It’s a Roman…It’s a Persian… it’s Rabbi Meir! Secret Identities and the Rabbinic Self in the Babylonian Talmud

• In Event: Secret Identity Politics: Jewish Texts, Jewish Lives, and Super Jews

Abstract

The Late Antique Babylonian rabbis imagined themselves to be exceptional. In rabbinic law and narrative, this exceptionality came with great rewards, but also great dangers from the outside world. This paper examines one narrative strategy that the rabbis used to mediate that danger, masking their exceptional natures and disguising themselves as non-Jews. Babylonian aggadatot at b. TA’ANIT 22a, b. BABA METZIA 86a, and b. AVODAH ZARAH 18a-b all depict rabbinic figures disguising themselves as non-Jews in order to successfully manipulate Roman government officials on behalf of other Jews. These narratives have been productively studied as evidence of persecution and as exempla of divine intervention in rabbinic life, but have yet to be situated as models of rabbinic identity formation. In conversation with the works of Tom Morris and Richard Harrison on secret identities, I argue that these narratives privilege rabbinic affiliation and Torah knowledge while recognizing that this exceptionalism is particularly ineffective at mediating the mundane world. Like Superman, who was born exceptional and took on the false identity of Clark Kent to interact with the mundane world, the rabbis’ true identity is the exceptional one; in order to function in a foreign world, they must depict themselves as ordinary. And like much of secret identity fiction, these rabbinic texts demonstrate anxiety about the effectiveness and ethics of these masks and disguises. As each story concludes, rabbinic exceptionalism can never (and perhaps should never) be permanently or completed obscured. By investigating what these Talmudic narratives thought it meant to BE rabbinic, APPEAR rabbinic, and/or perform non-Jewishness, this paper highlights the complex ways that the Talmud constructs rabbinic identity, and sheds light on broader questions of the self, the other, and the ontological effects of Torah.

Author

• Sara Ronis, St. Mary's University, Texas