The Romanization of Early Rabbinic Law in a Provincial Context

• In Event: Examining the Development of Rabbinic Law

Abstract

In this lecture I will offer a preliminary framework for examining the development of early rabbinic law as a product of its Roman provincial context, alongside Imperial institutions, and parallel to other local legal systems. In general, Roman law and government seem to be patently ignored by rabbinic legal discourse. Consequently, rabbinic law is regularly understood to operate within its own confined imaginary reality, or, in the case of the laws of Sanhedrin, as a hidden script of anti-imperial sentiments. These attitudes however represent only one facet of the complex range of responses towards imperial government by a local legal system. Roman imperialism served to promote civic and political structures by setting a model for legal systems in the provinces without directly coercing its laws upon the inhabitants. In turn, local elites hoped for recognition and privileges by conforming to Roman standards. In this respect, by shifting our attention from rabbinic authority to their actual legal activity, rabbinic literature offers a fascinating case study of the evolving body of provincial law. The earliest stages of rabbinic activity are rooted in the Augustan period and its expansion shadows the empire's rise to its peak with the turn of the third century. Consequently, early rabbinic literature offers a unique insight into the various stages of implementation of the Roman legal environment by local provincial systems. Beyond the very effort of creating and systemizing legal fields which before the Antonine period were generally left unaddressed, owing to the infiltration of Roman legal environment, in some cases we can closely trace a more nuanced process. The lecture will examine laws pertaining roughly to "laws of persons", including marriage, family and slavery. Within this field, one can identify a shift from a sporadic adoption of Roman legal institutions in the earlier layers of tannaitic halakhah to an absorption of conceptual and legal frameworks by third century rabbis. Conspicuously, the mishnah adopts Roman legal categories as it reorganized the law of persons to conform to Roman language and standards.

author

• Yair Furstenberg, Ben Gurion University of the Negev