"What shall the Alexandrians do?"
Subtitle: Rabbinic Judaism and the Mediterranean diaspora
By: by Jared Louis Kurtzer
Published: 2009
Language: eng
Number of pages: 341
Description: This dissertation seeks to present a more viable model for Jewish religious affiliation throughout the common Roman imperial culture of Late Antiquity than previous models have allowed. Despite basic limitations of both the rabbinic and material evidence there are implicit and explicit links between the two corpora. Rabbinic treatments of the Mediterranean Diaspora transform over time in response to changing political and ideological circumstances, and can be mapped productively against the material evidence from the Diaspora communities. The result is that rather than imagining a rabbinic revolution in antiquity, we are left with the banality of a rabbinic evolution--and an evolution that incorporates the Mediterranean Diaspora more than has been assumed. The survey of the histories of scholarship on the Jews of the Mediterranean Diaspora on one hand, and rabbinic Judaism on the other, exposes how cultural biases and limitations in the evidence predetermined that these fields be atomized from one another. Current trends in understanding the processes of "rabbinization" and the emergence of rabbinic piety might also include the Jews of the Diaspora, with a methodology that does not default to subordinating these Jews to rabbinic power. A model juxtaposing the 'common Judaism' theory for the Second Temple period with the emerging consensus on rabbinization allows for a tenable evolving hybrid culture across geographic boundaries.

Rabbinic references to the Diaspora--collected and thematically organized--demonstrate how Diaspora environs are described, how rabbis imagine themselves transacting with Jews of the Diaspora, and the ways that Diaspora is legalized and mythologized. In narrative contexts prior to the Bavli we can detect an evolving relationship between rabbis and Diaspora communities; it is only the Bavli that builds Diaspora into an elaborate, ideological typology. Nevertheless, the Bavli has colored the portrayal of much of the scholarship that attempted to work with these stories, which has in turn led to their discrediting as useful historical sources. By theorizing the Bavli's objectives in remaking these stories according to its particular historical-theological needs, we can also uncover the relatively untroubled process of rabbinization that these rabbinic texts are describing as transpiring similarly in the Diaspora as in Palaestina. The Diaspora evidence itself attesting to rabbinic piety throughout the Mediterranean--in inscriptions, archaeology, and literary sources--can be reorganized into channels that more accurately describe the multifaceted nature of rabbinization as it manifests in law, lore, liturgy, language and leadership. This would accord with a non-imperial narrative of rabbinic ascendance in which rabbinic piety takes its place on a spectrum of "common Judaism" throughout the Roman Empire into late antiquity, affecting both the Jews of Roman Palaestina and their neighbors throughout the Diaspora. Aligning the two data sets of Diaspora evidence and rabbinic sources does not produce perfect overlaps, but allows for a plausible explanation of how the complex phenomenon of rabbinization spreads throughout the empire in the 5 th /6 th centuries.
Notes: "November 2008."

Thesis (Ph.D., Dept. of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations)--Harvard University, 2009.

Includes bibliographical references.