian heretics. The Jews' failure to live up to the Christian understanding of them undermined the contemporary theological justification for their continued existence (i.e., until the end of time, as witness to the truth of Christian revelation).
Challenges also emerged in the economic and social order as economic opportunities were increasingly restricted. Although there were Jewish merchants, artisans, and viticulturists throughout much of the Middle Ages, by the 12th and 13th centuries the Jews were limited to the occupation of money lending, which brought some of them great wealth but also great animosity from borrowers. Moreover, the Jews were often an important source of capital for the monarchs of Europe. As an important source of revenue, the Jews provided a valuable service to the kings and thus received special protection in the law. This relationship, however, had an ominous side, as the Jews came to be defined in the law as the personal property of the king, to be exploited as he saw fit. Jews also lost their status as individuals and were secure only as long as they were of utility to their lords.
The declining economic usefulness of the Jews and the related deterioration of their social and religious status led to their expulsion from England in 1290 and from France in 1306. Jews were also expelled from the Holy Roman Empire and, most notoriously, from Spain in 1492. In Spain, anti-Jewish riots in the late 14th century had led to the conversion of large numbers of Jews, the so-called conversos. Spanish Christians, however, remained distrustful of the conversos, who were thought to maintain contact with uncoverted Jews and to practice the Jewish faith secretly. An inquisition established to deal with the conversos led to local expulsions in the 1480s. By 1492, however, the king and queen, Ferdinand II and Isabella I, and their inquisitors decided that the only real solution to the problem was the permanent separation of the conversos and the Jews. The Jews were compelled to choose between baptism and exile, and ultimately some 40,000 (estimates range as high as 800,000) departed Spain, never to return. They settled in Navarre (then outside the kingdom of Spain), North Africa, and Portugal. Many of those in Portugal, however, accepted Christianity as a result of an order of expulsion or conversion there in 1497.
Conflicts and new movements
The conflict between philosophers and anti-philosophers in Provence and northern Spain represented a clash between two mature Jewish subcultures of diverse geographic origins, the Sephardic and the Ashkenazic, each of which had in the course of centuries developed different esoteric doctrines to transcend the legalistic formalism and confining dogmas of normative Judaism. Both forms of speculation sought salvation for exceptional individuals through knowledge and thus provided an immediate substitute for messianic deliverance from exile and servitude. Each group charged the other with distortion of tradition, and each issued apologias and excommunications characteristic of medieval doctrinal controversy. While the rifts between them reached bitter proportions, the common threat posed by ecclesiastical attacks on the Talmud in public disputations and by the expulsion of the Jews from France in 1306 prevented open rupture or resolution of the conflict. Ever since that time, two strands of orthodoxy representing the two forms of medieval metaphysical speculation have lived side by side in an uneasy truce.
Most rabbinic circles of the 14th and 15th centuries displayed a progressive dogmatism and insistence on uniformity of practice. The great legal code of Jacob ben Asher of Toledo (c. 1269–c. 1340), Arbaʿa ṭurim (c. 1335; "Four Rows"), which sought to level differences in usage between Ashkenazim and Sephardim, signified the dominant trend of the rabbinate. The increasing hardening of ideological lines, however, did not eliminate independent thinking. Isaac Albalag (13th century) propounded an Averroist (rationalistic) interpretation of the Bible predicated on a theory of double truth (of reason and revelation), while Gersonides (Levi ben Gershom; 1288–1344), gave Jewish Aristotelianism a new and comprehensive formulation. In Muslim areas, the Maimonidean regimen of philosophical contemplation was extended by Maimonides' son Abraham to a quest for pietist ecstasy that seemed to have much in common with Sufism (Islamic mysticism).
The anti-Jewish riots in Spain and their consequences stimulated the anti-intellectualism of the rabbinate. Hasdai Crescas (1340–1410), while conceding the philosophical untenability of traditional belief in free will (see also determinism), launched a scathing attack on Aristotelian approaches to religion, and his disciple Joseph Albo (c. 1380–c. 1444) issued a compendium on dogma that reaffirmed the traditional postulates of divine creation, revelation, and retribution as axioms of Judaism. But these reassertions of traditional faith could not overcome the ideological and social fragmentation that had split the Spanish communities, often leaving them in open conflict with each other. Widespread marranism (ostensible conversion to Christianity) polarized the community and left residues of bitterness toward those returning to the fold (see Marrano). The expulsions from Spain and Portugal drove the leadership into intensified pursuits of mystical escape from, and rationalization of, the endless calamities that befell their flocks. In Italy and the Ottoman Empire (Asia Minor, northeastern Africa, and southeastern Europe)—the two principal centres of refuge for the exiles of the Iberian Peninsula—legalistic Kabbalism, which insisted on strict observance of the law as a precondition of mystical practice and study, became the dominant form of rabbinic leadership. Despite the terrible circumstances, the rabbinate continued to produce works of encyclopaedic proportions and staggering erudition in every field of Jewish learning.
Inspired by the Jewish tradition that the coming of the messiah would be preceded by horrendous catastrophes, a group of rabbis established a community in Ẕefat (Safed), Palestine, where, in anticipation of the new dawn, every aspect of life was conducted on principles of saintliness and mystical contemplation. Under the leadership of Jacob Berab, the ancient practice of ordination (semikha) was reinstituted in 1538 to form the nucleus of a revived Sanhedrin that would administer ritual procedures requiring fully ordained authorities. Although the effort failed because of rabbinic opposition, it reflected the temper of the times and further fanned messianic hopes sparked shortly before by the campaigns of Solomon Molkho (c. 1500–32) and David Reubeni (died after 1532) in Italy; Molkho was burned at the stake by the Christian authorities, and Reubeni died in prison. In Ẕefat itself, Kabbalism soon entered a new phase under the inspiration of Isaac Luria (1534–72) and Ḥayyim Vital (1543–1620), who confided to their disciples that the calamities of Israel were but a mirror of the captivity into which many sparks of the Godhead itself had fallen. Liturgical innovations and a novel mystical theology were formulated to redeem the imprisoned elements of divinity and thus restore creation to the harmony intended for it.
That the Almighty himself was not quite omnipotent, at least with respect to the fate of his chosen people, was cautiously hinted in a Hebrew work of history (1550) by Solomon ibn Verga (1460–1554), who regarded the Jewish problem as a sociopolitical one to which theological answers were futile. Such guarded rationalism was entertained by a number of courageous thinkers in 16th-century Italy, where, despite the policy of ghettoization (the segregation of the Jewish community in a restricted quarter) begun by Venice in 1516 and soon extended to all major Italian cities, the spirit of the Renaissance and the passion for historical criticism had captivated many Jews. Catholic scholars and prelates occasionally employed rabbis to instruct them in the Hebrew language and in the secrets of the Kabbala, which some Christians believed actually verified the postulates of their own faith. Contacts with Christian scholars in turn introduced Jews such as Azariah dei Rossi (c. 1513–78), whose Meor ʿenayim ("Enlightenment of the Eyes") inaugurated critical textual study of rabbinical texts, to new bodies of literature that had been lost to the Jewish community, such as the works of Philo and Josephus.
Such phenomena, however, were comparatively rare and isolated. The spread of dogmatic Kabbalism eventually led to the widespread acceptance of the views of the pseudo-messiah Shabbetai Tzevi (1626–76). Most of European and Ottoman Jewry was swept into near hysteria in the belief that the end was now finally at hand. When Shabbetai converted to Islam after being apprehended by the Ottoman government, all but his most faithful followers were despondent, though some tried to explain the apostasy of the pseudo-messiah as a form of voluntary crucifixion for the sake of the Jews. A witch hunt on the part of traditionalists to uncover the remaining cells of heresy unsettled Jewish communities everywhere.
The following century (to c. 1750) was the darkest in the history of Rabbinic Judaism. Scholarship declined and popular religion became mechanical to an extent that Jews had never before experienced. Polish Jews suffered terribly during the Deluge, a period of peasant revolts and war involving Poland, Russia, and Sweden that began in 1648. The Jews were slaughtered by rebels and professional soldiers during the war, which was fought mostly on Polish soil, and many survivors were sold as slaves in Turkey. The massacres and impoverishment of Polish Jewry after 1648 brought a pall over the growing eastern European centres of Jewish life. Antinomian eruptions of extreme Shabbetaians under the leadership of the self-proclaimed messiah and later Catholic convert Jacob Frank (1726–91) alarmed Gentile authorities almost as much as they did Jews. But the fossilization referred to above was only apparent. Beneath the surface many were restlessly searching for new avenues of faith, and the 18th century saw fresh responses that set the history of the Jews and of Judaism in new directions and marked the beginning of a new era.Gerson D. Cohen
Modern Judaism (c. 1750 to the present)
The new situation
The criteria used to identify dividing points in the history of the Jews and Judaism are especially notable when it comes to the start of the modern period. Historians of thought traditionally place this point in the late 17th century, with the appearance of those who abandoned, in part or in toto, their inherited Jewish faith but continued to regard themselves—and to be regarded by others—as Jews. Some Israeli scholars prefer a date of about 1700, with the first stirrings of the emigration from the Diaspora to the Holy Land, which culminated in the mid-20th century in the creation of the State of Israel. Political and social historians put the start of the modern period in the second half of the 18th century, when the American and French revolutions eventually resulted in the emancipation of Jews from discriminatory and segregative laws and customs, their attainment of legal status as citizens, and the freedom of individual Jews to pursue careers appropriate to their talents. These varying approaches have one thing in common: the view that the start of the modern period is marked by the end of the doctrine of the exile, whereby Jews saw themselves as a people waiting out centuries of woe in alien lands until the moment of divine redemption. Jewish modernity for most scholars is characterized by the end of a passive waiting for the messiah and the beginning of an active pursuit of personal or national fulfillment on this earth and preferably in one's own lifetime.
Although the 18th century Haskala (Enlightenment) among the Ashkenazim of central and eastern Europe is often taken as the starting point of Jewish modernity, the process of Westernization had begun a good deal earlier among the Sephardim in western Europe and in Italy. The Marranos who went to the Jewish communities of Amsterdam and Venice in the 17th century to declare themselves Jews carried with them the Western education that they had acquired while living as Christians in the Iberian Peninsula, as well as the habits of criticism that had kept them from assimilating into the majority during their Marrano years. Some, such as Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza (1632–77), a son of Marranos, applied these skills to all of the biblical tradition, including especially their own religion. In Italy there was an older Jewish community that had never been sealed off culturally from the influence of its environment; some of its figures were influenced by, and participated in, the main currents of the Renaissance.
Increased contact with Western languages, manners, and customs came to the Ashkenazim only in the 18th century, when new economic opportunities created such possibilities. Jewish bankers and brokers in various German principalities, army provisioners in most European countries, capitalists who were permitted to live in places such as Berlin because they opened new factories or were otherwise helpful to the expansion of the economy—all were in increasing contact with Gentile society, and most of them began to strive for full acceptance. Around this wealthy element there arose a number of intellectuals who agitated for the end of ghettoization as a necessary preamble to the emancipation of the Jews.
The Haskala, or Enlightenment
In central Europe
The most outstanding figure of the 18th-century Jewish Enlightenment was the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), a devoted adherent of traditional Judaism who turned away from the historic Jewish preoccupation with the Talmud and its literature to the intellectual world of the European Enlightenment. Mendelssohn did not attempt a philosophical defense of Judaism until pressed to do so by Christians who questioned how he could remain faithful to what they saw as an unenlightened religion. In his response, Jerusalem, published in 1783, Mendelssohn defended the validity of Judaism as the inherited faith of the Jews by defining it as revealed divine legislation, and he declared himself at the same time to be a believer in the universal religion of reason, of which Judaism was but one historical manifestation. Aware that he was accepted by Gentile society as an "exceptional Jew" who had embraced Western culture, Mendelssohn's message to his own community was to become Westerners, to seek out the culture of the Enlightenment. To that end he joined with a poet, Naphtali Herz (Hartwig) Wessely (1725–1805), in translating the Torah into German, combining Hebrew characters with modern German phonetics in an effort to displace Yiddish, and wrote a modern biblical commentary in Hebrew, the Beʾur ("Commentary"). Within a generation, Mendelssohn's Bible was to be found in almost every literate Jewish home in central Europe, serving to introduce its readers to German culture. Through his personal example and his life's work, Mendelssohn made it possible for his fellow Jews to join the Western world without sacrificing their Judaism; indeed, he convinced them that Judaism is compatible with an intellectual commitment to universal reason.
Mendelssohn's work was carried on by the Berlin Haskala, a group of Jewish intellectuals who had gathered around Mendelssohn during his lifetime; the Haskala was most active in the 20 years following his death. In the pages of their Hebrew-language periodical, Ha-Meʾassef ("The Collector"), they preached the virtues of secular culture and publicized the need for secular education. In response to the Edict of Toleration promulgated in 1781 by the Holy Roman emperor Joseph II (reigned 1765–90), Naphtali Wessely issued an urgent call for the reform of Jewish education as a prelude to full emancipation. Secular subjects—mathematics, German, and world history and literature—were to take precedence over traditional Jewish studies. The study of the Bible, because it was generally acknowledged to be a fundamental part of Western culture, was to be emphasized at the expense of the customary focus on the Talmud. Following this model, modern Jewish schools were established by Jewish intellectuals and businessmen in several German cities, among them Frankfurt and Hamburg. As its educational activities began to bear fruit in the wide dissemination of secular culture, the Berlin Haskala abandoned the use of Hebrew for German and gradually disintegrated. Unlike Mendelssohn himself, his immediate intellectual descendants, including his own children, were unable to strike a balance between Jewish and secular culture; their Western education undermined their religious faith, and they saw themselves as Europeans rather than as Jews.
One of Mendelssohn's disciples, David Friedlaender, offered to convert to Christianity without accepting Christian dogma or Christian rites; he felt that both Judaism and Christianity shared the same religious truth but that there was no relation at all between that truth and Judaism's ceremonial law. The offer was refused because Friedlaender would not acknowledge the superiority of Christianity and make an unconditional commitment to it. Unlike Friedlaender, many other followers of Mendelssohn chose to leave the Jewish faith as the only way to win full acceptance in European society.
In eastern Europe
Thus, the Haskala was quickly played out in central Europe; as an idea, its further career was to continue in eastern Europe, particularly in the Russian Empire, where it flourished in the middle third of the 19th century until, as a result of the pogroms of 1881, Jews lost faith in the willingness of Russians to accept "enlightened" Jews. It was a tenet of the Russian Haskala that the tsar was a benevolent leader who would bestow emancipation upon his Jewish subjects as soon as they proved themselves worthy of it. A goal of the Russian Haskala, therefore, was for the Jews to transform themselves into model citizens—enlightened, unsuperstitious, devoted to secular learning and productive occupations. Following the example of the Berlin Haskala, a Russian Hebrew-language writer, Isaac Baer Levinsohn (1788–1860), published a pamphlet, Teʿuda be-Yisrael ("Testimony in Israel"), extolling the benefits of secular education. At the same time, writers such as Joseph Perl (1774–1839) and Isaac Erter (1792–1851), though traditional Jews themselves, attacked in virulent satire the superstitious folk customs of the masses, thereby opening the way to the anticlericalism that became characteristic of the Russian Haskala.
In the 1840s and '50s the group's emphasis shifted from satirical attacks on the cultural parochialism of the Pale of Settlement (the regions to which the Jews were restricted) to romanticization of life outside the Pale, including periods of the Jewish past. Thus, Hebrew poets and novelists in Russia, such as Micah Judah Lebensohn (1828–52) and Abraham Mapu (1808–67), contributed to the creation of a modern Hebrew literature. In the 1860s the Russian Haskala, reflecting the larger political climate, entered a "positivist" phase, calling for practical social and economic reforms. Hebrew-language journals were established, and the Hebrew essay and didactic poetry, calling for religious and cultural reforms, came into their own, particularly in the hands of the poet Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) and the essayist Moses Leib Lilienblum (1843–1910). Abandoning the original Hebrew and German orientation of the Russian Haskala, a number of Jewish intellectuals—the most prominent of whom were Yoachim Tarnopol (1810–1900), Osip Rabinovich (1817–69), and Lev Levanda (1835–88)—became Russifiers, founding Russian-language Jewish weeklies devoted to "patriotism, emancipation, modernism." Like their contemporary fellow Jews in western Europe, they declared themselves to be Russians by nationality and Jews by religious belief alone. In 1863 a group of wealthy Jews in St. Petersburg and Odessa created the Society for the Promotion of Culture Among the Jews of Russia for the purpose of educating Russian Jewry into "readiness for citizenship." The goal of all segments of the Russian Haskala in the 1860s and '70s was to turn Jews into good Russians and to make their Jewishness a matter of personal choice. But the hopes of the Haskala were upset by the reaction of Russians following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881. Several Jewish communities were destroyed in pogroms, which often received the tacit approval of the governing authorities. Jewish economic life was severely curtailed, and quotas for Jewish students were put in place in secular educational institutions. The bright optimism of Russian-Jewish intellectuals faded.
Religious reform movements
One element of Westernization that the Haskala championed was the reform of religion. This movement began in western Europe during the Napoleonic period (1800–15), when certain aspects of Jewish belief and observance were seen as incompatible with the new position of the Jew in Western society. Napoleon convoked a Sanhedrin in 1807 to create a modern definition of Judaism that renounced Jewish nationhood and national aspirations, asserted that rabbinic authority was purely spiritual, and recognized the priority of civil over religious authority even in matters of intermarriage. In countries other than France, the rationale for reform, at least in its early years, was more aesthetic than doctrinal. The external aspects of Jewish worship—i.e., the form of the service—was unacceptable to the newly Westernized members of the Jewish bourgeoisie in both Germany and the United States, whose cultural standards had been shaped by the surrounding society and who desired above all to resemble their Gentile peers. Thus, the short-lived Reform temple established in Seesen in 1810 by the pioneer German reformer Israel Jacobson (1768–1828) introduced organ and choir music, allowed men and women to sit together during worship, delivered the sermon in German instead of Hebrew, and omitted liturgical references to a personal messiah and the restoration of Israel. A more radical temple established in Hamburg in 1818 adopted all of Jacobson's reforms and published its own much-abridged prayer book, which deleted almost all references to the long-awaited restoration of Zion. Reformers in Charleston, South Carolina, introduced similar changes in the synagogue ritual in 1824. It was apparent to the reformers that in Western society Judaism would have to divest itself of its alien customs and conform to the cultural and intellectual standards of the new "age of reason."
German Reform in the 1840s became institutionalized, a matter of organized formal belief and practice. At a series of synods held at Brunswick (1844), Frankfurt (1845), and Breslau (1846), it created the first theological rationalization for changes introduced to the faith in the previous generation. Judaism, it was declared, had always been a developmental religion that conformed to the demands of the times. Moreover, the reformers maintained, the Jews were no longer a nation and therefore were bound not by their religious and political code of law but only by the dictates of moral law. Rituals that impeded full Jewish participation in German social and political life were no longer considered valid expressions of Jewish religious truth. The use of Hebrew in religious services was limited; practices such as circumcision and the dietary laws and all national messianic hopes were questioned in light of the "spirit of the times." Messianism in Reform Judaism was transformed into active concern for social welfare in the present, and the Jewish role in history became Diaspora-centred; some even thought of it as constituting a mission to the Gentiles.
Although Reform Judaism was initiated in Europe, its success was limited there because many central European governments would not recognize more than one form of Judaism in any one locale. Even in areas where it had taken root, by the middle of the 19th century, European Reform (now usually called "Liberal Judaism") lost much of its early radicalism. Reform was much more successful in the United States, where it was carried by massive numbers of German Jewish immigrants in the 1840s and where it coalesced with existing American reform movements. By 1880 almost all of the 200 synagogues in the United States (amalgamated in the Union of American Hebrew Congregations in 1873) were Reform. In 1885 a conference of Reform rabbis formulated what was then the most comprehensive statement of Reform philosophy in the so-called Pittsburgh Platform. This manifesto announced that Judaism was an evolutionary faith and no longer a national one, and it declared that the Mosaic and rabbinical laws regulating diet, purity, and dress were "entirely foreign to our present mental and spiritual state." While the preservation of historical identity was considered beneficial, the maintenance of tradition was not; the Talmud was to be treated merely as religious literature, not as legislation. The principles of the Pittsburgh Platform remained the official philosophy of the American Reform movement until 1937, when a later generation, seeking to meet different emotional and intellectual needs, reintroduced the concept of Jewish personhood into the Columbus Platform; this document also reemphasized Hebrew and traditional liturgy and practices. After World War II, Reform in the United States developed along two tracks. It departed in new ways from traditional Judaism in ordaining women (1972), allowing patrilineal descent (1983), and sanctifying same-sex marriage (2000). On the other hand, some Reform Jews began reintegrating long-discarded rituals into worship services. This neo-ritualism stimulated greater use of Hebrew in prayer books and a more dynamic Zionism.
If Reform was a child of Enlightenment rationalism, Conservative Judaism was a child of historical romanticism. It began in 1845, when Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) and a group of followers seceded from a second Reform synod at Frankfurt over the issue of limiting the use of Hebrew to a small core of prayers. For Frankel, Hebrew represented the spirit of Judaism and the Jewish people, and Judaism itself was not merely a theology of ethics but the historical expression of the Jewish experience; this definition he called "positive-historical Judaism." Although Conservative Judaism conceived of Judaism as a developmental religion, it charted its course through close study of tradition and the will of the people and thus came to largely traditional conclusions about religious observance.
Orthodox developments
In western and central Europe
Although affected by the efforts at religious reform, the bulk of the official Jewish establishment in western and central Europe remained Orthodox (a term first used by Reform leaders to designate their traditionalist opponents). Under the leadership of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88) in Frankfurt, a more modern and militant form of Judaism arose. Known as Neo-Orthodoxy, the new movement asserted its right to break with any Jewish community that contained Reform elements. The teachings of Neo-Orthodoxy were profoundly influential, for they indicated the possibility of living a ritually and religiously full life while being totally integrated into Western society. This was accomplished by positing a theoretical division between religion and culture: in religion the Jews were to remain Orthodox (though deferring their messianic aspirations to the unforeseeable future), while in manners and culture they were to become Western. This form of Orthodoxy, which became the intellectual model for Western Orthodoxy, continued into the 21st century in the United States in a variety of religious and academic institutions (such as the Yeshiva University in New York City and the bulk of English-speaking Orthodox synagogues), coexisting in substantial tension with a number of Orthodox groups, most notably the Lubavitcher and Satmar Hasidim (see Hasidism) and some Talmudic academies that viewed the Western world as the enemy and chose to re-create the ghetto.
In eastern Europe
By the mid-18th century, Orthodoxy in eastern Europe, having been convulsed by frantic messianism and stifled by the sterility of legalistic scholarship, was ripe for revival. In the mid-17th century the experience of Shabbetaianism, the first messianic movement to excite virtually all of world Jewry, had revealed the pervasiveness of Jewish exhaustion with the Exile and fervent longing for messianic redemption. Later, in the 18th century, the nihilistic sect of Frankists (the followers of Jacob Frank) transformed that longing into a this-worldly hysteria. Talmudic piety and study, sunk in excessive pilpul (acute logical distinctions that often became mere hairsplitting), was refreshed by the new critical methods of Elijah ben Solomon (1720–97), the gaon of Vilna. Although essentially a legal rigorist, he was open to more-scientific methods of textual analysis insofar as they helped him to elucidate Talmudic texts. Orthodox religious expression also was raised to a new level with the development of Hasidism (pietism) by Israel Baʿal Shem Tov (c. 1700–60) in the mid-18th century. Hasidism contained elements of social protest, being at least in part a movement of the poor against the wealthy communal leadership and of the unlearned against the learned—though many of its leaders, among them Rabbi Dov Baer (1710–72), who was the maggid ("preacher") of Mezhirich, and Rabbi Levi Isaac of Berdichev (1740–1810), were well-versed in Talmudic learning. Nevertheless, it was essentially a non-messianic outcry in the name of piety, emphasizing prayer and personal religious devotion here and now. The major innovation that Hasidism introduced into Jewish religious life was the charismatic leader, the rebbe, who served as teacher, confessor, wonder-worker, God's vicar on earth, and, occasionally, atoning sacrifice. The earliest rebbes were democratically chosen, but spiritual dynasties formed as the position of leadership passed to the descendants of the first rebbes on the presumption that they had inherited their fathers' charisma. Hasidism spread throughout eastern Europe and was most successful in Poland.
Hasidism made little headway in Lithuania, where the traditional rabbinic class, under the leadership of Elijah ben Solomon, was able to stave off its influence by issuing a ban of excommunication (ḥerem, "anathema") against the new movement. The tactic, which involved a complete boycott and cutting off of communication, was widely embraced by non-Hasidic rabbis, who were given the title of Mitnaggedim ("Opponents") by the Hasidim. In areas where the rabbis had lost the respect of the masses, however, the ḥerem proved largely ineffective, and it called forth a round of counter-excommunications by the Hasidic rebbes. With the passage of time, Hasidim and Mitnaggedim abandoned their conflict and came to see each other as allies against the threat to all Orthodox Jewish religion posed by Haskala and secularization. The impact of Hasidism on eastern European Jewry cannot be overemphasized; even in Lithuania, where it did not take firm hold, it stimulated the growth of a homegrown pietism in the Musar (ethicist) movement of the mid-19th century, and it renewed the Talmudic energies of its opponents.
Developments in scholarship
As the Jews of central Europe moved into mainstream society, a group of young Jewish intellectuals devoted themselves to Jewish scholarship of a type far different from traditional Talmudic learning or medieval philosophy. In 1819 Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) and Moses Moser (1796–1838) founded the Society for Jewish Culture and Learning. The original group quickly dissolved, however, and Zunz became the unofficial leader of a generation of scholars dedicated to the Wissenschaft des Judentums ("science of Judaism").
The Wissenschaft movement sought to prove that the Jewish past was intellectually respectable and worthy of study, and hence that the Jews deserved an equal place within European societies. Jewish scholarship was enlisted as a weapon in the battles for change. Thus, Isaac M. Jost (1793–1860) wrote a general history of the Jews to promote Reform, Zunz's Gottesdienstliche Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt (1832; "The Worship Sermons of the Jews, Historically Developed") served to legitimize the modern innovation of the sermon in the vernacular, and Abraham Geiger (1810–74), the outstanding leader of German Reform in the 1840s and '50s, interpreted the Pharisees as the forerunners of the reformers of his own day. In their work, these intellectuals presented archetypes of what modern Jews should become. To support their claims of academic respectability, the Wissenschaft figures highlighted those aspects of the Jewish past that were closely integrated with general fields of study. In particular, Moritz Steinschneider (1816–1907), who owes his fame to towering achievements in bibliography, was concerned above all with the contribution of Jews to science, medicine, and mathematics. These scholars set out to praise Judaism as one of the cofounders of the Western tradition; they argued that, because the Jews produced great culture whenever they were not excluded from European society, they would repeat such accomplishments under conditions of social and political equality.
The Wissenschaft movement stimulated the critical study of the Jewish past, and great works of synthesis written from a variety of perspectives began to appear: the multivolume Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (1853–76; History of the Jews), written from a romantic-national point of view by Heinrich Graetz (1817–91); Dorot ha-rishonim (1897–1932; "The First Generations"), by Isaac Halevy (1847–1914); Toldot Yisrael (1894; "History of Israel"), written from an orthodox standpoint by Zeʾev Jawitz; and Die Weltgeschichte des jüdischen Volkes (1925–30; "The World History of the Jewish People") by Simon Dubnow (1860–1941), reflecting his belief in secular, nationalistic communal autonomy. After the 1920s this tradition of great synthesis was carried on in the United States by Salo W. Baron (1895–1989), who by the early 1980s had produced 18 volumes of his Social and Religious History of the Jews (1952–83), and in Israel by Ben-Zion Dinur (1884–1973), whose chief work was Yisrael ba-gola (3rd ed., 5 vol., 1961–66; "Israel in the Exile"). Many other first-rank scholars in Europe, Israel, and the United States have made notable contributions to the study of Jewish history, rabbinics, and mysticism.
Jewish-Christian relations
Jewish-Christian relations in the 19th century were strained at best and often broke down during periods of open conflict. The established Christian churches, particularly Roman Catholicism, were staunch upholders of the old order; they identified the Jews as the major beneficiaries of the French Revolution and as the carriers of liberal, secular, anticlerical, and often revolutionary doctrines. Clerical anti-Semitism allied itself with the anti-Semitism of the traditional right in France, and both forms contended with movements that supported the results of the French Revolution in the great convulsion of the Dreyfus Affair in the last years of the 19th century. In Russia the conflict between the Jews and the Orthodox Church released the most open and virulent manifestation of religious anti-Semitism. In the view of the church, the Jews were seeking to undermine Russian Orthodoxy and the tsar, the very foundations of Russian society. The church and the tsarist authorities condoned—and even encouraged—violent pogroms against the Jews in 1881–82 and again in 1905.
Russian Orthodoxy was also active in spreading the blood libel, a superstitious belief in Jewish ritual murder of Christian children whose blood would be used to make unleavened bread at Passover. The blood libel first emerged in the 12th century and often led to the persecution of Jews; it reemerged in Damascus in 1840 (in which instance the French consul in Syria initiated the accusation) and in Tiszaeszlár, Hungary, in 1882. In both cases, torture was used to obtain false confessions, though the accused were ultimately cleared. The most infamous occurrence of the blood libel in modern times was the case of Mendel Beilis, a Jewish bookkeeper in Odessa who was accused of ritual murder by the tsarist government in 1911. Imprisoned for more than two years, he was eventually acquitted by an all-Christian jury.
From Russian Orthodox circles too arose the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fraudulent documentation of an alleged international Jewish conspiracy to conquer the world by subverting the social order through liberalism, Freemasonry, and other modern movements. The concoction appeared about the turn of the 20th century and was proved to be a forgery by 1921. Despite this demonstration, the Protocols was widely used in anti-Semitic propaganda in Europe, the United States, and the Arab world into the 21st century.
In the 20th century, Jews and Christians moved toward mutual understanding. Although many Christians continued to hold irrational and hostile attitudes toward Jews, some liberal Christian voices were raised against anti-Semitism in the early decades of the century. In the United States the National Conference of Christians and Jews was founded in 1928 in response to the virulent anti-Semitism propagated in Henry Ford's newspaper, the Dearborn Independent. Some Christian leaders spoke out during the 1930s against the Nazi persecution of the Jews, but the majority of Christian leaders in Europe remained silent, even during the Holocaust. In 1946, however, the World Council of Churches denounced anti-Semitism, and in 1965 the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church adopted the schema on the Jews and other non-Christian religions, which formally revised the church's traditional attitude toward the Jews as the killers of Christ. A growing feeling of ecumenism was shared between Jews and Christians; indeed, Pope John Paul II made improved relations between Catholics and Jews a hallmark of his papacy. Although there remain many difficulties related to the question of the place that Zionism and the State of Israel hold within Judaism, the older forms of official church anti-Semitism have been radically diminished.
The most striking of the new phenomena in Jewish life was Zionism, which, insofar as it focused on the return to Zion (the poetic term for the Holy Land), recalled older religious themes. Because it stressed the establishment of a secular state, however, Zionism was yet another example of the secularization of Jewish life and of Jewish messianism. In its secular aspects, Zionism attempted to complete the emancipation of the Jews by transforming them into a nation like all other nations. Although it drew upon the general currents of 19th-century European nationalism, its major impetus came from the revival of a virulent form of racist anti-Semitism in the last decades of the 19th century, as noted above. Zionism reacted to anti-Semitic contentions that the Jews were aliens in European society and could never hope to be integrated into it in significant numbers; it transformed this charge into a basic premise of a program of national regeneration and resettlement. Zionism has come to occupy roughly the same place in Jewish life as the Social Gospel did in Christian life. Involvement in Israel as the new centre of Jewish energies, creativity, and renewal served as a kind of secular religion for many Diaspora Jews.
American Judaism
The history of Judaism in the United States is the story of several fresh beginnings. In the colonial period the character of the tiny American Jewish community was shaped by the earliest Sephardic immigrants. The community was officially Orthodox but, unlike European Jewish communities, was voluntaristic, and by the early 19th century much of the younger generation had moved away from the faith. By the mid-19th century a new wave of central European immigrants revived the declining community and remade it to serve their own needs. Primarily small shopkeepers and traders, the new immigrants migrated westward, founding new Jewish centres that were almost entirely controlled by laymen.
Life on the frontier in an open society created a predisposition for religious reform, and it is significant that the greatest American Reform Jewish leader of the 19th century, Isaac Mayer Wise (1819–1900), was based in Cincinnati, Ohio. Wise sought to unite all of American Jewry in the new nontraditional institutions that he founded: the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1873), Hebrew Union College (1875), and the Central Conference of American Rabbis (1889); but his ever more radical reforming spirit ultimately drove traditionalist elements into opposition.
The head of the traditionalists was Isaac Leeser (1806–68), a native of Germany, who had attempted to create an indigenous American community along the lines of a modernized traditionalism. After his death, Conservative forces became disorganized, but, in reaction to Reform, they defined themselves by their attachment to the Sabbath, the dietary laws, and especially to Hebrew as the language of prayer. Under the leadership of Sabato Morais (1823–97), a traditional Sephardic Jew of Italian birth, Conservative circles in 1886 founded a rabbinic seminary of their own, the Jewish Theological Seminary of America.
The eastern European immigrants who moved in large numbers to American shores from 1881 to 1914 were profoundly different in culture and manners from the older elements of the American Jewish community, and they and their descendants have made American Judaism what it is today. The bridge between the existing Jewish community led by German Jews of Reform persuasion and the new immigrant masses was the traditionalist element among the older settlers. A traditionalist, Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), cooperated with the German Reform circle of Jacob Schiff (1847–1920) in reorganizing the Jewish Theological Seminary (1902) and other institutions for the purpose of Americanizing the eastern European immigrants. Enough eastern European rabbis and scholars had immigrated, however, to create their own synagogues, which reproduced the customs of the Old World. In 1880 almost all of the 200 Jewish congregations in the United States were Reform, but by 1890 there were 533 synagogues, and most of the new ones founded by immigrant groups were Orthodox. The Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations, which was established in 1898 by elements associated with the Jewish Theological Seminary, was soon taken over by Yiddish-speaking recent immigrants for whom the seminary was much too liberal. In 1902 immigrant rabbis also formed their own body, the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada (the Agudath ha-Rabbanim), which fostered the creation of yeshivas (rabbinic academies) of the old type. In 1915 two small yeshivas, Etz Chaim and Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, merged and undertook a program of further growth, adding Yeshiva College of secular studies in 1928 and becoming Yeshiva University in 1945. The eastern European Orthodox elements concentrated primarily on Jewish education, and it was they who introduced the movement for Jewish day schools, analogous to Christian parochial schools. Gradually, an American version of Orthodoxy developed on the Neo-Orthodox model of Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808–88), which combined institutional separatism with a certain openness to general culture.
The immigrants and their children had three desires: to advance socially by joining older congregations or forming their own in an Americanized image, to affirm an unideological commitment to Jewish life, and to maintain their ties to the overseas Jewish communities of their origin. With their strong sense of Jewish personhood, they introduced Zionism into American Jewish life and accepted the basic ideas of the Reconstructionism of Mordecai Kaplan (1881–1983), which was committed to Zionism. A small group of anti-Zionists remained a significant force in the 1930s and '40s, but their central organization, the American Council for Judaism, represented the descendants of earlier German Jewish immigrants. The later immigrants took over all the earlier institutions of the Jewish community and imbued them with their own spirit.
American Jewish religious life is a continuum, from the most traditional Orthodoxy to the most radical Reconstructionism. In theory, all Orthodox groups agree on the revealed nature of all of Jewish law. For Reform groups, the moral doctrine of Judaism is divine and its ritual law is man-made; Conservatives see Judaism as the working out in both areas of a divine revelation that is incarnate in a slowly changing human history; and the Reconstructionists (who also include some Conservative and Reform Jews) view Judaism as the evolving civilization created by the Jewish people in the light of its highest conscience. The role of the rabbi is substantially the same in all three groups: no longer a Talmudic scholar but a preacher, pastor, and administrator, a cross between a parish priest and the leader of an ethnic group. Religious life for the three major Jewish denominations—Orthodox, Reform, and Conservative—revolves around the individual synagogue and the denomination to which it belongs. As religious identification has become increasingly respectable in American life, the Jews have followed the American norm, affiliating in greater numbers with synagogues, though often for ethnic or social rather than religious reasons.
Judaism in other lands
Modernity came first to the Jewish people of Europe. It was therefore within the European context that representatives of important non-Ashkenazi communities—such as the proto-Zionist Sephardi Judah ben Solomon Ḥai Alkalai (1798–1878) of Sarajevo and the Luzzatto family and Elijah Benamozegh (1822–1900) in Italy—participated in variations of Jewish modernity. In England and France more so than in Germany or Russia, the central focus of Jewish experience was Wissenschaft des Judentums, with its Enlightenment ideology; there the "republic of scholarship" became the synagogue of the Jewish intelligentsia. In neither country did Reform Judaism gain a major foothold, for the Orthodox establishment liberalized its synagogue practice while retaining its essentially conservative outlook. In Anglo-Jewish life in the last decades of the 19th century, the two most pronounced modernist tendencies were the moderate, romantic traditionalism of Solomon Schechter (1847–1915) and the "renewed Karaism" of Claude Joseph Goldsmid Montefiore (1858–1938), whose version of religious reform was "back to the Bible."
In South America and Canada, Jewish modernity appeared late, for European Jewry arrived in those places even later than in the United States, attaining significant numbers only in the 20th century. These communities were dependent on immigrant scholars and intellectuals for serious Jewish thought. Jews in the Arab lands in North Africa and the Middle East, living in traditional societies, entered modernity even later than those on the peripheries of Europe. Many of them received their first introduction to the Western world in schools set up by the Alliance Israélite Universelle (a Jewish defense organization centred in Paris), which combined Jewish education with the language and values of French civilization. Yet most of these communities remained traditionalist almost up to the moment when they were expelled or felt compelled to relocate, beginning in 1948, when the State of Israel was created. The ferment of modernity in all its forms is now being felt in their ranks. In Israel, which has received a large segment of Sephardic Jewry, the attention of these communities has turned to gaining equality with the more advanced Ashkenazim rather than to developing forms of modern Jewish thought.
Other groups that may be described as regional or ethnic include the Bene Israel, descendants of Jewish settlers in the Bombay region (now Mumbai) of India, whose deviation in some Halakhic matters from the present Orthodox consensus has raised problems for those among them who have migrated to Israel; the Falashas of Ethiopia, whose development has been almost entirely outside the mainstream described in this article; and the Black Jews of the United States, whose place in and relation to the rest of the community remains unclear.
Contemporary Judaism
As a result of the Holocaust, Judaism has become a non-European religion; its three major centres, which together include more than three-fourths of world Jewry, are Israel, the Slavic region of the former Soviet Union, and the United States. Although Jews constitute only a small fraction of the population of the United States, Judaism plays an important role in American life; with Roman Catholicism and Protestantism it is regarded as one of the major American faiths. Similarly, in the international realm of Western religion, Judaism has been welcomed as a partner able to deal with other major religions as an equal on issues such as anti-Semitism, human rights, and world peace.
Within its own community, Jewry is faced with the increasing secularization of Jewish identity in its three major centres, each in its own way. In the United States the open society and the "melting pot" ideologies of past generations have fostered among many Jews a sense of Jewish identity increasingly devoid of concrete religious, national, or historical content; in the former Soviet Union, government policy from the 1930s had banned the teaching of Judaism and Jewish culture to the young and had severely discouraged any manifestation of Jewish identity as a sign of the political disloyalty of "rootless cosmopolitans"; and in Israel a secular nationalism has taken root, raising questions about the role that Judaism plays in the identity of the average Israeli.
Nonetheless, underneath the external secularization there are signs of a deep and persisting religious fervour, in which the sense of history, community, and personal authenticity figure as the intertwined strands of Jewish religious life, especially as it has been affected by the State of Israel. Some of the rituals of the Jewish tradition, especially the rites of passage at the crucial stages of individual existence, are almost universally observed; in the United States, for example, more than 80 percent of Jewish children receive some formal religious training. Among Jewish youth there is, in some circles, a quest for tradition. In the United States, Jewish communes have been established that seek new forms of Jewish expression; in Israel, groups such as Mevaqshe Derekh ("Seekers of the Way") have tried to bridge secular Israeli culture and Jewish tradition and to maintain traditional Jewish ethical standards even in wartime; in Russia, thousands of young people gather on several occasions of the year to dance and sing and express solidarity in front of the synagogues in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Still, signs of major weaknesses persist. The rate of intermarriage among Jews in the Diaspora has increased, while regular synagogue attendance, at the very highest 20 percent in the United States, remains far below church attendance.
Despite their lack of traditional piety, there is a general sense among Jews that they remain Jews not because of the force of anti-Semitism but because of the attractiveness of their tradition and their sense of a common history and destiny. Although in 1945 the world Jewish community, decimated and horrified by the Holocaust, felt in danger of disappearing, there appeared to be no such despair in the last quarter of the century, when there was an expectation that Jewish communal feeling would remain strong—especially, for many or most Jews, in light of the existence of the State of Israel. Judaism enjoyed a heightened dignity in the eyes of the world, not only because of the creation of the State of Israel but also because of Judaism's close relations with other world religions. Although the recurring phenomenon of the alienation of young Jews from their tradition was troubling, it was no more so than in recent past generations. Along with other major religions, Judaism's most disturbing problem was how to deal with secular ideologies and the growth of secularism within its own ranks. Thus, at the beginning of the 21st century, it appeared that Judaism would have to contend with as many problems as the other major religions did, but it would face them with no less confidence—and with more confidence than it had felt at the start of the previous century.Arthur Hertzberg
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