ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO
ASPECTS OF HELLENISTIC JUDAISM
LECTURES DELIVERED
IN LONDON, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO, OXFORD,
AND PRINCETON
1977-1982
Edizione critica, introduzioni e note a cura di
LEA NICCOLAI e ANTONELLA SOLDANI
Pisa 2016
Risorsa elettronica
1
Sommario
Indice delle sigle e delle abbreviazioni ................................................................................................ 4
Abbreviazioni delle opere e delle lectures di Momigliano (selezione) ............................................... 7
Note sull’apparato critico ................................................................................................................... 11
Introduzione ....................................................................................................................................... 12
Le carte della serie P-o nell’Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano. ....................................................................... 15
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse: il primo ciclo, da Londra ad Oxford (1977-79)............................... 17
Tra Polibio e Daniele, Demostene e i Maccabei: il secondo (1979-1980) e il terzo (1981) ciclo sul
giudaismo ellenistico. ................................................................................................................................... 23
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse, Oxford 1982: ultimo atto di un unico grande progetto? .................. 27
Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism: un libro inedito (o più di uno?) ................................................................ 29
GL 1979 I Prologue in Germany........................................................................................................ 35
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati .............................................................................................. 35
2. Versioni precedenti della lezione: i documenti. ....................................................................................... 36
3. Argomento della lecture ........................................................................................................................... 37
4. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi. ........................................ 38
GL 1979 II
The Greeks outside the Persian Empire ...................................................................... 56
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati .............................................................................................. 56
2. Argomento della lecture ........................................................................................................................... 56
3. Note di contenuto: l’evoluzione della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi. ............................................. 57
GL 1979 III The Jews inside the Persian Empire ............................................................................. 73
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati .............................................................................................. 73
2. Argomento della lecture ........................................................................................................................... 73
3. I motivi della rielaborazione e i rapporti con GL 1979 IV (Defence). ..................................................... 74
GL 1979 IV The Defence against Hellenization ............................................................................... 90
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ............................................................................................. 90
2. Argomento della lecture .......................................................................................................................... 91
3. Note di contenuto: le finalità della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi. ................................................. 91
CL 1979 I ......................................................................................................................................... 109
Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber............................. 109
1. Una “premessa di metodo”: Freeman, Weber e l’universalismo. ........................................................... 109
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 109
GL 1980 I
Universal History in Greece and Rome .................................................................... 111
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ........................................................................................... 111
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 112
3. Note di contenuto: le finalità della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi ................................................ 113
2
GL 1980 II Daniel and the World Empires ..................................................................................... 129
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 129
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 129
3. Note di contenuto: le fasi di rielaborazione della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi. ......................... 130
GL 1980 III Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography ... 146
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 146
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 147
3. Note di contenuto: Flavio Giuseppe, tra testi editi e nuovi progetti. ...................................................... 147
CL 1981 I, II The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman
Imperialism ...................................................................................................................................... 163
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ........................................................................................... 163
2. Argomento della prima lecture (Greece). ............................................................................................... 164
3. Argomento della seconda lecture (The East) .......................................................................................... 164
4. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi. ...................................... 165
CL 1981 III Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World ........................................................ 189
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 189
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 190
3. Note di contenuto: i temi della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi. ..................................................... 190
CL 1981 IV From the World of Maccabees to Philo ....................................................................... 205
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ........................................................................................... 205
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 205
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi. ...................................... 206
GL 1982 I Jews and Gentiles ........................................................................................................... 222
1. Osservazioni preliminari ......................................................................................................................... 222
2. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 222
3. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 223
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione .................................................................................... 224
GL 1982 II The Jewish Sects in the Sources .................................................................................. 243
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ........................................................................................... 243
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 244
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi. ...................................... 244
Appendice a The Jewish Sects in the Sources: The New Letter by “Anna” to “Seneca” .......................... 258
GL 1982 III The decline of History and Apocalypse...................................................................... 262
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 262
2. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 263
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi. ...................................... 264
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta” ................................................................................................. 287
3
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II) .................................................................................. 287
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. ........................................................................................... 287
2. La caduta delle Religious foundations: riprese e scarti. ......................................................................... 288
3. Argomento della lecture ......................................................................................................................... 289
Appendice II CL 1977 III The Rabbis and the Communities .......................................................... 308
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati. .......................................................................................... 308
2. L’argomento della lecture ....................................................................................................................... 308
3. Una lezione dedicata ai rabbi .................................................................................................................. 309
4. Note sul tema rabbinico in rapporto all'insieme dei cicli ....................................................................... 311
Appendice III ................................................................................................................................... 320
Da Attitudes to Foreigners (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV) ................................ 320
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati ............................................................................................ 320
2. Argomento di NL Attitudes (= CL Jews and Gentiles, capp. III ss.) ..................................................... 321
3. Le prime strutture espositive del rapporto Ebrei-gentili: alcune riflessioni non recuperate................... 321
Bibliografia ...................................................................................................................................... 340
Indice delle sigle e delle abbreviazioni
AAB
AAM
AC
AIPHO
AJS
AMM
AnnSE
ANRW
ARW
ASNP
ASTI
AThR
BA
BAR
BASOR
BJRL
BWAT
BZ
BZTS
CAH
CBQ
Abhandlungen der Deutschen (Preussischen) Akademie der Wissenschaften zu
Berlin
Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano
L’Antiquité classique
Annuaire de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales et Slaves
Association for Jewish Studies Review
Anne Marie Meyer
Annali di storia dell’esegesi
Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt
Archiv für Religionswissenschaft
Annali della Scuola Normale superiore di Pisa. Classe di lettere e filosofia
Annual of the Swedish Theological Institute
Anglican Theological Review
Biblical Archaeologist
British Archaeological Reports
Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research
Bulletin of the John Rylands Library
Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten Testament
Biblische Zeitschrift
Bonner Zeitschrift für Theologie und Seelsorge
Cambridge Ancient History
Catholic Biblical Quarterly
4
CDAFI
CE
CHJ
CIG
CIH
CIJ
CIL
CL
CPh
CPJ
CQ
CRAI
CrL
DBI
EA
HER
EL
EthL
EVO
FGrH
FHG
GL
GS
H&Th
HThR
HUCA
IEG
IEJ
JAOS
JBL
JE
JEA
JHS
JJS
JNG
JQR
JR
JRAS
JRS
JS
JSJ
JSQ
JSS
Cahiers de la Délégation archéologique française en Iran
Chronique d’Égypte
The Cambridge History of Judaism, I: Introduction. The Persian Period; II: The
Hellenistic Age, ed. by W.D. Davies and L. Finkelstein; III. The Early Roman
Period, ed. by W. Horbury and W.D.Davies, Cambridge 1984, 1989, 1999.
Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum
Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum
J.-B. Frey, Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum I-II (1939-1951)
Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum
Chicago Lecture
Classical Philology
V. Tcherikover, A. Fuks, M. Stern, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum I-III (19571964)
Classical Quarterly
Comptes-rendues de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres
Creighton Lecture (King’s College, London)
Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani
The encyclopedia of apocalypticism. 1, The origins of apocalypticism in Judaism and
Christianity, ed. by J. J. Collins, New York 1998
Études sur l’Historire des Religions
Efroymson Lecture (Hebrew Union College, Cincinnati)
Ephemerides Theologicae Lovaniensis
Egitto e Vicino Oriente
F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker
Karl Müller, Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum
Grinfield Lecture (Oxford)
Gauss Seminar (Princeton)
History and Theory: Studies in Philosophy of History
Harvard Theological Review
Hebrew Union College Annual
Iambi et elegi Graeci ante Alexandrum cantati, edidit M.L. West, Oxford 19922
Israel Exploration Journal
Journal of the American Oriental Society
Journal of Biblical Literature
The Jewish Encyclopedia
Journal of Egyptian Archaeology
Journal of Hellenic Studies
Journal of Jewish Studies
Jahrbuch für Numismatik und Geldgeschichte
Jewish Quarterly Review
The Journal of Religion
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
Journal of Roman Studies
Journal des Savants
Journal for the Study of Judaism
Jewish Studies Quarterly
Journal of Semitic Studies
5
JSNT
JThSt
MH
MGWJ
NEAEHL
NL
NT
NTS
OGIS
OTS
PAAJR
PBA
PCPhS
PEQ
PG
PL
PLG
PVTG
RAL
RB
Rbi
RE
REG
REJ
RFIC
RHR
RIL
RQ
RR
RSB
RSI
RSO
RSPh
RSR
SB
SMSR
Sstor
StPh
StudClas
ThLZ
ThT
VChr
Journal for the Study of the New Testament
Journal of Theological Studies
Museum Helveticum: schweizerische Zeitschrift für klassische
Altertumswissenschaft
Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums
New Encyclopedia of Archaelogical Excavations in the Holy Land, ed. E. Stern, 4 v.,
Jerusalem 1993
Northcliffe Lecture (University College London)
Novum Testamentum
New Testament Studies
W. Dittenberger, Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae I-II
Oudtestamentische Studiën
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research
Proceedings of the British Academy
Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society
Palestine Exploration Quarterly
J.P. Migne, Patrum Graecorum Cursus Completus
J.P. Migne, Patrum Latinorum Cursus Completus
Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta, ediderunt E. Lobel et D. Page, Oxford 1955
Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti graece
Rendiconti della classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche dell’Accademia dei
Lincei
Revue biblique
Rivista biblica
Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft
Revue des études grecques
Revue des études juives
Rivista di filologia e istruzione classica
Révue de l’Histoire des Religions
Rendiconti dell’Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e di Lettere, Classe di
Lettere, Scienze morali e storiche
Révue de Qumrân
Ricerche Religiose
Ricerche storico bibliche
Rivista storica italiana
Rivista degli Studi Orientali
Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Theologiques
Recherches de Science Religieuse
F.Preisigke – F.Bilabel, Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Ägypten, I-IX
Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni
Storia della storiografia
Studia philosophica: Jahrbuch der Schweizerischen Philosophischen Gesellschaft
Studii clasice
Theologische Literaturzeitung
Theologisch Tijdschrift
Vigiliae Christianae
6
VT
VTS
ZDPV
ZNW
ZPE
ZRGG
ZWT
Vetus Testamentum
Vetus Testamentum, Supplement
Zeitschrift des Deutschen Palästina-Vereins
Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft
Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik
Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte
Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Theologie
Abbreviazioni delle opere e delle lectures di Momigliano (selezione)
Alexander’s visit
Alien Wisdom
Anna-Seneca
Apologia
Attitudes
Biblical Studies
Momigliano
Ciò che Flavio
Conflict, the
Contributo
Daniel
Daniele , teoria
Decimo
Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem, in Athenaeum, n.s. LVII, fasc.
3-4, 1979, 442-448; rist. in Settimo, 319-329; trad.it. in Pagine ebraiche, 85-93
[= Momigliano 1979a]
Alien Wisdom, The limits of Hellenization, Cambridge 1975; 2a ed. 1978 (con
bibliografia aggiornata); ed. ted. Hochkulturen im Hellenismus. Die Begegnung der
Griechen mit Kelten Römer Juden und Persern, München 1979; ed. fr. Sagesses
barbares. Les limites de l’hellénisation, trad. par Marie Claude Roussel, Paris 1979;
ed. it. Sagezza straniera, L’Ellenismo e le altre culture, trad. di Maria Luisa Bassi,
Torino 1980 (trad. cit. come Saggezza, vd. infra) [=Momigliano 1975f]
The New letter by ‘Anna’ to ‘Seneca’ (Ms. 17 Erzbischöfliche Bibliothek in Köln), in
Athenaeum, n.s., LXIII, fasc. 1-2, 1985, 217-19; rist. in Ottavo, 329-332; in On
Pagans, 202-205 [=Momigliano 1985a]
Un’apologia del giudaismo: il «Contro Apione» di Flavio Giuseppe, in La Rassegna
mensile di Israel, VI, 1-2 (seconda serie), 1931, pp. 1-8; rist. in Terzo, 513-22; in
Pagine ebraiche, 63-71 [= Momigliano 1931a]
Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past, NL 1977 III
Biblical Studies and Classical Studies. Simple Reflections upon Historical Method,
ASNP, s. III, vol. XI (1982) 25-32; rist. in Settimo, 289-96; in On Pagans, 3-10; trad.
it. a c. di M. Tavoni, in Storiografia greca, 336-344, e in Pagine Ebraiche¸ 5-11 [=
Momigliano 1982g].
Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide. Introduzione a P. Vidal Naquet, Il buon uso del
tradimento [trad.it. di Flavius Joséphe ou du bon usage de la trahison], Roma 1980,
9-21; rist. in RSI, XCI fasc. 4, 1979 [1980], 564-574; in Settimo, 305-17; in Pagine
ebraiche, 73-83; trad. ingl. a c. di J. Weinberg in On Pagans, 108-119 [=
Momigliano 1980c]
The Conflict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, essays ed.
by Arnaldo Momigliano, Oxford 1963; ed. it. Il conflitto tra paganesimo e
cristianesimo nel secolo IV, trad. a c. di Anna Davies Morpurgo, Torino 1968 [=
Momigliano 1963b]
Momigliano, A., Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Roma 1955
[=Momigliano 1955]
Daniel and the World Empires, GL 1980 II
Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi, RAL serie VIII vol.
XXXV; fasc. 3-4, 1980, 157-162; rist. in Storiografia greca, 293-301; in Settimo,
297-304; in Storia antica, 39-46; in Pagine abraiche, 33-39 [= Momigliano 1980b]
Momigliano, A., Decimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo
antico, ed. a c. di Riccardo Di Donato, 2 vv., Roma 2012 [=Momigliano 2012]
7
Decline , the
Defence, the
Development, the
The Decline of History and Apocalypse, GL 1982 III
The Defence against Hellenization, GL 1979 IV
Momigliano, A., The Development of Greek Biography. Four Lectures,
Cambridge(Mass) 1971; ed. it. Lo sviluppo della biografia greca, trad. a c. di Guido
Donini, Torino 1974 [= Momigliano 1971c]
Dopo Weber
Dopo Max Weber? Pref. a: Humphreys, S.C., Saggi antropologici ulla Grecia
antica, Bologna 1978; rist. in ASNP S. 3, vol. 8, fasc. 4 (1978), 1315-1332; in
Sesto, 295-312, e in Fondamenti, 437-454. Trad. ted. a c. di A. Wittenburg, in
Schriften, Bd. 3, 283-301 [=Momigliano 1978a]
Eastern Elements
Eastern Elements in Post-Exilic Jewish, and Greek, Historiography, in Essays, 25-35
[=Momigliano 1977d]
Ebrei e Greci
Ebrei e Greci, RSI, LXXXVIII, fasc. 3, 1976, 425-443; rist. in Sesto, 527-549; in
Storia antica, 151-171; in Pagine ebraiche, 13-31 [=Momigliano 1976a]
Essays
Momigliano, A., Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Middletown 1977
[=Momigliano 1977e]
First Maccabees
The Date of the First Book of Maccabees, in L’Italie préromaine et la Rome
républicaine. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Heurgon, Rome 1976, 657-661; rist. in
Sesto, 561-566 [=Momigliano 1976b]
Flavius Josephus
Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography,
GL 1980 III
Fondamenti
Momigliano, A., Sui fondamenti della storia antica, Torino 1984[= Momigliano
1984c]
Foundations, the
The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism, versione preparatoria a NL 1977 I
Fraccaro
Commemorazione del socio Plinio Fraccaro, RAL s.VIII vol. XV fasc. 7-12 (1960),
361-67; rist. in Terzo, 827-35 [=Momigliano 1960]
From History
From History to Apocalypse, CL 1977 V
From Maccabees
From the Books of Maccabees to Philo, CL 1981 IV
From the Pagan
From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil: Prophecy as History of Religion, in The Uses
of Greek and Latin. Historical Essays ed. by A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton and Jill
Kraye, London 1988, 3-18; rist. in Nono, 725-744; ed. it. Dalla Sibilla pagana alla
Sibilla cristiana. Profezia come storia della religione, ASNP, s. III; vol. XVII, 2,
1987 [1988], 407-28 [=Momigliano 1988c]
Greek Historiography Greek Historiography, H&Th XVII, 1, 1978, 1-28; versione ita.: Storiografia greca,
in RSI, LXXXVII, fasc. 1, 1975, pp. 17-46 (trad. a c. di Giuliana Pierallini); rist. in
Sesto, 33-67; in Storiografia greca, 3-41; con il titolo Storiografia e Bibliografia, in
Dizionario della Civiltà Classica, vol. I, 143-69 [=Momigliano 1978c]
Greeks outside, the
The Greeks outside the Persian Empire, GL 1979 II
Historiography
Momigliano, A., Studies in Historiography, London 1966 [=Momigliano 1966c]
Interpretazioni I-III
Interpretazioni minime, I-III, in Athenaeum NS 55, fasc. 1-2 (1977), 186-190; rist. in
Sesto, 181-186, e Storiografia greca, 302-307 [=Momigliano 1977a]
Interpretazioni IV-VII Interpretazioni minime, IV-VII, ASNP s. 3, vol. 10, fasc. 4 (1980), 1221-1231; rist.
in Settimo, 105-114 [=Momigliano 1980a]
Jews inside, the
The Jews inside the Persian Empire, GL 1979 III
Juden
Momigliano, A., Die Juden in der Alten Welt, mit einer Einführung von Karl Christ,
Berlin 1988 [=Momigliano 1988d]
Nono
Momigliano, A., Nono contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico,
ed. a c. di Riccardo Di Donato, Roma 1992 [=Momigliano 1992f]
8
Note on Weber, a
On Pagans
Opposition
Origins, the
Ottavo
Pagine ebraiche
Paradox, the
Persian Empire
Portata storica
Prime linee
Prologue
Quarto
Quinto
Rabbies, the
Reconcile
Religione Romana
Resistance, East
Resistance, Greece
Roma arcaica
Romans-Maccabees
A Note on Max Weber’s Definition of Judaism as a Pariah-Religion, H&T 19,3
(1980), 313-318; rist. in Settimo, 341-348; in On Pagans, 231-37 [=Momigliano
1980d]
Momigliano, A., On Pagans, Jews and Christians, Middletown 1987 [=Momigliano
1987f]
Some Preliminary Remarks on the “Religious Opposition” to the Roman Empire, in
Opposition et résistances à l’Empire d’Augut à Trajan – Entretiens, tome XXXIII
(1986), Vandoeuvres-Genève 1987, 103-133 (2a ed. in On Pagans, 120-141; e in
Nono, 681-699; trad. it. in Religione Romana, 151-169; trad. ted. a c. di K. Brodsen,
in Schriften, I 289-311) [=Momigliano 1986h]
The Origins of Universal History (Creighton Lecture, University of London) in
ASNP, serie III. vol. XII,2, 1982, pp. 533-560. Rist. in The Poet and the Historian,
ed. R.E. Friedman, Chico, Calif. 1983, 133-154; in Settimo, 77-103; in On Pagans,
31-57; trad. ita. in Storia e Storicismo, 25-55; trad.ted. a c. di A. Wittenburg in
Schriften, I, 111-140 [=Momigliano 1982a]
Momigliano, A., Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo
antico, Roma 1987 [=Momigliano 1987h]
Momigliano, A., Pagine ebraiche, a c. di Silvia Berti, Torino 1987 [=Momigliano
1987e]
The Paradox of Roman Empire and Christian Historiography, CL 1979 V
Persian Empire and Greek Freedom, in The Idea of Freedom. Essays in Honour of
Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan, Oxford 1979, 139-51; rist. in Settimo, 61-75
[=Momigliano 1979c]
La portata storica dei vaticini sul settimo re nel terzo libro degli Oracoli Sibillini in
Forma Futuri. Studi in onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino, Torino 1975, 10791084 ; rist. in Sesto, 551-559 [=Momigliano 1975a]
Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione Maccabaica, Roma 19301 (2a
ed. Torino 1931; 3a ed. Amsterdam 1968) [=Momigliano 1930e]
Prologue in Germany, GL 1979 I
Momigliano, A., Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo
antico, Roma 1969 [=Momigliano 1969e]
Momigliano, A., Quinto contributo alla sotria degli studi classici e del mondo
antico, 2 vv., Roma 1975 [=Momigliano 1975f]
The Rabbis and the Community, CL 1977 III
How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans, CL 1981 V; pubbl. In Mededelingen der
Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen. Afd. Letterkunde, N.R. 45,
9, 1982, 231-5; rist. in Settimo, 437-462; e in On Pagans, 264-88. Trad. it. in Roma
arcaica, 325-245 [=Momigliano 1982f]
Momigliano, A., Saggi di storia della religione romana (Studi e lezioni 1983-1986),
a c. di R. di Donato, trad. di M. Tavoni, Brescia 1988 [=Momigliano 1988e]
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman
Imperialism. The East, CL 1981 II
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman
Imperialism. Greece, CL 1981 I
Momigliano, A., Roma arcaica, Firenze 1989 [=Momigliano 1989]
The Romans and the Maccabees, in Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen
Abramsky, ed. by A. Rapoport-Albert and S.J. Zippersstein, London 1988, 231-44;
9
Saggezza
Schriften
Second Maccabees
Secondo
Sects, the
Sesto
Settimo
Some Exemplary
Storia antica
Storia e storicismo
Storiografia
Temple, the
Terzo
Tobiadi, i
Two Types
Universal History
Weber e l’antichità
Weber-Meyer
rist. in Nono, 747-61; trad. it. a c. di L. Polverini in RIL, 123 (1989), 1990, 95-109
[=Momigliano 1988a]
Saggezza straniera, l’ellenismo e le altre culture (trad. it. di Alien Wisdom, the
Limits of Hellenization, Torino 1980, vd. Wisdom)
Momigliano, A., Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung,
hrsg. von Glenn W. Most unter Mitwirkung von Wilfried Nippel und Anthony
Grafton, 3 B., Stuttgart-Weimar 1998-2000 [=Momigliano 2000]
The Second Book of Maccabees, CPh, LXX, 3 (1975), 81-88; rist. in Sesto, 567-578;
trad. it. a c. di Mirko Tavoni in Storiografia greca, 308-321, e Pagine ebraiche, 4851 [=Momigliano 1975b]
Momigliano, A., Secondo contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Roma 1960
[=Momigliano 1960b]
The Jewish Sects in the Sources, GL 1982 II
Momigliano, A., Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico,
2 v., Roma 1980 [=Momigliano 1980f]
Momigliano, A., Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo
antico, Roma 1984 [=Momigliano 1984d]
Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World, CL 1981 III
Momigliano, A., Storia e storiografia antica, presentazione di Emilio Gabba,
Bologna 1987 [=Momigliano 1987i]
Momigliano, A., Tra Storia e storicismo, Pisa 1985 [=Momigliano 1985c]
Momigliano, A., La storiografia greca, Torino 1982 [=Momigliano 1982h]
The Temple and the Synagogue, GL 1977
Momigliano, A., Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico,
2 v., Roma 1966 [=Momigliano 1966d]
I Tobiadi nella preistoria del mondo maccabaico, in Atti della Reale Accademia
delle Scienze di Torino, Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, LXCII,
1931-32, 165-200; rist. in Quinto, 597-628 [=Momigliano 1932c]
Two Types of Universal History. The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber, in The
Journal of Modern History, 58,1 (1986), 235-45; rist. in Studii clasice, 24 (1986), 717; in Ottavo, 121-134; trad.it. a c. di S. Scoglio, in Il Pensiero, ns. XXXIV 1, 1995,
33-44 [=Momigliano 1986i]
Universal History in Greece and Rome, GL 1980 I
Max Weber di fronte agli storici dell’antichità, prefazione a Weber, M., Storia
economica e sociale dell’antichità, Roma 1981, vii-xiii; rist. in Settimo, 245-51
[=Momigliano 1981b]
The Instruments of Decline [tit. orig. Max Weber and Eduard Meyer: apropos of City
and Country in Antiquity], in The Times Literary Supplement, 8 April 1977, 435-6;
rist. in Sesto, 285-93 [=Momigliano 1977b]
10
Note sull’apparato critico
<->
->
<(c)
(g)
(p)
(p-c)
[AMM]
[Mom]
{…}
all.
corr.
docc.
def.
del.
id.
interl.
mginf
mgdx
mgsn
mgsup
msb
msl
msn
msr
msr>n
segr
stl.
tsf
tsf1
sostituzione di ciò che segue il segno con quanto lo precede (scil. nuovo testo <-> vecchio
testo)
cancellazione del testo che segue
cancellazione del testo che precede
in posizione centrale
in corpo grande
in corpo minore
in corpo piccolo e posizione centrale (e.g.)
mano di Anne Marie Meyer
mano di Momigliano
espunzione
allegato
correzione
tutti i documenti esaminati
testo assente
intervento di cancellazione
medesimo intervento
testo interlineare
margine inferiore
margine destro
margine sinistro
margine superiore
testo manoscritto in penna blu
testo manoscritto in lapis
testo manoscritto in penna nera
testo manoscritto in penna rossa
cambio di penna da rossa a nera (e.g.)
segno di rimando
sottolineato
in testa al foglio
in testa al foglio 1 (e.g.)
11
Introduzione
A quasi trent’anni dalla morte di Arnaldo Momigliano, la discussione sul ruolo dell’ebraismo
nella sua riflessione storica e storiografica – superfluo, forse, ricordare l’inscindibilità del binomio
all’interno della sua personale prospettiva di indagine – continua a trarre nuovo alimento dal
rinvenimento, tra le carte dell’Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano (da qui in poi AAM), di manoscritti e
dattiloscritti inediti dedicati al tema in questione1. Ultimi, in ordine di pubblicazione, i Pensieri
sull’Ebraismo, editi nel 2012 da Riccardo Di Donato all’interno del Decimo contributo alla storia
degli studi classici e del mondo antico ed evidenti depositari di una riflessione sull’appartenenza
all’ebraismo che, a partire da premesse contemporanee, ne travalica la prospettiva novecentesca per
risalire – secondo un iter consueto all’autore – alla domanda sui fondamenti dell’eredità culturale
millenaria che le è sottesa.
Una nota autografa al testo consente di datare i Pensieri all’agosto del 1979, anno tra i più
prolifici nella riflessione momiglianea sul giudaismo di età greco-romana. Se le carte d’archivio
documentano infatti l’infittirsi, tra 1977 e 1982, di testi dedicati alla ricerca sul periodo storico
contrassegnato dall’ellenizzazione della Palestina a seguito della conquista di Alessandro Magno, è
proprio tra 1978 e ’79 che si apprezza un’evoluzione tangibile del percorso di indagine attraverso i
cicli di lectures ad esso dedicati e un suo arricchimento per intersezione di tematiche trasversali
(l’universalismo, la storiografia di resistenza) in prospettiva della progettazione di uno o più volumi
sull’argomento.
Dietro a tale interesse per l’incontro del mondo ebraico con quello greco risiede, come è stato
ben osservato, “il tentativo di trovare, nella storia passata, una risposta alla domanda fondamentale
sulle possibilità e i limiti del contatto tra culture diverse e della sopravvivenza ad esso,
nell’oscillazione tra perdita di identità e resistenza all’assimilazione che poneva a Momigliano la
sua doppia appartenenza di ebreo, legato alla tradizione dei propri padri, e di italo-piemontese,
radicato nel paese in cui da secoli risiedeva la sua famiglia”2. È un tentativo su cui si innesta la
complessa questione, cui si accennerà solo cursoriamente in questa sede, della continuità di
interesse nei confronti di tematiche ebraiche e del ruolo di tale ambito nella sua ricerca. All’interno
del dibattito, sorto con la pubblicazione postuma delle Pagine Ebraiche a cura di Silvia Berti, si
1
La consultazione del corpus degli inediti momiglianei è oggi resa accessibile grazie all’opera di Giovanna Granata,
Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano. Inventario analitico, pref. di R. Di Donato, Roma 2006 (=GRANATA 2006), da cui sono
riprese le sigle usate per identificare i documenti dell’Archivio, nonché lo schema, posto in apertura di ogni capitolo,
dei rapporti genetici tra le unità testimoni di ciascuna lecture. In relazione ai testi editi nel presente volume, la sottoserie
P-o/*P-o (Lectures on Hellenistic Judaism) si rimanda soprattutto alle pp. LXXVI-XCVI, 54-88. Nella realizzazione
dell’edizione particolare debito di indagine si è contratto non solo con il volume di inventario, ma anche con il saggi La
resistenza all’ellenizzazione. Il corpus di inediti momiglianei sul giudaismo ellenistico, 1977-82 (= GRANATA 1999),
imprescindibile punto di riferimento per ogni tentativo di elaborazione della sottoserie P-o tanto per la chiarezza
ricostruttiva dell’insieme dei documenti quanto per la messa in luce dell’evoluzione del pensiero di Momigliano
attraverso di essi. Terzo documento di riferimento (in ordine di tempo, ma non di importanza) è infine il saggio “Aspetti
del giudaismo ellenistico” 1977-1982 nell’Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano di Antonella Soldani (= SOLDANI 2009),
fondamentale percorso di indagine attraverso le fasi di genesi e sviluppo del corpus, dalla premessa seminale di Alien
Wisdom fino all’auspicata (ma mai realizzata) concertazione dell’insieme in una monografia dedicata al tema. Ad
Antonella Soldani spetta infatti, tra gli altri, il merito di aver riconosciuto nel documento P-o 89 (testimone di Prologue
in Germany, lecture di apertura del primo ciclo di conferenze) tracce di una revisione del testo, in prospettiva editoriale,
che sembrerebbero risalire agli anni Ottanta e che offrono quindi un contributo fondamentale alla questione relativa al
progetto editoriale di Momigliano in relazione al corpus di lectures su cui cfr. infra, pp. 29-32).
2
GRANATA 1999, 73. Per una riflessione sull’attenzione crescente a figure e memorie ebraiche del nostro tempo “come
segno di una più angosciosa domanda sul ruolo della cultura ebraica contemporanea” (cit. GRANATA 1999, 74) si
rimanda a GABBA 1981.
12
rileva la possibilità di distinguere il delinearsi di due tendenze interpretative contrapposte3: l’ipotesi
di un’ininterrotta continuità di interesse, di matrice cospicuamente religiosa, sostenuta dalla stessa
Berti4, e di contro la necessità, teorizzata da Margherita Isnardi Parente, di isolare nell’opera di
Momigliano un’iniziale fase di interessamento, risalente ai primi anni Trenta, e il suo successivo
recupero in età matura5.
Indubbia risulta fin dalla giovinezza l’attenzione alle indagini sul giudaismo ellenistico, non a
caso argomento della prima monografia (Prime linee di storia della tradizione Maccabaica, Roma
19301) e che Momigliano stesso annovererà, in una lettera a Timpanaro, tra gli ambiti di massima
rilevanza per i suoi interessi di ricerca6. Altrettanto indubbio appare, d’altra parte, il diradarsi negli
anni di contributi dedicati all’argomento, che – con l’eccezione di qualche recensione7 – scompare
dalle pubblicazioni momiglianee per alcuni decenni. La ristampa nel 1968 delle Prime linee di
storia della tradizione Maccabaica, corredate da nuova prefazione ed appendice bibliografica, e la
recensione, nel 1970, del celebre e discusso saggio del teologo luterano Martin Hengel, Judentum
und Hellenismus8, testimoniano un primo riavvicinamento alla questione. Ѐ soprattutto l’edizione
dei Contributi a rendere però conto di un progressivo ritorno di interesse: se il Quinto, licenziato nel
1975, vede la riproposizione di saggi anche giovanili sul tema, nel Sesto (1980) la presenza di una
sezione dedicata all’ebraismo è accompagnata da un’introduzione che la qualifica come
“testimonianza dello sforzo di un Ebreo italiano, e più precisamente piemontese, per analizzare
criticamente le complesse fonti e i molteplici debiti della sua formazione culturale” (p. 9). La
pubblicazione, tra la fine degli anni Settanta e i primi anni Ottanta, di contributi isolati su Flavio
Giuseppe, i Maccabei, il libro di Daniele, Filone di Alessandria9, non può quindi non ricevere nuova
luce dall’ingente quantità di materiale emerso dalla sottoserie P-o/*P-o dell’AAM (lectures on
Hellenistic Judaism), in prospettiva al quale i saggi editi appaiono ora tasselli di una più vasta e
organica struttura di indagine. Rimane da valutare quali fattori possano aver suscitato la volontà di
sottoporre genesi e sviluppo del giudaismo ellenistico a tale ricerca, in quali tempi, e a quali scopi.
Se noto e caratterizzante della produzione di Momigliano è il fatto che una centralità di interesse
potesse non trovare esito in una pubblicazione monografica10, una mediazione tra le divergenti
prospettive della critica sopra menzionate (Berti, Isnardi Parente) appare possibile alla luce di
3
SOLDANI 2009, n. 7.
Cfr. introduzione alle Pagine Ebraiche (BERTI 1987) e ID. 1988A.
5
Per cui cfr. ISNARDI PARENTE 1988A; ID. 1989. Per ulteriori contributi sulla questione del giudaismo nell’opera storica
di Momigliano, si rimanda in primis ai saggi sul tema contenuti nel fascicolo della RSI 100.2 interamente dedicato alla
figura dello storico: HUGHES 1988; PATLAGEAN 1988. A questi vanno aggiunti: PARENTE 1989A; ID. 1989B. Una
rassegna bibliografica fino al 2006 è premessa all’inventario dell’Archivio, pp. XXXV-LIII (=GRANATA 2006); per un
aggiornamento dei titoli si rimanda a SOLDANI 2009, n. 7. Va infine segnalato il recentissimo WARBURG COLL. 2014
(che propone sull’argomento i saggi di RAJAK 2014; CAMERON 2014; NORTH 2014; DI DONATO 2010).
6
Cfr. SOLDANI 2009, 3. Storiografia greco-romana e giudaica, pace e libertà degli antichi, civiltà degli ebrei ed
evoluzione dell’evoluzione statale romana sono gli ambiti di ricerca identificati da Momigliano nel 1967 in una lettera a
Timpanaro edita con osservazioni in DI DONATO 2004.
7
Ad es.: a R. Tramontaro, La lettera di Aristea a Filocrate (Napoli 1931), RFIC n.s. 10.3, 1932, p. 414; a F. Geiger,
Philon von Alexandria als sozialer Denker, RFIC n.s. 11.1, 1933, pp. 94-98; a H. A. Wolfson, Philo. Foundations of
Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, Islam (Harvard 1947) RR 20, genn.-dic. 1949, pp. 199-201 (=Quarto,
625-27).
8
MOMIGLIANO 1970C.
9
Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem (=Alexander’s visit); The New letter by ‘Anna’ to ‘Seneca’
(=Anna-Seneca); Biblical Studies and Classical Studies (=Biblical Studies); Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide (=Ciò
che Flavio); Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi (=Daniele); Ebrei e Greci; The Date of the First
Book of Maccabees (=First Maccabees); Interpretazioni, I-VII; The Origins of Universal History (=Origins); Persian
Empire and Greek Freedom (=Persian Empire); How to reconcile Greeks and Trojans (=Reconcile); Two Types of
Universal History (=Two Types).
10
SOLDANI 2009, 4. La lunga gestazione redazionale e la revisione rigorosa cui Momigliano sottoponeva i suoi scritti,
tornando a rivistarli anche a distanza di anni, sono sicuramente tra i fattori determinanti di questa tendenza. Cfr. in
proposito il corpus, pubblicato postumo, della Sather Lectures del 1962 (= MOMIGLIANO 1990).
13
4
alcune considerazioni. Che anche negli anni di relativo “silenzio” lo sguardo sul tema sia rimasto
critico si apprezza dalla riconoscibilità, già nei testi pubblicati, di un’evoluzione di prospettive.
Fausto Parente si è soffermato in proposito sul passaggio dalla lettura del moto maccabaico così
come formulata all’inizio degli anni Trenta, anticipatrice delle tesi di Bickerman e di Hengel11, alla
critica serrata che Momigliano riserverà successivamente alla loro interpretazione
dell’ellenizzazione del giudaismo. A fare infatti la parte del villain nella tesi di fondo che percorre
l’intero complesso di lectures qui presentate – l’ellenismo di forma del giudaismo greco-romano
come espressione di un radicale antiellenismo di sostanza – è soprattutto la prospettiva hengeliana
di Judentum und Hellenismus, considerata da Momigliano debole, cristianocentrica e incapace di
cogliere come la sopravvivenza del giudaismo tra i Greci sia stata ottenuta non tramite simbiosi e
annullamento, ma per mezzo della ferma conservazione della propria specificità e cultura creativa.
La nuova via di indagine perseguita nelle lectures, tesa ad individuare non tanto le somiglianze e le
differenze tra giudaismo e culture circostanti, quanto piuttosto le modalità con cui gli Ebrei
risposero alla sfida culturale lanciata dai Greco-Macedoni12, appare in tal senso chiaro indizio della
volontà di Momigliano di sostanziare le obiezioni alle teorie di Bickerman ed Hengel mediante la
proposizione di una pars construens depositaria della propria personale concezione su senso e
origine del giudaismo postesilico. In tal senso, i documenti dell’AAM testimoniano una linea di
indagine che può essere definita in fieri sotto determinati aspetti (la ristrutturazione complessiva del
primo ciclo, ad esempio, o la grande domanda sui rapporti tra storiografia e apocalittica), ma che fin
dalle premesse è costante nel basarsi sull’intuizione di fondo della natura resistenziale del
giudaismo ellenistico, e la cui perentorietà è tale da giungere a mettere in discussione la stessa
categoria storica in questione (cui Momigliano riserverà peraltro un’ironica valediction al termine
della lezione prefatoria13).
Al di là dell’attenzione costante all’esegesi contemporanea, dietro tale compiutezza ab origine
della riflessione momiglianea sul giudaismo del Secondo Tempio è da ricercarsi – come già è stato
rilevato 14 – un ulteriore fattore: l’eredità di Alien Wisdom. Non pare infatti un caso che la
pubblicazione nel 1975 della monografia, dedicata specificamente alla riflessione sui limiti
dell’ellenizzazione greca nelle culture limitrofe (particolarmente di Romani, Celti, Ebrei, Persiani),
coincida approssimativamente con l’inizio di un’elaborazione del primo ciclo di conferenze sul
giudaismo ellenistico. Gli Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism si qualificano, in tal senso, come
specificazione tematica di una questione macroscopica – la risposta alla grecità – le cui fondamenta
erano già state compiutamente gettate. Significativa risulta in proposito la presenza
nell’introduzione ad Alien Wisdom dell’osservazione su come la fisionomia peculiare dell’ellenismo
– considerato da Momigliano età assiale speculare rispetto alla Achsenzeit individuata da Karl
Jaspers nel VI sec. a.C. – sia accentuata dal ruolo specifico assunto dai gruppi etnici dei Romani e
degli Ebrei. È soprattutto la descrizione dei secondi a porre in nuce questioni destinate a trovare,
nelle lectures, sviluppo sostanziale:
The Jews basically remained convinced of the superiority of their beliefs and ways of life and fought
for them. Yet they continuously compared their own ideas with Greek ideas, made propaganda for
their own beliefs, absorbing many Greek notions and custom in the process – and ultimately found
themselves involved in that general confrontation of Greek and Jewish values which we call
Christianity (p.10)
11
I Tobiadi nella preistoria del mondo maccabaico (=Tobiadi); cfr. PARENTE 1989A.
“The Jews were the only ones both to be creative under the Greeks and not to mix with the Romans. There is here a
problem of survival of a civilization in very peculiar circumstances. The problem of how Judaism survived is equivalent
to the problem of how Judaism emerged from Persian rule capable of reacting to Hellenism and later saved itself from
the Romans”, cc. 23-24.
13
GL 1979 I (Prologue in Germany), c. 24.
14
Cfr. ad es. ISNARDI PARENTE 1988; SOLDANI 2009, 2; RAJAK 2014, 95.
14
12
L’idea qui proposta di un parallelo tra il costante assorbimento di idee e usanze greche e la strenua
resistenza per la conservazione della propria unicità culturale risulta già di per sé incompatibile con
le prospettive di Bickerman e di Hengel. Appare in conclusione plausibile che una convergenza di
fattori distinti (l’insoddisfazione per gli esiti più recenti della ricerca sul giudaismo ellenistico; la
volontà di indagare ulteriormente sugli interrogativi posti da Alien Wisdom) risieda alla base della
stesura degli Aspects on Hellenistic Judaism, inedito opus magnum in cui linee di ricerca
approfondite fin dagli esordi si precisano e convergono in un progetto organico di recupero e
formalizzazione, prima ancora che di riscoperta.
Le carte della serie P-o nell’Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano.
Il grande corpus di scritti inediti relativi al giudaismo di età ellenistica e romana conservato
dall’AAM consta di 190 carte, tra manoscritti e dattiloscritti, riuniti dall’inventario di Giovanna
Granata nella sottoserie P-o/*P-o sotto il titolo di lectures on hellenistic Judaism15. I documenti, la
cui data di composizione va dal 1977 al 1982, afferiscono a tre cicli di conferenze tenute da
Momigliano in quegli anni e intitolati rispettivamente Between Synagogue and Apocalypse, Daniel
and the Origins of Universal History e The Jewish Historiography of Resistance. Sono conservati in
24 raccoglitori (folders) testimoni del raggruppamento originario con cui sono pervenuti a Pisa
(piuttosto che di successive fasi di sistemazione dell’archivio), e risultano così ripartibili: al di là di
8 fascicoli, che contengono materiale frammentario o eterogeneo, 103 afferiscono al primo ciclo,
della cui complessità di strutturazione si renderà conto nel prossimo paragrafo16; 44 al secondo; 34
al terzo. Tutte le unità, che rispecchiano vari stadi di elaborazione del testo (dalla stesura
manoscritta alla versione finale) presentano annotazioni di mano di Momigliano o della sua
collaboratrice abitualmente preposta alla dattilografia e ai controlli formali, Anne Marie Meyer. Di
particolare utilità nell’analisi delle fasi di sviluppo delle singole lectures è la ricostruzione, condotta
da Giovanna Granata 17 , della modalità di lavoro di Momigliano: ciascun manoscritto veniva
trascritto in bella copia attraverso un’opera di dattiloscrittura dalla quale, grazie all’ausilio di una
carta carbone, erano prodotte una top copy (dattiloscritto di base, conservato in genere senza
interventi) e due carbon copies destinate a correzioni e integrazioni eventualmente anche
dattiloscritte. Non raro anche il ricorso a copie xerox (o fotocopie), spesso utilizzate nei casi in cui il
testo necessitava di revisione cospicua. Alle informazioni redazionali si aggiungono quelle sulla
funzione dei documenti, identificati come new version, corrected copy, reading copy da annotazioni
manoscritte, spesso di mano dello stesso autore; è invece Anne Marie Mayer, di norma, a riportare
sulle trascrizioni informazioni relative alla data di dattiloscrittura o all’associazione della top c. alle
c.c. da essa derivate.
Già la semplice sproporzione numerica sopra rilevata tra le unità testimoni di Between the
Synagogue and Apocalypse e quelle relative al secondo e al terzo ciclo rende ragione della
complessità di gestazione della prima serie, all’interno della quale si articola per intero quello
sviluppo concettuale rispetto al quale Daniel and the World Empires e The Jewish Historiography
of Resistance si qualificheranno piuttosto come ampliamenti a tema.
Nel gennaio del 1977, alla presentazione di Between Synagogue and Apocalypse presso lo
University College London, in occasione delle Northcliffe Lectures (= NL), la struttura del ciclo –
ancora ben lontana dalla sua formalizzazione definitiva – risulta articolata in quattro lezioni: I.
Prologue in Germany, II. The Temple and the Synagogue, III. Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions
of the Past e IV. From History to Apocalypse. La riproposizione del ciclo tra l’aprile e il maggio
15
GRANATA 2006, part. alle pp. LXXVI-XCVI. Sull’AAM si rimanda inoltre a DI DONATO 1995; sulla sottosezione del
corpus relativa al giudaismo ellenistico e, più in generale, sull’intero periodo 1975-87, cfr. invece ID. 2010 (part alle pp.
193-95), con appendice sui testi momiglianei editi sul giudaismo ellenistico e bibliografia relativa (p. 200).
16
Di cui 52 testimoni della fase Northcliffe 1977 e 51 tra quella Efroymson 1978 e la duplice serie Grinfield 1979-82.
17
Cfr. GRANATA 1999, 84, e ID. 2006.
15
dello stesso anno, nell’ambito del seminario annuale tenuto da Momigliano a Chicago in qualità di
Alexander White Visiting Professor, comporterà invece un primo ampliamento in cinque Chicago
Lectures (= CL). Prologue in Germany e the Temple and the Synagogue vengono conservate (con
modifiche), mentre Attitudes to Foreigners and Vision of the Past è rimpiazzata dal nuovo dittico
The Rabbis and the Communities e Jews and Gentiles; inalterata rimane invece la quarta, ora quinta
lezione, From History to Apocalypse.
È soprattutto la presentazione delle conferenze tra l’ottobre e il novembre del 1978, in occasione
delle Efroymson Lectures (= EL) tenute presso lo Hebrew Union College di Cincinnati, a
testimoniare un ripensamento radicale della struttura del ciclo, interessato ora non solo da un
ulteriore ampliamento del numero delle lezioni ma da una revisione sostanziale di metodi e
prospettive di indagine. Vengono proposte a Cincinnati sei lectures: I. Prologue in Germany; II. The
Greeks outside the Persian Empire; III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire; IV. The Defence
against Hellenization; V. Jews and Gentiles; VI. The Decline of History and Apocalypse and the
Defence against the Romans. Di questi sei interventi Momigliano sceglierà di riproporre tuttavia
solo i primi quattro in occasione delle Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint (= GL) che, pronunciate
presso l’università di Oxford tra il gennaio e il febbraio del 1979, documentano quindi l’assetto
testuale più compiuto e maturo del primo ciclo. La quinta e la sesta lecture, messe da parte anche e
soprattutto per esigenze di approfondimento di indagine, dovranno attendere per la riproposizione
l’ultimo ciclo GL, presentato tra il gennaio e il febbraio del 1982; in questa occasione Momigliano
introdurrà tuttavia tra Jews and Gentiles (divenuta adesso la prima conferenza) e The Decline of
History and Apocalypse una terza lecture composta ad hoc, The Jewish Sects in the Sources.
L’intervallo di tempo che va dalle GL del 1979 a quelle del 1982 è colmato dalla proposizione di
due cicli intermedi. Il primo, Daniel and the Universal History, è presentato in cinque conferenze
tra l’aprile e il maggio del 1979, in occasione delle Chicago Lectures: I. Two Types of Universal
History: the Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber; II. Universal History in Greece and Rome; III.
Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic; IV. The Greeks outside and the Jews inside the Persian
Empire; V. The Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian Historiography. Con l’eccezione della
prima lecture, presto destinata a pubblicazione autonoma (anche e soprattutto in virtù del carattere a
sé stante dell’argomentazione), e della quarta, sintetica riproposizione delle GL 1979 II e III, le
lectures saranno ripresentate a Princeton nel novembre del 1979, in occasione del Gauss Seminar (=
GS). La nuova struttura del ciclo, I. Universal History in Greece and Rome, II. Daniel and the
World Empires e III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian
Historiography, sarà infine proposta a Oxford in occasione della seconda Grinfield Lecturership di
Momigliano (gennaio-febbraio 1980).
La terza e ultima serie, The Jewish Historiography of Resistance, viene invece composta ad hoc
in occasione del terzo ciclo Grinfield, tenuto l’anno successivo, tra il gennaio e il febbraio del 1981.
In questa sede la serie risulta articolata in tre lezioni, I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to
Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism; II. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World;
III. From the Books of Maccabees to Philo. I tre interventi diventeranno però cinque con la
ripresentazine del ciclo a Chicago, tra l’aprile e il maggio del 1981, tramite l’ampliamento della
prima conferenza in due distinti interventi, uno dedicato alla Grecia, l’altro all’Est, e grazie
all’aggiunta di una lecture conclusiva (How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans), tematicamente
eccentrica rispetto all’ambito del giudaismo ellenistico e infatti licenziata da Momigliano l’anno
successivo come saggio autonomo.
Già questa preliminare ricognizione per titoli e sedi delle lectures dal 1977 al 1982 permette di
apprezzare come, in tre casi su quattro (ossia in corrispondenza agli anni 1979, 1980 e 1982) lo
stadio testuale più avanzato e conforme alla volontà dell’autore sia quello documentato dai fascicoli
destinati alla lettura Grinfield; si è dunque scelto di proporre per l’edizione il testo GL, con
l’eccezione delle conferenze afferenti al terzo ciclo (The Jewish Historiography of Resistance,
1981) in cui l’ampliamento e la rielaborazione in occasione della riproposizione a Chicago ne rende
16
i documenti testimoni più completi. Posta tale premessa, due questioni rimangono da affrontare in
sede di introduzione: una presentazione sintetica dell’evoluzione struttuale e contenutistica dei
singoli cicli, che ne confermi o smentisca la natura di unico grande complesso argomentativo, e
infine un breve riesame dell’iter editoriale che permetta di valutare per quali testi e in quali tempi
Momigliano avesse progettato forme di pubblicazione.
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse: il primo ciclo, da Londra ad Oxford (1977-79).
BETWEEN SYNAGOGUE AND APOCALYPSE
NL 1977
(gen.)
1
Prologue in Germany
CL 1977
(apr.-mag.)
1
Prologue in Germany
EL 1978
(ott.-nov.)
1
2
The Temple and the
Synagogue
2
The Temple and the
Synagogue
2
3
Attitudes to Foreigners
and Visions of the Past
3
The Rabbies and the
Communities
3
4
4
4
From History to
Apocalypse
Jews and Gentiles
18
GL 1979
(gen.-feb.)
1
Prologue in Germany
Prologue in Germany
The Greeks outside the 2 The Greeks outisde the
Persian Empire
Persian Empire
The Jews inside the
Persian Empire
3
The Jews inside the
Persian Empire
The Defence against 4 The Defence against
Hellenization
Hellenization
5
From History to
Apocalypse
5
Jews and Gentiles
6
The Decline of History
and Apocalypse and the
Defence against the
Romans
forti rielaborazioni
rapporto diretto, con
rielaborazioni di minor rilievo
Intitolato inizialmente Between Romance and Apocalypse: The World of Jewish Hellenistic
Literature19, il primo ciclo non sarà mai presentato al pubblico con tale nome. È plausibile che i
riferimenti al romanzo e alla letteratura ellenistica fossero stati in un primo momento cercati da
Momigliano perché consoni all’occasione di presentazione, quelle Lord Northcliffe Lectures in
Literature che, come il nome stesso suggerisce, offrono una sede privilegiata per la discussione di
argomenti letterari20; dopo una prima fase di elaborazione – testimoniata dalle cc. P-o 5 e 16, in cui
il titolo viene corretto, ma il sottotitolo conservato – il ciclo sarà tuttavia presentato nel gennaio del
1977 come Between Synagogue and Apocalypse. Il contesto di indagine appare così individuato fin
dalle premesse tra i poli della sinagoga, istituzione fondante del giudaismo di età ellenistica, e della
letteratura apocalittica, sui cui rapporti con il contesto sinagogale – nello specifico del rabbinato –
Momigliano avverte l’esigenza di indagare a fondo. La struttura quadripartita che il primo ciclo
assume rispecchia piuttosto fedelmente la sequenza già prospettata in una lettera datata al
24.11.1976, in cui si fornisce un primo schema di articolazione del progetto:
18
Fonte del grafico: SOLDANI 2009, 22.
Cf. c. 1 del fascicolo P-o 2.
20
SOLDANI 2009, 4.
19
17
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse: Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism
1) Prologue in Germany
2) The Foundations of Hell. J.
3) The Vision of the Past
4) The Vision of the Future
Benché i titoli siano stati modificati la connessione tematica rimane tangibile, come una breve
rassegna dei contenuti può mostrare. Alla base di Prologue in Germany, testo la cui valenza
introduttiva abbraccia l’intera riflessione momiglianea sul giudaismo ellenistico21, risiede l’esigenza
di individuare premesse di metodo che, prima ancora che nell’antichità, sono da ricercarsi nella
storiografia moderna e contemporanea. Come, dove e perché sia nata l’attenzione europea per gli
sviluppi del giudaismo postesilico sono gli interrogativi a cui Momigliano tenta di dare risposta
risalendo nella storia degli studi fino a Kant e Schiller e alle discussioni di natura teologicofilosofica, sorte in Germania agli inizi del XIX secolo, sulla nascita del cristianesimo. La
prospettiva parziale di tali premesse (alimentate da un’irriducibile dicotomia tra il giudaismo
palestinese rabbinico e la variante alessandrina poi subordinata a funzioni di praeparatio
evangelica) si conserva come vizio di forma nella volontà con cui la critica contemporanea guarda
al giudaismo ellenistico per cercare gli elementi greci che lo pervadono (Bickerman, Hengel) o
quelli che, al contrario, appaiono irriducibili ad influssi ellenistici. Necessaria appare quindi
l’individuazione di una “terza via di indagine” che, alla ricerca della vera peculiarità del giudaismo,
ne indaghi piuttosto “le caratteristiche con cui è emerso dal dominio persiano e grazie alle quali ha
potuto sostenere l’impatto con la cultura greca”22.
Non è un caso che la seconda Northcliffe lecture, The Temple and the Synagogue, corrisponda
nell’elenco del 1976 al titolo Foundations of Hell. J.: la riflessione sulle religious foundations, nello
specifico di un’analisi dei rapporti tra Tempio e sinagoga, è proposta a Londra come aspetto
imprescindibile della riflessione storica relativa23. La terza lezione, Attitudes to Foreigners and
Visions of the Past, risponde invece all’esigenza di indagarne le prospettive sul passato. Frutto di un
intenso lavoro, terminato (come attesta l’epistolario) a fine novembre del 1976, Attitudes documenta
l’iniziale strutturarsi in un’unica sequenza di due grandi nuclei argomentativi (incentrati
rispettivamente sul tema resistenziale e su quello storiografico) destinati a trovare, nei cicli
successivi, articolazioni e collocazioni differenti. Al termine della prima serie NL si pone infine
From History to Apocalypse, dedicata a quell’indagine sui rapporti tra storiografia e apocalittica che
rimarrà un nodo imprescindibile per tutto l’arco di sviluppo della riflessione momiglianea sul tema.
Prime, significative modifiche a tale disegno d’insieme emergono già dalla ristrutturazione del
ciclo in prospettiva delle Chicago Lectures dell’aprile-maggio del 1977, a cominciare dalla
ridistribuzione dei materiali del Prologue NL, le cui premesse generali sulle istituzioni religiose
confluiscono nella lezione della serie CL ad esse deputata, The Temple and the Synagogue. Il
risultato si apprezza in un Prologue più centrato sulle premesse europee di metodo e in cui lo spazio
ricavato dallo spostamento del capitolo dedicato al tempio e alla sinagoga viene impiegato per
articolare il concetto chiave di resistenza all’ellenizzazione. È quindi evidente come, malgrado le
successive rielaborazioni24, i punti fermi del Prologue siano tali fin dalle stesure del 1977: lo
sguardo critico al ricorso a una categoria storica giudicata approssimativa nel ridurre la complessità
21
Cfr. introduzione alla lecture, n. 1.
GRANATA 1999, 79.
23
“Only through a clear understanding of the tension between Temple and Synagogue can we arrive at proper
appreciation of how Judaism defined itself in relation to Hellenism and ultimately survived it”, c. 13.
24
Cfr. in proposito l’introduzione alla lecture.
18
22
della temperie che designa ad appendice della grecità25, e insieme la percezione – chiaro lascito di
Alien Wisdom – per cui un riesame degli sviluppi del giudaismo debba implicarne la valorizzazione
delle componenti attivamente oppositive, creative.
Al di là degli sviluppi del Prologue, il ciclo CL mostra un particolare processo di raffinamento
nelle tre lectures che seguono. La prima, intitolata come la corrispondente NL The Temple and the
Synagogue, si presenta ora come l’esito di un primo accorpamento della sezione finale di Prologue
con la successiva NL 1977 II e di una successiva sintesi dell’insieme, motivata da esigenze
espositive26. Di rilievo risulta però soprattutto l’integrazione dell’indagine sulle istituzioni del
giudaismo con l’analisi sui suoi più rilevanti sviluppi comunitari, così come condotta nella CL 1977
III, The Rabbis and the Communities. Al riconoscimento della sinagoga come struttura per mezzo
della quale il giudaismo postesilico ha preservato la propria identità culturale, all’insegna di una
religiosità rifondata su preghiera e devozione, viene qui ad affiancarsi la considerazione crescente
riservata alla nascita della classe laica interessata a partecipare a tale vita religiosa, il rabbinato, e
alla sua operazione di rinnovamento del sistema educativo in prospettiva dell’idea di eternità e
centralità della Legge.
Due distinte Northcliffe lectures sono, anche in questo caso, all’origine della nuova lezione: la
sezione finale della NL 1977 II (The Temple), dedicata a un abbozzo preliminare di presentazione
dei rapporti tra sinagoga e rabbini, e la prima parte della NL 1977 III, Attitudes (capp. I-II), grosso
modo incentrata sulla pluralità linguistica del giudaismo della diaspora e sulla rilevanza assunta
dall’operazione di traduzione del testo biblico nel tentativo di arginare il processo di separazione tra
comunità.
The Rabbis and the Communities, testo destinato a non essere mai riproposto da Momigliano
dopo Chicago 1977, risulta tuttavia di grande rilevanza nella valutazione del suo progetto
d’insieme. In particolare, come ha rilevato Giovanna Granata, si osserva al suo interno
un’identificazione tra genesi della classe rabbinica e principio di difesa all’ellenizzazione 27 ,
plausibile presa di distanza rispetto alla precedente mancata presa di posizione in Ebrei e Greci e
che senz’altro va messa in relazione a quella crescita di interesse per le dinamiche tra correnti
interne al giudaismo che avrebbe trovato esito nella GL 1982 II, The Jewish Sects in the Sources.
Nuova risulta infine anche la quarta lezione del ciclo CL, Jews and Gentiles, risultato di
un’espansione della seconda metà della NL 1977 III, Attitudes, incentrata sula valutazione critica
delle eventuali aree di contatto e scambio, sia in ambito religioso che culturale, tra Ebrei e Greci. La
conclusione raggiunta da Momigliano è che tale comunicazione tra culture sia stata in realtà di tipo
superficiale, complessivamente estranea al confronto approfondito e allo scambio. L’unico ambito
ad emergere come effettivo spazio di relazione intellettuale è la storiografia, per quanto anche in
questo contesto la costante rivendicazione della priorità cronologica delle rispettive culturaee i
mezzi perseguiti allo scopo di provare tale assunto (produzione e alterazione di fonti storiche)
testimonino debolezza e superficialità di approccio.
Sono due, ad ogni modo, gli spunti di riflessione offerti da Jews and Gentiles e destinati a
rivestire un’importanza nodale nei successivi sviluppi dell’indagine: l’importanza del ruolo della
storiografia nell’opposizione ebraica alla sfida culturale greco-macedone e lo speculare problema
posto dalla perdita di interesse del giudaismo rabbinico per la ricerca sul proprio passato. È a questa
seconda questione, colta in relazione all’importanza assunta in età ellenistica dalla letteratura
apocalittica, che tenta di dare risposta – ancora provvisoriamente – la quinta e ultima Chicago
Lecture, From History to Apocalypse. Per citare nuovamente Giovanna Granata:
25
Per quanto una vera e propria scelta di superamento della nozione sarà formulata in modo esplicito solo nel testo GL
(“this first lecture was intended to be a valediction to the notion of Hellenistic Judaism”).
26
L’Appendice I non riporta il testo della versione abbreviata proposta come CL 1977 II e testimoniato dal fascicolo P-o
36, ma la sua versione estesa (ds. P-o 31). Appare evidente come le 35 cc. di cui si compone (e che rappresentano la
trattazione più ampia che Momigliano abbia mai dedicato al tema) apparissero troppe per la presentazione a una
pubblica lettura.
27
Cfr. GRANATA 1999, 87.
19
Una volta verificato, cioè, che l’elemento portante della rivoluzione ellenistica che conduce
all’istituzione della sinagoga è costituito dal concetto anti-storico di eternità della legge attorno a cui si
è costruita la identità religiosa e culturale del mondo giudaico, si tratta di verificare due ipotesi che si
escludono a vicenda e che Momigliano riassume così: “If you start from the synagogue you will rather
end in apocalypse than in history” oppure “the synagogue was meant to save the Jews both from
apocalypse and from history?”28.
Sarà però la rielaborazione di From History to Apocalypse, presentata nel 1978 a Cincinnati con il
titolo, già di per sé eloquente, di The Decline of History and Apocalypse and the Defence against
the Romans, a fornire risposta al quesito: al di là di forti divergenze di prospettiva, storiografia e
apocalittica condividono un aspetto fondamentale, la riflessione sul cambiamento. La fortuna di
entrambe in età ellenistica troverà il suo corrispettivo nel declino parallelo a cui andranno incontro
con il prevalere degli ideali di permanenza e stabilità della legge, a vantaggio dei quali il giudaismo
rabbinico rinuncia non solo alla pratica dell’indagine storica ma al tempo stesso anche alle
promesse apocalittiche di salvezza e di intervento divino nel mondo.
Tale conclusione è destinata a rimanere inalterata fino all’ultima lecture dell’ultimo ciclo:
proposta in occasione delle EL dell’ottobre-novembre del 1978, The Decline of History and
Apocalypse dovrà attendere il ciclo oxoniense del febbraio del 1982 per essere ripresentata nel suo
assetto definitivo. La perentorietà dell’assunto di partenza appare così un’ulteriore prova della
rilevanza della fase di Cincinnati nell’elaborazione definitiva degli Aspects.
Già sul finire del 1976 Momigliano era stato invitato da Samuel Sandmel a tenere sei Gustav A.
e Mamie W. Efroymson Memorial Lectures presso lo Hebrew Union College di Cincinnati, tra il
1978 e il 197929. Come ha rilevato Antonella Soldani, tale nuovo contesto di presentazione – la
prima istituzione ebraica di alta istruzione in America, fondata nel 1875 dal leader del Reform
Judaism, Rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, non è affatto indifferente agli sviluppi del progetto: il ciclo
marca “un nuovo inizio (…) un momento di espansione di vita: lettere di quel periodo lasciano
affiorare la gioia per il successo ottenuto e per il calore dell’accoglienza, e anche il coinvolgimento
almeno emotivo in esperienze condivise30”. La presentazione Efroymson rappresenta infatti un
momento di ripensamento fondamentale, definibile nei termini di una vera e propria rivoluzione
nelle prospettive e nelle modalità di ricerca.
La lezione incipitaria, Prologue, viene mantenuta complessivamente inalterata, con piccole ma
significative differenze (ad esempio, la premessa di omaggio alla tradizione di studi del Collegio o
alcuni approfondimenti per i quali l’ambiente di Cincinnati potrebbe aver agito da stimolo, cfr.
l’introduzione alla lecture); si individua però alla fine del testo un’aggiunta cruciale, che
condizionerà l’intero sviluppo del ciclo EL, e che consiste non in un incremento degli argomenti
trattati, ma piuttosto nella recusatio del tema romano31. Nelle lezioni tenute a Cincinnati la presenza
dei Romani sarà infatti limitata al tema della difesa contro di essi così come proposto nel finale
della sesta conferenza. Al taglio operato sulla parte “bassa” della cronologia (versante romano e
rabbinico) corrisponde però un ampliamento “in alto” coerente non solo con l’opzione meyeriana
celebrata da Momigliano (attenzione per le relazioni tra Greci e Persiani32) ma anche, in un certo
28
GRANATA 1999, 80.
Lettera al 14.10.76.
30
Di particolare importanza documentaria appare in tal senso la lettera ad Anne Marie Meyer del 18.11.78 che riporta le
impressioni generali al termine del ciclo di lezioni (“Cincinnati è finito veramente bene. È ovvio che le mie lectures
siano state apprezzate, e la cordialità era genuina ed ebraica nel senso migliore”) e il significato attribuito ad alcuni
momenti, su cui cfr. SOLDANI 2009, n. 17.
31
P-o 72, c. 19bis = cc. 24-5 del testo GL edito.
32
Su cui cfr. Prologue, c. 22.
20
29
senso, con la diffidenza dello storico ad avventurarsi tra quei testi della letteratura rabbinica in cui
sentiva meno saldo il proprio dicastero33.
La principale novità del ciclo EL è tuttavia rappresentata dalla sostituzione del dittico CL
dedicato alle istituzioni del giudaismo ellenistico, The Temple and the Synagogue e The Rabbis and
the Communities, con tre lezioni del tutto nuove. Nella prima, The Greeks outside the Persian
Empire, Momigliano propone un’indagine sulla reazione greca all’incontro con la Persia, allo scopo
di fornire una base di partenza nell’individuazione delle peculiarità nella risposta giudaica allo
stesso incontro che costituisce invece l’oggetto della successiva The Jews inside the Persian
Empire. Se nel caso di The Greeks outside Momigliano lavora essenzialmente in eredità di Alien
Wisdom, attingendo quindi da materiale ampiamente autonomo rispetto al ciclo, nel caso di The
Jews inside risalta la consistente ripresa tematica di sezioni testuali provenienti dalla CL 1977 II,
The Temple and the Synagogue, soprattutto in relazione agli aspetti politici ed istituzionali,
economici e sociali della funzione del Tempio in rapporto alla potenza achemenide. Discorso
analogo può essere condotto per la successiva Efroymson lecture, The Defence against
Hellenization, in cui il materiale utilizzato proviene in buona parte non solo da The Temple and the
Synagogue ma anche e soprattutto dalla dissolta The Rabbis and the Communities.34 Momigliano
struttura qui la propria riflessione su come a trasformare la devozione sacerdotale del giudaismo
persiano nel sistema accademico per lo studio della Torah sia stata l’assimilazione ebraica della
fede dei Greci nell’educazione organizzata. Segue infine la riproposizione della CL 1977 IV, Jews
and Gentiles (per la cui evoluzione testuale in questa fase si rimanda all’introduzione alla lecture) e,
come sesta e ultima conferenza, The Decline of History and Apocalypse and the Defence against the
Romans, depositaria di un raggiungimento di conclusioni valide per tutto il corpus delle lectures35.
In conclusione, quello che soprattutto si apprezza dal ripensamento delle modalità di indagine
sancito dal ciclo Efroymson è la scomparsa dalle lectures di interventi che isolino come temi a se
stanti le analisi del binomio Tempio-Sinagoga e del rabbinato, con conseguente predilezione per un
reinserimento di genesi e sviluppo delle due istituzioni nel contesto persiano (The Jews Inside) o
resistenziale (The Defence). Tale trasformazione non ha valore meramente formale. Per citare,
ancora una volta, la fine analisi condotta da Giovanna Granata a riguardo:
la versione precedente le Efroymson premetteva all’analisi dei rapporti tra Ebrei e gentili la trattazione
relativa al ruolo sociale, religioso e culturale dei rabbini. Non è banale affrontare il tema del giudaismo
in età ellenistica a partire da questa prospettiva nella quale trova la sua formulazione più drastica l’idea
di Momigliano riguardo alle caratteristiche del giudaismo come sistema di reazione all’ellenismo. (…)
La rielaborazione dei temi (…) sottolinea le aree attraverso cui questa reazione è stata messa in atto, il
sistema educativo e il controllo linguistico del testo biblico, con minore enfasi sulla nuova struttura (la
sinagoga) e la nuova classe dominante (i rabbini) che ne sono il prodotto (p. 87).
Inevitabile porre tuttavia nel solco di tale conclusione la questione, se la rielaborazione
Efroymson conduca o meno a una svalutazione del ruolo di rabbini e sinagoga (la cui centralità nel
ciclo di Chicago appare sotto ogni aspetto indiscutibile) o se prescinda piuttosto da relativi giudizi
33
“To pass from the Qumran texts and the Gospels to the Mishnah and Tosefta requires a jump I am too old to make”
(GL 1982 III, c. 17bis).
34
Per l’esatta ripartizione di paragrafi tra The Jews Inside e The Defence si rimanda all’Appendice I.
35
Per quanto (come rileva SOLDANI 2009) il paragrafo finale della versione EL di The Decline, destinato ad essere
rimpiazzato nella versione GL 1982 da una chiusa di tono e prospettive differenti (cfr. Appendice alla lecture, tagli al
testo Efroymson: da “There is another story to tell” fino a “Talmud Bab. Ta’anit 7a”, cc. 30-31), abbia carattere ancora
provvisorio e plausibilmente subordinato al contesto: “l’aneddoto, scelto da Momigliano per terminare il suo ciclo di
lezioni è inteso a esemplificare forme di continuità tra il giudaismo ellenistico e il giudaismo rabbinico di cui la
persistenza tradizionale si pone a garanzia, e di cui il rispetto per le “alien cultures” dei Greci e dei Romani appare un
tratto qualificante. Questo testo, però, non sarà più letto dopo Cincinnati (…) ed è lecito porsi la questione (…) se la
scelta sia dovuta alla sua particolare adeguatezza del primo ad un contesto riformato”.
21
di valore. La riproposizione pressoché letterale dei materiali utilizzati a Chicago – che in taluni casi
finiscono anzi per essere accresciuti36 – induce in ultima analisi a ridimensionare l’ipotesi di una
polarizzazione tra un momento preliminare di sopravvalutazione del tema (Chicago) e la sua
successiva perdita di importanza. Unico fattore in grado di limitare effettivamente la presenza
rabbinica nei testi sarà piuttosto l’esclusione tematica di Roma dal focus di indagine (annunciata,
come si è visto, a Cincinnati, ma apprezzabile soprattutto nella definitiva riformulazione di The
Defence per il ciclo GL 1982), con conseguente selezione cronologica: una scelta, tuttavia, più di
pragmatica che di principio.
L’ultima riproposizione del ciclo Between Synagogue and Apocalypse, a Oxford, nel gennaiofebbraio del 1979, si pone dunque al termine di questo complesso percorso di formazione.
L’occasione è quella delle Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint, tradizionalmente destinate allo
sviluppo in ambiente non ebraico di riflessioni su temi del giudaismo ellenistico, particolarmente in
relazione alla Settanta. L’invito a riferire delle proprie ricerche presso la prestigiosa sede è accolto
da Momigliano con sorpresa e gioia, come documenta l’introduzione anteposta per l’occasione al
testo di Prologue in Germany (cc. 1-4 dell’edito), in cui una nuova indagine sulle premesse italiane
alla riscoperta tedesca del giudaismo ellenistico è fatta precedere da una brillante premessa di taglio
autobiografico. I testi Grinfield, al di là degli interventi particolari (per i quali si rimanda
all’introduzione alle singole lectures) risultano complessivamente interessati da una generale
operazione di inquadramento, contestualizzazione e raffinamento del focus di indagine che si
apprezza soprattutto nella stesura di nuove introduzioni e conclusioni dal valore esplicativo e
riepilogativo. È il caso – per portare un esempio significativo – della nuova conclusione del
Prologue, dedicata alla presentazione dei temi su cui la ricerca andrà concentrandosi: “These three
themes [i.e. Il rapporto di Greci ed Ebrei con la Persia; le forme di comunicazione tra Ebrei della
diaspora; i limiti dello scambio tra Ebrei e gentili] will occupy me in the remaining two lectures of
this year and in three lectures which I hope to deliver next year” (c. 24).
Dalla circoscrizione tematica emergono due interessanti constatazioni. La prima si lega al
riferimento alle “lezioni rimanenti per l’anno” 37 – progetto strutturale, quindi, del primo ciclo –
all’interno del quale Momigliano sceglie di limitarsi alla presentazione dei primi quattro interventi
EL. È un modo per chiudere la serie con un punto di domanda: l’ultima GL, The Defence against
Hellenization – che riveste non a caso ruolo mediano nel ciclo Efroymson – è un testo che solleva
più interrogativi di quanti non ne risolva, aprendo la strada tanto a Jews and Gentiles, per ciò che
concerne l’analisi dei punti di contatto tra Ebrei e Greci, quanto a The Decline of History and
Apocalypse per le interconnessioni tra i due generi letterari. Sul fatto che nella nuova conclusione
del Prologue la materia di tali lezioni venga rimandata all’anno successivo38 si innesta la seconda
possibile constatazione sul passo, relativa alla valutazione dell’organicità del progetto momiglianeo
nel suo complesso e della sua evoluzione nel tempo: il ciclo a cui lo storico rimanda non può certo
essere identificato nelle GL 1980 né, tantomeno, in quelle del 1981, ma corrisponde chiaramente
alla quarta e ultima serie. Ciò significa che nel gennaio del 1979 Momigliano non era ancora
arrivato all’idea di una quadripartizione dell’indagine e di un suo ampliamento in direzione dei temi
– ai quali andava interessandosi in parallelo – della storiografia universale e resistenziale.
36
Cfr. in proposito Appendice II, (The Rabbis and the Communities).
Singolarmente indicate come due, anziché come le tre che effettivamente seguono Prologue (Greeks outside; Jews
inside; Defence). Potrebbe però trattarsi di un semplice lapsus, considerata la stretta vicinanza tematica delle prime due
lezioni.
38
Un’analoga promessa di completamento del percorso di indagine nell’anno a venire è aggiunta, non a caso, anche in
apertura a The Defence: “This year I shall only be able to say something about the first point – the linguistic situation.
The rest of my analysis of the methods by which the Jews organized their intellectual world inside the intellectual world
of the Greeks must be left to my second series of lectures”.
22
37
Tra Polibio e Daniele, Demostene e i Maccabei: il secondo (1979-1980) e il terzo (1981) ciclo sul
giudaismo ellenistico.
DANIEL AND THE ORIGINS OF UNIVERSAL HISTORY
CL 1979
(apr.-mag.)
1
Two Types of Universal
History. The Cases of E.A.
Freeman and Max Weber.
2
Universal History in
Greece and Rome
3
Daniel and the Dangers
of Apocalyptic
39
GS 1979
(nov.)
1
Universal History in
Greece and Rome
GL 1980
(gen.feb.)
1
Universal History in
Greece and Rome
2
Daniel and the World
Empires
2
3
3
Flavius Josephus, the Pagan
Historians and the Birth of
Christian HIstoriography
Daniel and the World
Empires
Flavis Josephus, the Pagan
Historians and the Birth of
Christian Historiography
[4 The Greeks outside and the
Jews inside the Persian
Empire]
5
The Paradox of the Roman
Empire and Christian
Historiography
La ricerca di un’area di contatto privilegiata nelle relazioni culturali tra Ebrei e Greci successive
all’ingresso di Alessandro Magno in Palestina determina un progressivo spostamento dell’interesse
dal giudaismo ellenistico tout court alla produzione storiografica dell’epoca, emersa in The Defence
against Hellenization come l’ambito culturale di maggior impatto. Oggetto del secondo ciclo di
lectures, Daniel and the World Empires, è infatti lo sviluppo del genere greco della storiografia
universale prima e dopo la sua reinterpretazione giudaica. Da sottolineare come anche in questo
caso il percorso di indagine non rappresenti per Momigliano tanto una scoperta, quanto piuttosto un
recupero: l’epistolario testimonia come lo storico si dedicasse al tema già nel 1978, in
contemporanea alla presentazione del ciclo Efroymson a Cincinnati40. Non si esauriscono però in
questo aspetto i punti di contatto tra il nuovo percorso di indagine e il primo ciclo. Lo sguardo
ravvicinato al libro di Daniele – considerato da Momigliano un testo chiave nella misura in cui
recupera il modello storiografico greco di successione degli imperi del mondo e se ne appropria
ricollocandolo sub specie aeternitatis – permette l’approfondimento di quella riflessione sui
rapporti tra storiografia e apocalittica che, già oggetto della EL 1978 VI (The Decline), era stata
accantonata in sede Grinfield in attesa di ulteriore indagine. Le profezie di Daniele sul superamento
degli imperi mondani in prospettiva del regno di Dio vengono ora interpretate come antesignane di
quella visione apocalittica giudaica che sarà poi mutuata a Roma dalla storiografia cristiana ed
applicata, con vari esiti, ai rapporti tra Chiesa e Impero.
Daniel and the Origins of Universal History viene proposto una prima volta tra l’aprile e il
maggio del 1979, nel contesto delle Chicago Lectures. In quest’occasione il ciclo si compone di
cinque lezioni, di cui solo tre verranno recuperate per la riproposizione nelle sedi successive. La
prima CL, Two Types of Universal History: the Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber, dedicata a
sviluppi e tendenze contemporanee del genere letterario, si presenta fin da subito come lezione
39
40
Fonte del grafico: SOLDANI 2009, 22.
Lettera al 6.10.78.
23
eccentrica, di introduzione al metodo, né sorprende la sua successiva pubblicazione come contributo
autonomo41. Ad essere accantonata sarà anche la quarta CL, The Greeks outside and the Jews inside
the Persian Empire (di cui l’AAM non conserva il testo, ma che doveva verosimilmente offrire una
sintesi delle GL 1979 II e III a beneficio del pubblico di Chicago, al quale – ricordiamo – il primo
ciclo era stato proposto prima della composizione delle due lectures in questione). Le rimanenti
Universal History in Greece and Rome; Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic; Flavius Josephus e
The Paradox of the Roman Empire, sono invece conservate in occasione della riproposizione del
ciclo come Gauss Seminar a Princeton nel novembre dello stesso anno, pur andando incontro a
consistenti operazioni di ristrutturazione.
Nel caso della prima, dedicata alle premesse greco-romane del tema (vari modelli greci di
rappresentazione degli sviluppi dell’umanità e loro fortuna in ambito poetico e filosofico;
formalizzazione scientifica del genere da parte di Polibio) si apprezza una certa continuità di forma
e contenuti nel passaggio alla versione GS42. Più complesso invece il rapporto instauratosi tra la
seconda lecture, incentrata sul ruolo di Daniele e sulla sua eredità letteraria (gli oracoli sibillini,
l’Apocalisse di Giovanni) e la terza, il cui titolo CL (The Paradox of the Roman Empire and
Christian Historiography) si richiama in modo significativo al problema per cui interprete
privilegiato del destino di Roma diventa paradossalmente una scuola storiografica cristiana che
mutua dall’apocalittica giudaica una visione ostile all’Impero. La trasformazione del testo di Daniel
passa ora infatti per l’inserimento di ampi stralci recuperati da The Paradox, con la conseguenza di
una parziale sovrapposizione testuale tra lectures per la cui soluzione in questa sede editoriale si
rimanda alle rispettive introduzioni. Il passaggio a Daniel di cospicue sezioni provenienti da The
Paradox determina inoltre un consistente spostamento del focus di quest’ultima e una sua
ristrutturazione in prospettiva di un tema che va assumendo importanza crescente nell’indagine di
Momigliano, il ruolo storico – e storiografico – di Flavio Giuseppe: è su di lui che si incentra la
nuova sezione incipitaria della lecture (cc. 1-9), coerentemente rinominata Flavius Josephus, the
Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography43.
La riproposizione Grinfield del ciclo, presentato ad Oxford tra il gennaio e il febbraio del 1980,
vede una sostanziale continuità con le versioni di Princeton: quello che si apprezza ancora una volta
è il raffinamento della forma, ottenuto mediante l’aggiunta di paragrafi in apertura e chiusura dei
testi che assolvono a un ruolo di raccordo e di focalizzazione tematica: tre nuove pagine di
introduzione vengono premesse a Universal History, due a Daniel, tre a Flavius Josephus, senza
considerare i singoli interventi e le aggiunte minute, per i quali si rimanda all’introduzione ai singoli
testi.
La conclusione del percorso di indagine condotto nel secondo ciclo non ha tuttavia portato fino
in fondo le possibilità esplorative offerte dalla tematica storiografica in contesto ellenistico. Al
contrario, ha contribuito a rafforzare l’attenzione di Momigliano per la dimensione resistenziale del
rapporto tra cultura ebraica e cultura greco-romana, di cui emerge adesso la necessità di indagine in
merito alla stessa documentazione storica fornita dai contemporanei. In altri termini, l’indagine
sulle origini dell’opposizione culturale ebraica va trasformandosi in un’indagine sulle origini della
storiografia di opposizione – ebraica, ma non solo.
41
Vd. Two Types, infra, pp. 109-10.
Si rimanda comunque all’introduzione alla lecture (pp.111-14) per le singole modifiche, comunque presenti.
43
Per il ruolo di Flavio Giuseppe nella riflessione di Momigliano cfr. il par. 3 dell’introduzione alla lecture, pp. 147-49.
24
42
THE JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE
44
GL 1981
(gen.-feb.)
1
The Intellectual and
Religious Resistance to
Greco-Macedonian and
Roman Imperialism
CL 1981
(apr.-mag.)
1
The Intellectual and Religious
Resistance to GrecoMacedonian and Roman
Imperialism. Greece.
2
2
Some Exemplary Stories
from the Jewish World
3
From the Books of
Maccabees to Philo
The Intellectual and Religious
Resistance to GrecoMacedonian and Roman
Imperialism. The East.
3
Some Exemplary Stories from
the Jewish World
4
From the Books of Maccabees
to Philo
5
How to Reconcile Greeks and
Trojans
Il tema trova sviluppo nel terzo e ultimo ciclo di lectures, significativamente intitolato The
Jewish Historiography of Resistance, proposto per la prima volta direttamente ad Oxford – tra il
gennaio e il febbraio del 1981 – e poi ripresentato a Chicago tra l’aprile e il maggio dello stesso
anno, in versione ampliata (da tre a cinque lectures).
Al cuore dell’indagine si pone, ancora una volta, il privilegiato ma controverso rapporto che
Momigliano coglie tra storia ed apocalittica. Apocalittica che trova nel contesto un habitat ideale,
per così dire, in virtù di premesse gettate fin dal ciclo sulla storiografia universale: Daniel and the
Origins of Universal History aveva infatti contribuito a mettere in luce come la prospettiva
universalistica fosse al tempo stesso al cuore dell’espressione dell’opposizione giudaica alla
conquista greco-macedone prima e romana poi. Quello che Momigliano si propone ora è costruire,
intorno a questo nodo fondamentale, una storia dello sviluppo delle pratiche resistenziali che metta
a confronto il modello greco con quello non solo giudaico ma più genericamente orientale,
ripercorrendo l’arco dei secoli già tracciato nel ciclo precedente, sia pure con diversa prospettiva.
Ai primi due modelli è dedicata la lezione incipitaria del ciclo GL, The Intellectual and Religious
Resistance to Greco-Roman and Macedonian Imperialism (destinata ad essere poi riarticolata in
sede CL in due lezioni, 1. Greece; 2. The East). Qui trovano spazio l’analisi della dimensione
essenzialmente politica della resistenza greca verso Macedoni e Romani e il parallelo confronto con
le tendenze orientali – egizie, iraniche e fenicie – all’opposizione religioso-profetica e alla pratica di
attingere dal proprio patrimonio mitico e sacrale, idealizzandone la tradizione.
A dare un giro di vite alla riflessione momiglianea sulla questione è però la constatazione,
sviluppata nelle successive Some Exemplary Stories of the Jewish World e From the Book of
Maccabees to Philo, che la letteratura resistenziale ebraica documenti sia componenti del modello
greco che del modello orientale e che la presenza di entrambi gli aspetti sia diacronicamente
distinguibile. In Some Exemplary, dedicata ai libri ellenistici di Ester, Giuditta, Tobia, ne viene
infatti delineata la natura di prodotti della diaspora su sfondo del dominio persiano, recuperando in
particolare – soprattutto nel caso di Giuditta e del suo plausibile modello erodoteo – la questione
della pratica giudaico-ellenistica del ricorso a materiale greco in chiave ostile. Per quanto tra loro
differenti, Ester, Giuditta e Tobia condividono un tratto in comune: ai protagonisti, minacciati in
quanto appartenenti a un gruppo etnico, non è mai richiesto di abbandonare l’ebraismo; non
44
Fonte del grafico: SOLDANI 2009, 23.
25
compare e non agisce ancora quella nozione determinante di “apostasia”, di scelta tra obbedienza e
disobbedienza a Dio, che discende direttamente dalle persecuzioni di Antioco IV e che sarà invece
al cuore dei libri dei Maccabei45. In From The Books of Maccabees to Philo si mostra infatti come
la rappresentazione degli Ebrei come gruppo etnico stabile subirà invece nei libri maccabaici un
ripensamento in chiave religiosa, di caratterizzazione come gruppo etnico-religioso mobile, aperto
alla modifìca per il tramite dell’apostasia. È un’interpretazione che finisce per individuare un
ulteriore punto di intersezione con il ciclo Daniel and the Origins of the Universal History, nella
misura in cui è il libro di Daniele il primo a formulare tale criterio di apostasia con lo scopo di
sottrarsi alle consolazioni generiche dell’oracolistica che lo precede. Risalta così doppiamente la
specificità dell’operazione culturale del suo autore, che se da una prospettiva universalistica aveva
mutuato il modello greco di successione degli imperi per adeguarlo a prospettive ebraiche, sul piano
resistenziale innova nel leggere la dominazione di Antioco IV attraverso categorie interpretative
destinate a godere di grande fortuna per il tramite della letteratura maccabaica.
Con una riflessione sulla compresenza di entrambi i modelli (etnico ed etnico-religioso) nella
produzione politica di Filone di Alessandria, e sulla sua scelta di valorizzare il secondo modello in
un tentativo di compromesso con il potere politico romano, ha termine il terzo e ultimo ciclo
momiglianeo sul giudaismo ellenistico. Una quinta lecture, How to reconcile Greeks and Trojans, è
presentata in chiusura della serie di Chicago, ma la natura eccentrica dei suoi contenuti rispetto al
corpus faranno presto optare Momigliano per un licenziamento autonomo, al pari di Two Types of
Universal History46.
A questo punto di sviluppo degli Aspects, due lezioni del primo ciclo, le EL 1978 Jews and
Gentiles e The Decline of History and Apocalypse, non sono però ancora mai state presentate al
pubblico di Oxford; la loro funzione e, se vogliamo, il loro stesso assetto testuale, sono rimasti in un
certo senso in sospeso. È nella loro direzione che guarda la chiusa di From the World of Maccabees
to Philo (“But the choice is now primarily with the individual Jew: and the choice is between Greek
life and Jewish life”), sintetica anticipazione dei nuclei concettuali del quarto e ultimo ciclo,
dedicato all’individuazione di quei punti di contatto tra giudaismo ed ellenismo attraverso i quali la
componente resistenziale torna ad oltrepassare il confine della produzione storiografica e a
riverberarsi in ogni ambito culturale.
45
Per una recente valutazione di tale intepretazione momiglianea della letteratura maccabaica si rimanda a RAJAK 2014,
96, che le contrappone la posizione opposta sostenuta da G. Bowersock in Martyrdom and Rome (Cambridge 1995)
arrivando alla conclusione per cui “neither of these extremes is, in my view, sustainable”.
46
Vd. Reconcile.
26
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse, Oxford 1982: ultimo atto di un unico grande progetto?
Tra il gennaio e il febbraio del 1982 Momigliano torna ad Oxford per proporre, un’ultima volta,
le sue Grinfield Lectures on the Septuagint. Sufficiente a marcare il carattere conclusivo della
ricerca proposta è già il titolo del ciclo, Between Synagogue and Apocalypse,che recuperando quello
utilizzato nel 1979 riconduce all’origine il punto di arrivo dell’intero arco di riflessione.
BETWEEN SYNAGOGUE AND APOCALYPSE
EL 1978
5
6
Jews and Gentiles
The Decline of History and
Apocalypse and the Defence
against the Romans
47
GL 1982
(gen.-feb.)
1
Jews and Gentiles
2
The Jewish Sects
in the Sources
3
The Decline of History and
Apocalypse
I testi qui presentati, non a caso, non saranno più riproposti altrove. Si tratta di tre lectures, di cui
la prima (Jews and Gentiles) e la terza (The Decline of History and Apocalypse) costituiscono la
rielaborazione finale di quelle due conferenze omonime della serie Efroymson (EL 1978 V e VI)
che erano state accantonate nella presentazione del primo ciclo ad Oxford, e che ne confermano
l’intuizione di partenza per cui
It has now become a commonplace that there is no aspect of Jewish life between Alexander the Great
and the destruction of the Second Temple which was not affected by Hellenism. Which is also to say
that there is no aspect of Judaism of that period which is not marked by the effort to challenge
48
Hellenism in the very act of taking it into account .
È una conclusione su cui va ad innestarsi la seconda lecture, The Jewish Sects in the Sources,
approfondimento composto ad hoc ma la cui necessità era stata già sollevata in sede Efroymson, in
corrispondenza all’indagine sui rapporti tra rabbinato e storiografia: il declino degli interessi
storiografici e apocalittici successivo alla produzione di Flavio Giuseppe, che Momigliano
riconduce in The Decline of History and Apocalypse all’operazione culturale rabbinica di
valorizzazione dell’eternità della Legge a discapito del divenire storico, è confermata in The Jewish
Sects in the Sources dal disinteresse talmudico nel ricostruire, adottando criteri storiografici
scientifici, ideologie e divergenze delle correnti interne al giudaismo di età ellenistica.
A rispettare nella presente edizione l’originaria collocazione delle lectures GL 1982 – senza
riunire in un’unica serie i due cicli omonimi, alterando così la sequenza della conferenze – ha
indotto la ricostruzione del progetto momiglianeo di ricomposizione organica dei quattro cicli. Si è
visto come secondo e terzo ciclo contribuiscano a sostanziare l’argomentazione di Between
Synagogue and Apocalypse da prospettive parallele, convergendo nel delineare il destino comune di
storiografia ed apocalittica. La questione che si impone di conseguenza è se la collocazione di
lectures dal valore riassuntivo alla fine del percorso di indagine debba essere ritenuta un’operazione
a posteriori, per cui, giunto al ciclo GL 1982, Momigliano avrebbe deciso di recuperare i contenuti
dei cicli intermedi con sguardo di sintesi, o se si possa invece cogliere una volontà di concertazione
anteriore all’elaborazione delle ultime lectures.
47
48
Fonte del grafico: SOLDANI 2009, 23.
Jews and Gentiles, c. 2.
27
È indubbio infatti il tentativo di reductio ad unum delle GL 1982, affidato – ancora una volta –
alla composizione di sintesi introduttive e conclusive. Ciò si apprezza particolarmente in Jews and
Gentiles, la cui nuova posizione incipitaria richiede un prologo in grado di fare da ponte con i temi
affrontati nei cicli precedenti. Lo scopo è raggiunto da Momigliano con una trattazione di cinque
pagine che solo con grande difficoltà può essere considerata alla stregua di una ‘sutura’
estemporanea, data l’ampiezza concettuale perseguita e la sua efficacia nell’illuminare relazioni e
implicazioni tra le principali tematiche. Chiave interpretativa è posta nel riconoscimento della
centralità della riflessione sulla pratica storiografica, collocata fra i due temi polari di sinagoga e
apocalisse, in evidente tentativo di fusione con i cicli intermedi. Si apprezza inoltre nella lecture il
ricorso a tagli del testo laddove sia presente una certa sovrapponibilità con tematiche già affrontate
in testi editi (è il caso, ad esempio, della rimozione di un’excursus dedicato ai rappresentanti della
storiografia giudaico-ellenstica49) o nei cicli mediani50: operazione che sembrra suggerire qualcosa
anche in merito alla natura del progetto editoriale sugli Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism che sarà
argomento del prossimo paragrafo.
Il carattere restrospettivo di tali interventi potrebbe indebolire la possibilità di considerarli
prodotto di un progetto sviluppatosi in itinere; getta tuttavia nuova luce sulla questione un breve
documento, la cui rilevanza per la ricostruzione del corpus è parsa chiara solo nell’ultima fase del
presente lavoro di edizone, che riporta un’introduzione manoscritta (forse mai dattiloscritta, o la cui
dattiloscrittura è andata perduta) alla GL 1981 I, The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to
Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism. Tale documento, un foglio a righe allegato al fascicolo
P-o 129 e scritto a mano da Momigliano51, riporta il seguente testo:
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is not for me to judge my youngers and betters. They did me the honour of extending my
Grinfield lectureship from two to four years and therefore presented me with the dilemma of either
diluting the three lectures I had already prepared into nine lectures or inventing six new lectures. My
English not being good enough for a dilution of such propositions (such things must be left to the
natives) I had really no choice.
I have therefore decided to devote the two intermediate years to a more detailed exploration of two
aspects of Jewish historical thinking within its Greco-Roman context: first universal history, as
typified by the book of Daniel; and secondly, what one might call the historiography of resistance
from Esther and Judith to Philo, the IV Maccabees and Flavius Josephus, and perhaps the Seder ‘Olam
Rabbah.
My purpose (as defined in my first lecture last year) remains the study of certain intellectual
developments which contributed to making Judaism the only creative native culture in territories
controlled by the Greeks after 250 B.C.
Dietro il tono scherzoso della recusatio linguistica, pretestuosamente autoironica, emerge un
senso di continuità progettuale la cui chiarezza difficilmente può essere messa in discussione e le
cui origini appaiono piuttosto precoci, risalendo forse addirittura allo stesso febbraio del 1979, ossia
a quando, al termine del primo ciclo GL, Momigliano avrebbe ricevuto un ampliamento dell’invito.
Che il contratto originario prevedesse la presentazione di soli due cicli (rispettivamente di quattro e
tre incontri) risulta d’altronde coerente con i richiami, inseriti nelle nuove introduzioni e conclusioni
dei testi GL 1979, a un “next year” e a una “second series of lectures” in cui completare il percorso
49
“As I have characterized Jewish Hellenistic historiography in my previous lectures and published works, I shall not
go into details” (Jews and Gentiles, c. 18).
50
Per quanto vada sottolineato come non tutte le operazioni di taglio o di integrazione testuale nelle lectures del ciclo
GL 1982 rispondano univocamente a tale volontà di concertazione. Per le ulteriori esigenze di contesto si rimanda
all’introduzione delle singole lectures in questione.
51
Una c.c. del foglio, testimone di uno stato redazionale anteriore (risulta infatti priva delle successive correzioni mss.)
è riportata anche in allegato a P-o 138. Per l’edizione del testo si rimanda all’appendice alle lectures CL 1981 I e II.
28
intrapreso con le EL rimaste fuori dall’organizzazione, Jews and Gentiles e The Decline of History
and Apocalypse52. L’ampliamento di contratto da due a quattro cicli deve aver indotto Momigliano
– che nel frattempo aveva già iniziato a lavorare sul tema della storiografia universale e doveva
quindi averne anche già compreso la produttività in ambito giudaico-ellenistico – ad accantonare
temporaneamente le tre lezioni già previste per il ciclo successivo (le due EL rimaste fuori, più la
nuova The Jewish Sects in the Sources) per orientare l’indagine in direzione di un approfondimento
storiografico. Che tale indagine costituisse d’altronde parte integrante di un percorso globale si
evince in un certo senso anche da un possibile argomento ex silentio: se nel 1979 Momigliano
avesse ritenuto conclusa la propria indagine sul giudaismo ellenistico, nulla gli avrebbe impedito di
presentare l’anno successivo le tre lectures già preparate e di postporre a queste i due nuovi cicli, in
qualità di terza e quarta Grinfield Lecturership. Al contrario, Momigliano voleva che i suoi stessi
ascoltatori fossero consapevoli del progetto d’insieme, come si evince dal fatto che, nel gennaio del
1981, avesse a cuore di descrivere loro in che modo il ciclo quadriennale si andava strutturando.
Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism: un libro inedito (o più di uno?)
Ogni tentativo di valutazione dell’organicità del progetto momiglianeo non può tuttavia
prescindere dalla speculare, complessa questione relativa alla destinazione editoriale delle lectures.
Se, come si è considerato all’inizio dell’introduzione, non tutti gli argomenti centrali nella
riflessione di Momigliano hanno necessariamente preso la strada di una pubblicazione monografica,
nondimeno nel caso del ciclo in questione risulta ben documentata la volontà di non limitare la
ricerca all’ambito “aurale” delle Lectureship ma di destinarne i risultati a una sede editoriale. Risale
al settembre del 1978 (appena un mese prima della presentazione delle Efroymson Lectures) il
contratto, stipulato con la Cambridge University Press, in cui Momigliano si impegna infatti a
pubblicare un libro dal titolo From Synagogue to Apocalypse. Copia del contratto è conservata
nell’AAM (D-b 9, c.8):
Proposed title:
From Synagogue to Apocalypse. The Jews between Greeks and Romans from 300 B.C. to A.D. 100
Length: Six chapters of approximately 180-200 pp. (the length of my previous book, Alien Wisdom)
Provisional title of the individual chapters:
1. Prologue in Germany: The Ambiguities of the Notion of Hellenistic Judaism.
2. The Heritage of the Persian Rule and the Encounter with the Greeks.
3. Greeks ad Jewish Education: the Synagogue
4. From Greco-Macedonian to Roman Rule
5. History and Apocalypse
6. A Roman World
The Text includes the Northcliffe Lectures delivered at the University of London (University College) in
January 1977 in a second version which will be presented as Efroymson Lectures at Hebrew Union
College of Cincinnati in November 1978. My aim is to define the changes in Jewish life and thought
which can be associated either with Greek rule or later with Roman rule. The emphasis is on the diversity
of situations inherent in the transition from the former to the latter. Special attention is given to the
preservation of the religious unity of the Jews, notwithstanding the difference in languages, political
allegiance, social organization and education between Jews.
52
Cfr. la nuova conclusione del Prologue: “These three themes will occupy me in the remaining two lectures of this
year and in three lectures which I hope to deliver next year” (c. 24) e la nuova introduzione di The Defence, “This year I
shall only be able to say something about the first point – the linguistic situation. The rest of my analysis of the methods
by which the Jews organized their intellectual world inside the intellectual world of the Greeks must be left to my
second series of lectures” (c. 1).
29
Già a un primo sguardo risulta evidente l’affinità del titolo CUP con quello del primo ciclo,
Between Synagogue and Apocalypse. Meno perspicua, invece, la sovrapponibilità dei singoli
capitoli all’argomento delle lectures: a giudicare dai sei titoli, il cui numero si rifà evidentemente
alla strutturazione del ciclo Efroymson, era prevista una consistente rivisitazione dei contenuti, con
compattamento di The Greeks outside e The Jews inside in un’unica sezione (cap. 2), recupero di
un’autonomia di The Temple and The Synagogue (cap. 3, con particolare focus sulla valorizzazione
del sistema educativo), assenza di una sezione specificamente dedicata alla difesa contro
l’ellenizzazione e, soprattutto, composizione ex novo di un’intero capitolo sulla distanza degli
sviluppi del legalismo rabbinico di età romana con il giudaismo di Flavio Giuseppe, Filone e
dell’apocalittica53.
Il libro, tuttavia, non sarà mai pubblicato. La questione della mancata realizzazione del progetto
editoriale è stata già affrontata con chiarezza da Giovanna Granata54 e ripresa – con significativo
avanzamento – da Antonella Soldani55. Rilevante appare una nota manoscritta di Momigliano
apposta sul folder VIII (lo stesso che conteneva il contratto di pubblicazione),“Contract for
publication in 1979 with Cambridge University Press. To be published in case of my death only
after consultation with experts and declaring that the author considered them in need of through
rewriting”. Come rileva Granata, è evidente che “già un anno dopo l’impegno contrattuale e
l’indicazione abbastanza precisa di quello che doveva essere il testo da pubblicare, l’autore riteneva
necessaria una sua riscrittura”. Per quanto il tipo di revisione che Momigliano aveva in mente sia
difficile da stabilire, indizi significativi sono offerti sia dalle modalità di riproposizione delle EL IIV come GL 1979 – senza variazioni sostanziali, come si è visto – che dall’interruzione della
sequenza, l’anno successivo, con lo sviluppo di secondo e terzo ciclo. Se già era stata sollevata
l’ipotesi che la necessità di riscrittura del testo destinato alla pubblicazione fosse stata imposta
dall’allargamento del disegno iniziale, il rinvenimento dell’introduzione manoscritta alla GL 1981 I
(The Religious and Intellectual Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism), per cui
cfr. supra (p. 28), pare la prova migliore dell’esigenza momiglianea di continuare ad approfondire il
complesso ruolo della storiografia negli sviluppi del giudaismo ellenistico.
In una lettera a J. Mynott datata al 7.2.1980 (all’indomani, quindi, della presentazione a Oxford
del ciclo Daniel and the Origins of the Universal History) è Momigliano stesso a mettere in
relazione il nuovo ciclo sulla storiografia universale con il ritardo nella pubblicazione del libro
CUP, motivando la procrastinazione con il progetto, sopravvenuto nel frattempo, di licenziare
autonomamente la seconda serie di lectures:
The reason why I have kept so silent about my book is that three chapters of it have emerged as an
independent product, The Origins of Universal History, which I have just read as the Grinfield
Lectures at Oxford this year… to be published independently as a little book on its own. The other
book will follow as promised, probably under the original title56.
Anche da Daniel and the Origins of Universal History, tuttavia, Momigliano non ricaverà mai
una monografia indipendente, optando piuttosto per la pubblicazione – sia pure in forma ridotta o
53
In direzione di una maggiore vicinanza del ciclo Efroymson rispetto al progetto edito vanno, inoltre, le annotazioni
conservate sui raccoglitori o folders delle lectures di serie P-o. Il VII, che contiene il testo delle “revised Northcliffe”
reca infatti l’annotazione “not to be published in case of my death as needing still much revision, July 1977”. La data e
il contenuto della cartella permettono di ricondurre la nota, con buona plausibilità, all’assetto testuale Northcliffe. Il VI,
invece, che contiene il testo delle Efroymson, ne identifica il contenuto come “Efroymson – CUP”, suggerendo come
quindi fosse questa la versione destinata alla pubblicazione.
54
GRANATA 1999, 88-92.
55
SOLDANI 2009 (part. alle pp. 7, 11, 17-18).
56
Cfr. inoltre quanto Momigliano scrive in una lettera ad Anne Marie Meyer del 9.5.79, in riferimento al secondo ciclo:
“Le lezioni di qui, ridotte a tre (2,3,5) potrebbero fare un piccolo libro non stupido”.
30
parziale – dei singoli contributi: se Two Types of Universal History (per il quale non era comunque
previsto l’inserimento nel volume) viene edito autonomamente57, una versione riassunta e conflata
di Universal History e Daniel sarà proposta a breve distanza come Creighton Lecture a Londra e poi
licenziata con il titolo The Origins of Universal History58, mentre alcuni degli spunti della terza
lecture saranno riproposti nel breve saggio Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide59.
Il materiale dato alla stampa non esaurisce tuttavia né l’indagine del secondo ciclo né, tanto
meno, della ricerca nella sua interezza. Come già osservato da Riccardo Di Donato
nell’introduzione all’edizione italiana delle Sather Classical Lectures, appare plausibile che “la
pubblicazione di singoli tasselli avesse per Momigliano carattere provvisorio e che lo stesso autore
intedesse l’importanza del quadro generale della sua ricerca anche per la comprensione dei singoli
elementi”60, soprattutto se si considera come lo stesso terzo ciclo di conferenze fosse destinato
plausibilmente ad essere riassorbito in From Synagogue to Apocalypse. A corroborare tale ipotesi è
ancora un’annotazione manoscritta dell’autore alle lectures di Chicago, “provisional text for all the
lectures in Chicago revised to 9-V-81. If I die, this may be considered for publication after revision
and checking… declaring circumstances.”
Posto come l’annotazione renda chiara la determinazione dell’autore a onorare l’impegno
assunto con la CUP, ne deriva che la mancanza di pubblicazione possa essere ricondotta a due
ordini di problemi, già rilevati da Giovanna Granata61: in primo luogo, la necessità di una revisione
formale del testo, che – nato per essere letto – aveva bisogno di un apparato di note e di un controllo
rigoroso delle citazioni; ancora, è plausibile che Momigliano stesso provasse incertezza nel definire
il taglio editoriale dell’opera, considerato il progressivo ampliamento e arricchimento del progetto
iniziale. In tal senso, non appare improbabile che proprio la mancata pubblicazione autonoma del
piccolo libro sulla storia universale valga come indizio di un ripensamento rispetto a quanto
annunciato nella lettera a Mynott e della volontà di tornare a riproporre la sezione dall’interno di un
quadro più generale.
Il sopraggiungere di impegni e interessi paralleli faranno comunque sì che il progetto editoriale,
quale che fosse, non venga mai portato a compimento. Oltre ai titoli sopra menzionati, di tutto il
materiale complessivo solo due lectures saranno date alle stampe da Momigliano: la GL 1979 II,
The Greeks outside the Persian Empire62, e la CL 1981 V, How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans63.
A queste si possono aggiungere le Indicazioni Preliminari su Apocalissi ed Esodo che riprendono la
riflessione sulla letteratura rabbinica a distanza di qualche anno (siamo ormai nel 1985) e, l’anno
successivo, la pubblicazione della conferenza di Chicago sulla storia delle religioni, From the
Pagan to the Christian Sybil; in entrambi i casi l’ulteriore elaborazione dei temi fa tuttavia sì che
siano abbastanza pochi i contatti testuali con le lectures. Ne deriva come di fatto poco dei cicli sul
giudaismo ellenistico sia stato pubblicato e che From Synagogue to Apocalypse sia rimasto –
evidentemente per ragioni di tempo, prima che di interesse – un libro inedito.
C’è però una prova che Momigliano fosse tornato a mettere mano al progetto a distanza di anni
(forse addirittura nel 1985) ed è con questa prova che il percorso di ricostruzione della storia degli
Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism può concludersi. Il completamento del regesto AAM da parte di
57
Cfr. Two Types.
Cfr. Origins. Per le modifiche strutturali rispetto alle due lectures da cui deriva si rimanda alle rispettive introduzioni.
Un’analisi della teoria momiglianea sul libro di Daniele viene proposta anche nel saggio Daniele e la teoria greca della
successione degli imperi (=Daniele).
59
Cfr. Ciò che Flavio.
60
DI DONATO 1992, X.
61
GRANATA 1999, 91.
62
Cfr. Greek outside. Pubblicata già nel 1979 all’interno della Festschrift dedicata ad Isaiah Berlin, offre in questa sede
un’introduzione di notevole importanza nella ricostruzione del progetto editoriale sul giudaismo ellenistico: “I offer
here to Isaiah Berlin an attempt to define the Greek attitude (or attitudes) towards the Persians, reserving the
comparison with the Jewish attitude (or attitudes) for a little volume which I am writing at present”.
63
Cfr. Reconcile.
31
58
Giovanna Granata ha infatti permesso ad Antonella Soldani di individuare un documento che
conserva evidenti interventi editoriali di Momigliano sulla GL 1979 I (Prologue), testimoniando
una revisione dello scritto in vista della pubblicazione. Si tratta di P-o 89, dattiloscritto che, oltre a
interventi puntuali (per la rassegna dei quali si rimanda all’introduzione alla lecture) offre,
nell’ultima pagina, la significativa sostituzione del rimando “in my next lecture” con un “in my next
chapter”64. È plausibile che il testo sia stato ripreso in considerazione negli anni Ottanta65, essendo
conservato con annotazioni di Anne Marie Meyer di cui l’ultima è databile al 1985. Ulteriore
indizio della funzione editoriale del fascicolo è la conservazione in allegato di due fogli manoscritti
che riportano estratti del contratto con la CUP e uno schema delle Grinfield Lectures datato al
2.10.81. La presenza in quest’ultimo di tutti e quattro i cicli (e non soltanto del primo e del quarto)
risulta l’ultimo di una serie di indizi a favore della profonda interconnessione del sistema di lectures
e della volontà di Momigliano di dare, per così dire, ragione all’insieme. In conclusione, per quanto
non abbia valore determinante nella ricostruzione della struttura del libro (o forse dei libri)
progettati e mai realizzati, la scelta di proporre in questa sede l’esatta successione cronologica delle
lectures intende restituire l’ultima struttura perseguita – e comunicata – dell’indagine, nel rispetto
della complessità di impostazione degli Aspects of Hellenistic Judaism.
Lea Niccolai
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
64
Va tuttavia segnalato come tale sostituzione si accompagni alla conservazione, nella pagina immediatamente
precedente (c. 24), dell’espressione “this first lecture was intended to be a valediction” (cfr. infra, p. 53). Possibile
dimenticanza, la definizione di “lecture” non risulta ad ogni modo problematica nella valutazione di P-o 89 come
testimone privilegiato del processo di elaborazione editoriale, posta la tendenza di Momigliano a conservare
l’oscillazione tra le espressioni “lecture” e “chapter” nei volumi editi a partire da raccolte di conferenze: emblematico il
caso di Alien Wisdom, in cui la definizione dei capitoli come “lectures” si mantiene in quattro casi (“In the next lecture I
shall produce some evidence that about 190- 185 b.C. (…)”, p. 4; “I shall therefore devote the substance of my lecture
to a study of the cultural connections (…)”, p. 6; “we shall have to ask ourselves in the next lecture (…), p. 21; “with
the consequences which I hope to illustrate in my next lecture (…)”, p. 49).
65
Cfr. SOLDANI 2009, 17.
32
I CICLI DI CONFERENZE SUL GIUDAISMO ELLENISTICO DI ARNALDO MOMIGLIANO, 1977 - 198266
NL 1977
(gen.)
1
Prologue in Germany
BETWEEN SYNAGOGUE AND APOCALYPSE
CL 1977
EL 1978
(apr.-mag.)
(ott.-nov.)
1
1
Prologue in Germany
Prologue in Germany
GL 1979
(gen.-feb.)
1
Prologue in Germany
2
The Temple and the
Synagogue
2
The Temple and the
Synagogue
2
The Greeks outside the
Persian Empire
2
3
Attitudes to Foreigners
and Visions of the Past
3
The Rabbies and the
Communities
3
The Jews inside the
Persian Empire
3
4
4
4
4
From History to
Apocalypse
Jews and Gentiles
The Greeks outisde the
Persian Empire
The Jews inside the
Persian Empire
The Defence against
Hellenization
The Defence against
Hellenization
5
From History to
Apocalypse
5
Jews and Gentiles
6
The Decline of History
and Apocalypse and the
Defence
against
the
Romans
DANIEL AND THE WORLD EMPIRES
GS 1979
GL 1980
(gen.feb.)
(nov.)
1
1
Universal History in
Universal History in
Greece and Rome
Greece and Rome
CL 1979
(apr.-mag.)
1
Two Types of Universal
History. The Cases of E.A.
Freeman and Max Weber.
2
Universal History in
Greece and Rome
2
Daniel and the World
Empires
2
3
3
Daniel and the World
Empires
Flavius Josephus, the Pagan
Historians and the Birth of
Christian HIstoriography
3
Daniel and the Dangers
of Apocalyptic
Flavis Josephus, the Pagan
Historians and the Birth of
Christian Historiography
[4 The Greeks outside and the
Jews inside the Persian Empire]
5
The Paradox of the Roman
Empire and Christian
Historiography
THE JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY OF RESISTANCE
GL 1981
CL 1981
(gen.-feb.)
(apr.-mag.)
1
1
The Intellectual and Religious
The Intellectual and Religious
Resistance to Greco-Macedonian
Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and
and Roman Imperialism
Roman Imperialism. Greece.
2
Some Exemplary Stories from
the Jewish World
2
The Intellectual and Religious
Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and
Roman Imperialism. The East.
3
From the Books of Maccabees
to Philo
3
Some Exemplary Stories from the
Jewish World
4
From the Books of Maccabees to
Philo
5
How to Reconcile Greeks and
Trojans
66
Fonte del grafico: SOLDANI 2009, 22-23.
33
5
BETWEEN SYNAGOGUE AND APOCALYPSE
EL 1978
GL 1982
(gen.-feb.)
1
Jews and Gentiles
Jews and Gentiles
6
The Decline of History and
Apocalypse and the Defence
against the Romans
2
The Jewish Sects
in the Sources
3
The Decline of History and
Apocalypse
forti rielaborazioni
rapporto diretto, con
rielaborazioni di minor rilievo
34
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
GL 1979 I Prologue in Germany
Sedi e date:
NL 1977 (17 gennaio – cfr. D-a 1)
CL 1977 (ante 15 aprile – cfr. carteggio).
EL 1978 (29 ottobre – cfr. D-a 1)
GL 1979 (24 gennaio – GRANATA 2006, 419).
Documenti
- [Old] Prologue in Germany
a) NL 1977 I [The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism]
P-o 2, P-o 3: ms.
P-o 5: top c. con aggiunte
P-o 4 (a), P-o 30 (a), P-o 31 (a): c.c. di P-o 5.
- [New] Prologue in Germany
a) CL 1977 I – EL 1978 I
P-o 87 ms.
P-o 159: c.c. di P-o 5 + P-o 87
P-o 16, P-o 30 (b): xerox di P-o 159
P-o 35: top c., nuova versione basata su P-o 30 (a-b)
P-o 60, P-o 71, P-o 72 (a) : c.c. di P-o 35
P-o 72 (b) aggiunte mss.
b) GL 1979 I [cfr. Bibl. 610 bis]
P-o 61, aggiunte mss.
P-o 62, P-o 73, P-o 89: nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 61 + 72, c.c.
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
La Grinfield Lecture intitolata Prologue in Germany è stata pubblicata nel 1992 da Riccardo Di
Donato e posta in seguito da Glenn Most, in traduzione tedesca, a chiusura della raccolta
momiglianea da lui curata1. La versione che si intende riproporre qui coincide ampiamente, ma non
interamente, con quella precedentemente edita: grazie al completamento nel 2006 del regesto AAM
da parte di Giovanna Granata si è individuato infatti un documento che pare conservare gli ultimi
interventi di Momigliano sulla lezione, presentando piccole differenze con il testo edito2.
Si tratta di P-o 89, una c.c. di 25 carte dss. con correzioni autografe e di mano di AMM: la
presenza in allegato di due fogli mss. connessi all’impegno contratto con la Cambridge University
Press, unitamente a una significativa correzione (sostituzione di “in my next lecture” in “in my next
chapter”, c. 24) hanno indotto a pensare che la copia testimoni un ritorno al progetto editoriale
sottoscritto nel novembre del 1978.
P-o 89 non offre il testo letto a Oxford il 24 gennaio 1979 3: annotazioni mss. di AMM
identificano piuttosto la reading copy in P-o 62, ds. di 25 carte corredato da interventi mss. per lo
più autografi. Aggiunte e modifiche su P-o 89 e P-o 62, peraltro discedenti da un originale comune
(P-o 61 + 72), non risultano sempre perfettamente coincidenti. La reading copy appare testimone
esclusivo di alcune importanti correzioni e integrazioni mss. d’autore, che segnalano progettualità
(la possibile articolazione dei due cicli oxoniensi sul giudaismo ellenistico, c.254; il proposito di
1
Nono, 543-562 (le citazioni bibliografiche, nella forma esatta e completa riportata nel testo, si devono all'intervento
redazionale di AMM); G. W. Most in MOMIGLIANO 2000, 367-368 (cfr. particolarmente p. 368 per le ragioni che
inducono a porre la lecture, qui definita eine der tiefsinnigsten und zugleich persönlichsten in Momiglianos ganzem
Oeuvre).
2
GRANATA 2006, XCI.
3
Data ms. da AMM su P-o 89, c. 1.
4
“These three themes [i.e. Il rapporto di Greci ed Ebrei con la Persia; le forme di comunicazione tra Ebrei della
diaspora; i limiti dello scambio tra Ebrei e gentili] will occupy me in the remaining two lectures of this year and in three
lectures which I hope to deliver next year” (n. 74). L’affermazione appare significativa tanto per il rimando alle due
lectures successive (anziché alle tre che effettivamente completano il ciclo GL 1979) quando per l’annuncio di un
successivo ciclo di tre lezioni destinato alla conclusione dell’indagine sul giudaismo ellenistico. Se il primo dato
potrebbe rappresentare un semplice lapsus (le due lectures GL 1979 II e III rispondono insieme a uno solo dei tre
35
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
pubblicare uno studio su Moritz Friedlaender, c. 12) e ripensamento di nozioni (la citazione di una
“Sinagoga degli ellenisti” in Gerusalemme di Atti 6,9 diventa un più generico riferimento alla
presenza di “Ellenisti”, c. 14; è cancellato un enunciato sull’immediata ellenizzazione del
cristianesimo, c. 17). È probabile tuttavia che sia stato lo stesso Momigliano a scartare queste
varianti: le caratteristiche di P-o 62 e di P-o 89 lasciano supporre che il primo documento, la cui
tendenza alle correzioni contrasta con il ductus lineare delle trascrizioni sul secondo, sia stato
ripreso dopo la lettura ad Oxford e utilizzato come fonte di correzioni e addenda da riportare sulla
quasi identica base ds. di P-o 89 per iniziare a formare il libro.
Certa è la recenziorità di P-o 89 anche rispetto a un terzo documento Grinfield, P-o 73: una c.c.
di 25 carte, riveduta e corretta a mano da AMM, del tutto simile a P-o 89 e P-o 62 per quanto
riguarda il testo dattiloscritto e le correzioni formali. Mancano tuttavia nel testo, divenuto poi la
base per l’edizione nel Nono contributo, alcuni interventi che risultano quindi varianti per così dire
congiuntive di P-o 89 e P-o 62. Va sottolineato come, rispetto al testo pubblicato, l’apporto di P-o
89 alla conoscenza del pensiero dell’autore non sia sostanziale: il nuovo documento restituisce
tuttavia alcune variazioni di sfumatura, aggiunte bibliografiche e piccole precisazioni5.
2. Versioni precedenti della lezione: i documenti.
Le reading copies conservate nell’AAM permettono di identificare un susseguirsi di interventi
che plasmano il testo di Prologue in Germany, sia per aggiunta che per sottrazione di materiali, fino
al raggiungimento della forma Grinfield. Testimonia la struttura di NL 1977 I la reading copy P-o
4, c.c. fittamente annotata di P-o 5, che conserva tra l’altro anche i primi titoli assegnati da
Momigliano alla lezione e all’intero ciclo Northcliffe: The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic
Judaism e Between Romance and Apocalypse: the World of Jewish Hellenistic Literature. Solo il
primo dei due capitoli delle Foundations (cc. 1-13) corrisponde nei contenuti ai temi del Prologue
nella sua forma più recente; il secondo (cc. 14-26), destinato a sviluppo autonomo come parte
iniziale della CL 1977 II, The Temple and the Synagogue, rivolge piuttosto la sua attenzione alla
fondazione e alla storia delle due istituzioni.
Così il lunghissimo (37 cc.) e composito documento P-o 159, malgrado l’indicazione
“Northcliffe Lectures I” apposta sulla prima carta, raccoglie in realtà insieme il testo di CL 1977 I
(prime 22 cc.) e CL 1977 II (ultime 14 cc.), di cui risulta reading copy grazie alla presenza delle
consuete note di lettura: l’attribuzione al ciclo NL leggibile sulla prima carta si spiega perché
originariamente presente sul documento di cui P-o 159 è xerocopia6. La varietà della paginazione e
della dattiloscrittura del documento rivelano modifiche profonde rispetto all’assetto precedente del
testo, in rapporto alla ristrutturazione complessiva cui Momigliano sottopone la propria ricerca
subito dopo il primo ciclo Northcliffe del 1977.
Documento base di P-o 159 è P-o 5, top copy NL 1977 I con aggiunte, interessata da due
correzioni autografe di rilievo (riportate anche su P-o 159): la modifica del titolo dell’intero ciclo,
interrogativi proposti, la relazione di Greci ed Ebrei con la Persia, offrendo per così dire un nucleo argomentativo
unitario) la seconda allusione appare invece di grande importanza nella valutazione dell’organicità del progetto
momiglianeo e della sua evoluzione nel tempo: il ciclo a cui lo storico rimanda non può infatti essere identificato nelle
GL 1980 né in quelle del 1981, ma corrisponde chiaramente alla quarta e ultima serie (1982). Ciò significa che nel
gennaio del 1979 Momigliano era ancora lontano dall’idea di una ripartizione quadripartita dell’indagine complessiva e
di un suo ampliamento in direzione dei temi, ai quali andava interessandosi in parallelo, della storiografia universale e
resistenziale. Per l’evoluzione del progetto in tal senso sulla plausibile base di modifiche del contratto si rimanda all’
Introduzione al testo.
5
Ad esempio, la modifica nella “percentuale di sfiducia” espressa in relazione alla Formgeschichte, c.1; i riferimenti a
Weber e Sanders, c.5, e a Geiger, c.11; l’esplicitazione dell’opinione dell’autore sul ruolo della Persia in relazione alle
origini della capacità di reazione del giudaismo, c. 24; il riferimento al progetto editoriale, c. 25.
6
In GRANATA 2006 P-o 159 è invece classificato sub NL 1977 I insieme a P-o 87 (aggiunte mss.), anch'esso
plausibilmente testimone della versione CL.
36
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
con la sostituzione della parola Romance con Synagogue, e un intervento su quello della singola
lecture, che affianca alle Foundations la dicitura Prologue in Germany7.
Una terza reading copy testimonia infine la versione Efroymson. Si tratta di P-o 72, c.c. riveduta,
corretta a mano e corredata da carte mss. autografe per un totale di 23 fogli. Il lavoro destinato al
pubblico dello Hebrew Union College di Cincinnati consiste soprattutto di aggiunte alla versione
CL: occorre però segnalare che almeno due di queste sembrerebbero contenere testo Grinfield
(certamente la c. 10 bis, ma probabilmente anche la c. 13 bis), per cui P-o 72 appare plausibile
testimone di una prima fase di preparazione della GL, svolta come di consueto sulla reading copy
del testo più recente8. Proprio al testo di questa lezione, che reca per la prima volta il solo titolo
Prologue in Germany, Momigliano apporterà le ultime aggiunte per la GL 1979 I: una nuova
introduzione (P-o 89, cc. 1-4) e un nuovo finale (P-o 89, c. 25).
3. Argomento della lecture
Il problema della comparsa della Septuaginta prima e della sua sparizione poi dal patrimonio
culturale ebraico coincide con quello della natura e dei limiti del giudaismo ellenistico. Preso in
considerazione già da Azariah de’ Rossi, che nella Mantova del 1573 riflette per primo sulla
letteratura al crocevia tra antico testamento e testi rabbinici, è destinato però a dover attendere
l’idealismo ottocentesco per imporsi definitivamente all’attenzione del panorama scientifico
tedesco. Ѐ la medietà del giudaismo ellenistico tra Oriente e grecità a suscitare nuovo interesse tra
gli Ebrei tedeschi profondamente integrati nella vita culturale della Germania: alla condanna
hegeliana dell’ebraismo come espressione di una frattura tra Dio e Natura, sanabile solo dal
cristianesimo, risponde nel periodo 1830-35 il dibattito sul ruolo del pensiero giudaico-ellenistico e
della sua figura più emblematica, Filone di Alessandria, nella preparazione al cristianesimo stesso.
Va in direzione alternativa a questa tesi la posizione di Droysen, che nel clima di riscoperta degli
studi sull’antico Oriente coglie alle origini del cristianesimo la soluzione di un conflitto fra civiltà,
risemantizzando su questa base il termine “ellenismo” allo scopo di identificare un periodo storico
culturalmente, politicamente ed economicamente inquadrabile.
Le scoperte di Qumran e Nag Hammadi hanno ulteriormente contribuito ad ampliare e a
migliorare la prospettiva della ricerca novecentesca sul giudaismo. L’impressione che ogni testo
composto dai tempi di Alessandro fino a Costantino mostri influenze greche ha portato alcuni
studiosi (Bickerman, Hengel) a definire come “ellenistica” la produzione letteraria dell’intero arco
cronologico menzionato. L’alternativa di Daniélou, che isola dottrine e pratiche tardogiudaiche e
cristiane irriducibili a influenza greca, identificando così una continuità privilegiata tra Sinagoga e
Chiesa, induce però Momigliano a cercare una terza via di indagine, tesa non tanto a riconoscere
somiglianze e differenze tra giudaismo e culture circostanti, quanto a individuare le modalità con
cui gli Ebrei risposero alla sfida culturale lanciata dai Greco-Macedoni.
Il giudaismo va in conclusione riconsiderato in una prospettiva diacronica, dai primi sviluppi
determinati dal contatto con la cultura persiana fino agli esiti rabbinici e normativi di età romana, in
un’ottica di superamento piuttosto che di adesione alla categoria dell’”ellenismo”: valida nei limiti
della distinzione, debole e di prospettiva cristiana, tra il giudaismo farisaico di Palestina e quello
ellenizzato di Alessandria, la definizione fallisce nel cogliere come la sopravvivenza del giudaismo
tra i Greci prima e tra i Romani poi sia stata ottenuta non tramite simbiosi e annullamento, quanto
piuttosto per mezzo di una ferma conservazione della propria specificità e cultura creativa.
7
L’assetto del titolo risulta però ancora in fieri: Momigliano scrive a mano a) Prologue in Germany e aggiunge una b)
davanti a The Religious Foundations.
8
Non così in GRANATA 2006, dove la presenza di aggiunte Grinfield in P-o 72 non è segnalata; il contenuto delle c. 10
bis (Domenico Diodati sul greco come lingua di Cristo, cfr. attuale c.14) e 13 bis (il giudaismo ellenistico di Hengel
come praeparatio evangelica e le difficoltà che derivano da tale prospettiva, cfr. c.18) induce però a considerarle
riferibili al ciclo oxoniense.
37
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
4. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi.
Nel momento in cui Momigliano inizia a pensare e a comporre la lezione incipitaria per il suo
primo ciclo di lectures, Prologue in Germany è ancora lontana dall’esistere. Le versioni più vecchie
sono ancora contrassegnate dal titolo The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism, e solo
nell'imminenza dell'esposizione pubblica il Prologue inizierà a emergere come unità a sé stante.
Alla diversa designazione risponde la profonda discrepanza dell'oggetto designato. Già il plurale dei
“fondamenti” pare rimandare a una stesura bipartita: un primo capitolo che affronta da una
prospettiva metodologica i presupposti religiosi e l'origine teologica della nozione di giudaismo
ellenistico; un secondo, che sceglie invece di delineare lo stretto rapporto della civiltà degli Ebrei
nel periodo ellenistico con i "fondamenti religiosi" del Tempio e della sinagoga che avevano
contribuito a produrla9.
La sistemazione del ciclo Northcliffe, con la frammentazione del nucleo tematico
Tempio/sinagoga tra prima e seconda lezione, deve però essere apparsa presto insoddisfacente a
Momigliano. Già nell'aprile-maggio dello stesso 1977 lo storico apporta modifiche sostanziali al
ciclo per presentarlo a Chicago: la trattazione sulle istituzioni religiose postesiliche viene riunita in
un'unica sede a esse dedicata, più ampia e organica della Northcliffe Foundations, e preceduta da un
Prologue ampliato in misura rilevante.
La nuova CL 1977 I presenta, rispetto alla versione Grinfield, due differenze formali di
immediata evidenza: non è divisa in capitoli e non si chiama ancora semplicemente Prologue in
Germany, ma appare piuttosto corredata di doppio titolo (documentato da P-o 159) che potrebbe
forse rispondere all’effettiva bipartizione contenutistica, considerando come solo la prima parte sia
incentrata sulle "origini in Germania", mentre la seconda (= capp. III e ss. GL) esce dall'ambito
esclusivo della cultura tedesca per affrontare i diversi orientamenti teologici relativi all’argomento.
Tale struttura viene tuttavia conservata anche nelle versioni successive, dove scompare invece il
titolo bipartito.
Sul piano contenutistico la lezione di Chicago risulta arricchita da diverse aggiunte. La critica
alla scuola di Tubinga introduce un approfondimento relativo alla duplice vexata quaestio degli
influssi greci sull'essenismo e dell’eventuale ruolo di quest’ultimo nella preparazione al
cristianesimo (P-o 159, cc. 3-6). Lo spostamento del capitolo su Tempio e sinagoga permette a
Momigliano di dedicare spazio a chiarire un punto importante della sua proposta di metodo, il
superamento delle impostazioni "comparativiste" a vantaggio del proprium dell'indagine: gli Ebrei,
ciò che accadde loro nell'incontro con l'ellenismo, che cosa gli opposero. Fa così il suo ingresso nel
prologo il richiamo esplicito alla linea di ricerca di Eduard Meyer10: per presentarla vengono scritte
nuove pagine, che rispondono certo alla necessità di allargare la trattazione per il nuovo ciclo in
cinque lectures 11 , ma che appaiono anche coerenti con l'abbandono dell’idea di chiudere il
"prologo" Northcliffe con un'opzione di (moderata) maggior vicinanza all'interpretazione storica di
Daniélou piuttosto che a quella di Bickerman. I due studiosi vengono ora accomunati nella presa di
distanza dalla loro comune debolezza di impostazione: la volontà di spiegare con il giudaismo le
origini del cristianesimo. Un’indagine sulla resistenza degli Ebrei all’ellenizzazione richiede
piuttosto che si tenga conto dell'indagine meyeriana su quanto il giudaismo debba, nel suo
costituirsi, alla Persia.
La successiva rielaborazione del Prologue in vista del ciclo Efroymson di Cincinnati presenta,
rispetto al testo di Chicago, differenze non vistose, benché significative. A parte la breve premessa
9
Da segnalare inoltre come in The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism la simmetria contrastiva della
struttura rispetto a The Historical Foundations of Post-Biblical Judaism di Bickerman (1949) sia troppo perfetta per non
essere voluta. La scelta sembra esprimere un intento emulativo sotteso agli esordi della vicenda che sarà tuttavia quasi
subito abbandonato, almeno per quanto riguarda l’esplicitazione formale nel titolo.
10
Cfr. Le radici classiche della storiografia moderna. Sather Classical Lectures, ed. it. di Momigliano 1990, a cura di
R. Di Donato, Firenze 1992, cap. I, "Storiografia persiana, storiografia greca e storiografia ebraica", part. alle pp. 23 ss.
11
Cfr. lettera al 15.4.1977: "E devo allargare quella che è diventata la quinta lecture su Apocalissi. Ho allargato la
prima parte con un paio di pagine su E. Meyer"
38
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
di omaggio alla tradizione di studi dell'Hebrew Union College (P-o 72, c. [1] ms.12), e alcuni
approfondimenti per i quali l'ambiente dello Hebrew Union College può aver agito da stimolo (e.g.
sul liberale Friedlaender, P-o 72, c. 7bis13), l'aggiunta cruciale si individua alla fine e consiste non
in un incremento degli argomenti affrontati, ma al contrario in una vera e propria recusatio del tema
romano (P-o 72, c. 19bis14). Nelle lezioni tenute a Cincinnati la presenza di Roma è infatti limitata
al tema della "defence against the Romans" così come si presenta nel sesto e ultimo intervento: al
taglio operato sulla parte "bassa" della cronologia (versante romano e rabbinico della ricerca)
corrisponde un ampliamento "in alto", coerente con l'opzione meyeriana (Greci e Persiani) e, si è
tentati di dire, con un ambito storiografico in cui il magistero di Momigliano era più che mai sicuro.
Anche se molti lavori della maturità che si trovano a toccare aspetti della storia degli studi sul
giudaismo ellenistico risultano a questo punto già scritti da alcuni anni e i punti di vista dell'autore
appaiono ormai consolidati, non si può non osservare la particolare attenzione dedicata a Eduard
Meyer nei saggi che dal 1977 al 1981 accompagnano, nei cicli di lezioni sul giudaismo ellenistico,
il progressivo concentrarsi sull'età greca e l'approfondimento in direzione degli elementi fondanti,
collocandosi a monte (piuttosto che a valle) del tema in analisi: la pervasività della riflessione di
Meyer non è tuttavia che un aspetto di un progetto che va modificandosi secondo un metodo – dalla
visione sintetica nel concepimento di un tema, al procedimento analitico in profondità che tende a
delimitarlo e/o scandagliarne singole parti – non certo insolito per Momigliano e difficilmente
riconducibile a una singola motivazione o influenza15.
Rimane come unico terreno sicuro quello delle motivazioni dichiarate, e nel nostro caso i
documenti sono espliciti: già a Cincinnati Momigliano sottolinea (P-o 72, 19bis) la cesura che la
dominazione romana segna nella storia del giudaismo, costituendo rispetto al periodo greco un
oggetto distinto di studi che limiti di competenze e tempo lo spingono a non affrontare.
Conseguenza è che la stessa età dei rabbini viene sospinta al di fuori dell’indagine, come
Momigliano torna a ribadire nell'ultima Grinfield: “To pass from the Qumran texts and the Gospels
to the Mishnah and Tosefta requires a jump I am too old to make” (GL 1982 III, c. 17bis).
L’ultima e definitiva versione della lecture, l’oxoniense GL 1979 I, nasce per accrescimento
rispetto alla EL 1978 I: P-o 89, P-o 62, P-o 73 si presentano come riscritture prodotte a partire da un
testo che viene suddiviso in capitoli e arricchito all’inizio e alla fine da importanti aggiunte.
L'ampia e densa introduzione (4 cc., conservate ms. in P-o 61) trascende evidentemente
l'occasione: il tema, connesso al contesto Grinfield, della dipendenza del ciclo di lectures
dall’indagine sulla Septuaginta, permette a Momigliano di cogliere l'opportunità di un
approfondimento nella forma di un "preludio italiano" che va a ricollegarsi a momenti significativi
della propria storia familiare e della personale vicenda di studioso. Nelle nuove considerazioni finali
– prima del cenno alla successiva lezione (o capitolo, in P-o 89) – appare evidente come
Momigliano sia giunto a definire con la massima chiarezza e rigore il proprio progetto di indagine.
Più decisa che in passato risulta la scelta di superare la nozione di giudaismo ellenistico, troppo
vincolata a implicazioni teologiche ("this first lecture was intended to be a valediction to the notion
of Hellenistic Judaism"). Per la prima volta vengono resi espliciti i centri di interesse sulle origini
dell'identità giudaica e sulle forme e i limiti della comunicazione tra Ebrei e Greci. Il progetto così
delineato appare ormai non solo corrispondente in linea di massima all'effettivo svolgimento del
primo e dell'ultimo ciclo Grinfield, ma anche compatibile con gli estesi sviluppi storiografici dei
due cicli intermedi sulla storia universale e sulla storiografia della resistenza.
12
Vd. apparato ad loc., n. 26.
Paragrafo poi conservato nel testo della versione GL, vd. c. 12.
14
Confluita nelle cc. 24-5 della versione GL (da “I have neither the time nor the competence to go into the second
question of how the Jews saved themselves from the Romans” fino alla chiusa “I am, after all, a student of
historiography”).
15
Sugli "studi non realizzati in modo corrispondente al disegno originario" anche e soprattutto in relazione al
giudaismo ellenistico, cfr. particolarmente DI DONATO 1992, x.
39
13
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
I
[Between Synagogue and Apocalypse] *16
Introduction
Nowadays every self respecting17 ancient historian expects to find a theological forger under his
bed. No wonder that when I18 received the honour of being invited to be the Grinfield Lecturer on
the Septuagint for two academic years I suspected a theological forgery.19 But20 the authenticity of a
letter from Miss C. L. Lee of the University of Oxford can be more easily ascertained than the
authenticity of a letter by Plato or St. Paul. The letter was authentic. I had to find its “Sitz im
Leben”. Neither “Quellenforschung” which I trust 80 percent of the time nor “Formgeschichte”,
which I distrust 7021 percent of the time could be of help. I was left with “ratio ipsa”; and “ratio
ipsa” suggested that if the electors to the Grinfield Lectureship had thought of me, it meant that they
did not want me to speak on the Septuagint. But “ratio”, as we all know, is valid “praesertim
accedente Vaticani veteris suffragio”. I therefore asked a kind friend at Christ Church to make some
verifications on my conjecture. The “suffragium” came. I was left to decide in what sense a lecturer
on the Septuagint might lecture without talking about it. The decision was perhaps not so difficult.
I was born in a house full of books – or, to maintain the traditional distinction among Italian
Jews, full of sefarim and of libri. Bibles were abundantly present both among sefarim and libri; but
among the Greek books there was a New Testament, not an Old Testament. When as an
undergraduate I acquired my own copy of Tischendorf’s Septuagint, the lofty thought traversed my
mind that this was the first Septuagint to enter my family’s library since the decline and fall of the
Roman Empire. The “terminus ante quem” for the break between my ancestors and the Septuagint
had of course to be put before February 13, A.D. 553, when the Emperor Justinian tried to prop up
the use of [2] the Septuagint in the Synagogues by his truly remarkable Novella 146.
It is, however, not so easy to be epoch-making, and one minute of reflection was enough to
persuade me that the credit for overcoming the taboo on the Septuagint rather belonged to my
father’s first cousin Felice Momiglianoi who, as professor of philosophy in the University of Rome
and as a writer, so profoundly and subtly wove together the Hebrew prophets and the thinkers of the
Italian Risorgimento – and incidentally introduced Claude Montefiore’s work on Jesus and the
Gospelsii to the Italians.
This is to say that, if in my life I have thought little about the appearance of the Septuagint
among the Jews, I have thought much more about its disappearance among the Jews. The problem
basically coincides with that of the nature and the limits of Jewish Hellenism or Hellenistic
Judaism. I have therefore decided to take the Grinfield Lectureship as an opportunity for an attempt
to define the main characteristics of Hellenistic Judaism within the wider terms of reference of
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 89. Si riportano le varianti di P-o 62 (reading copy di GL 1979, c.c., basata su P-o
72 + 61) e di P-o 73 (ulteriore c.c.). Dei testimoni di versioni non GL (P-o 72, EL; P-o 159, CL; P-o 4, NL) si
segnalano in apparato le varianti significative.
P-o 89, 73, 62: Introduction, tsf; P-o 72: Between Synagogue and Apocalypse: the World of Jewish Hellenistic
Literature – I. Prologue in Germany; P-o 159(privo di introduction): Between Synagogue (<-> Romance, ms[Mom])
and Apocaplypse: the World of Jewish Hellenistic Literature – I. a. Prologue in Germany, interl.ms[Mom]- <b.> The
Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism; P-o 4 (privo di introduzione) Between Romance and Apocalypse: The
World of Jewish Hellenistic Literature – I. The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism.
16
P-o 89: re-typed 8.1.79, tsfmgsn,ms[AMM]; Grinfield I - 24 Jan. 79, mgdx; P-o 73:Introduction (new, 1979) to
Grinfield Lectures (pp. 1-4), tsfms[AMM].
17
P-o 89, 62: self respecting, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73: def. (= Nono).
18
P-o 89, 62: when I -> unexpectedly, del.; P-o 73: corr. def. (= Nono).
19
P-o 62: forgery. What did I know about the Septuagint?, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 89, 73: def. (= Nono).
20
P-o 89: But -> contrary to widespread opinion, del.; P-o 73: corr. def. (= Nono).
21
P-o 89, 62: 70 <-> 80, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73: 80 (= Nono).
40
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
Judaism inside the Hellenistic World. As I have no need to explain to theologians – even if there is
no hope of making the point palatable to ancient historians – not only is Hellenistic Judaism a
theological notion, but Hellenism itself, as a term for the civilization which developed out of
Alexander’s conquests, is a theological notion too. We have to grasp this point and start by
questioning the legitimacy of the research on Hellenistic Judaism which has been going on now for
almost two centuries.
Hence my prologue in Germany. But this prologue must be qualified by two observations.
1) The first observation is almost obvious after my allusion to Justinian’s Novella 146. Though,
as far as our information goes, creative Jewish thought in the Greek language ceased more or less at
the time of Hadrian, the use of Greek in liturgy and polemics went on for several more centuries.
2) The second observation is that though the initial stage of the research on Jewish Hellenism is
clearly to be placed in Germany and in the early decades of the nineteenth century, there was a
moment, about 1573, when the stage was [3] set for a prelude in Italy – more precisely in the Jewish
quarters of Mantua and Ferrara. The intellectual formation of Azariah de’ Rossi, who came out with
his Me’or ‘Enayim, “The Light of the Eyes”iii, in his native Mantua at the age of sixty, remains a
mystery. He had lived for years in Bologna not far from Carlo Sigonio who shared his interests in
chronology and in Jewish institutionsiv, but I do not know of any evidence that they learned from
each other. He was about when Scaliger toured Northern Italy 22 and was delighted to talk,
apparently in Biblical Hebrew, with the slightly puzzled23 local Jews; but there is no sign that
Scaliger and de’ Rossi ever mentioned each other. The traditional learning of Jewish and of
Christian scholars was obviously at de’ Rossi command, but what suddenly impelled this man, who
had never written a book before, to put to himself the questions of the origin and value of the
Septuagint, of the orthodoxy of Philo and of the chronology of the Hellenistic world, remains so far
unexplained. Perhaps a clue is now provided by a letter made known by Johanna Weinberg in her
important paper on de’ Rossi last years just published in the Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore
di Pisa [1978, p. 511]v. The letter is by the Inquisitor of Ferrara, who had friendly relations with de’
Rossi – and describes him as “brutissimo di corpo” but “di bellissimo e singolarissimo ingegno”.
The Inquisitor had had hopes for de’ Rossi’s conversion, but now underlines that de’ Rossi was
himself active in reconverting Marranos to Judaism in Ferrara, where Marranos abounded. The
interest in Marranos seems to be also implicit in de’ Rossi’s poems for the death of Marguerite de
Valois, the wife of Emanuele Filiberto, Duke of Savoy. De’ Rossi’s autograph in three languages –
Hebrew, Aramaic and Latin (the Italian section is missing) – is preserved in Bodley’s. The text has
been repeatedly publishedvi , but it does not seem to have been observed that when Marguerite died
in 1574 her husband had just been compelled by Spain to repeal the decree of 1572 which opened
up24 the Dukedom of Savoy to the settlement of Marranos: Marguerite had been known to support
the project. De’ Rossi was therefore lamenting the death of a friend of Marranos. It was, I suspect,
the meeting with Marranos, rather than [4] the by now traditional cross-fertilization of Jewish
scholars and Italian humanists, which encouraged the new problems and the new answers. De’
Rossi, who took the trouble of translating the Letter of Aristeas into Hebrew, was unaware that Juan
Louis Vives in an out-of-the-way note to St. Augustine’s De Civitate Dei 18, 42vii had recognized it
as a pseudepigraphon. De’ Rossi considered the Letter of Aristeas to be unimpeachable evidence for
the high quality25 of the Septuagint and consequently explained the discrepancies with the Hebrew
text as later corruptions, most of which would have been due to ill-intentioned Greeks and
Egyptians. At the same time de’ Rossi felt that the Septuagint betrayed an Aramaic substratum: an
idea which he later tried to extend to the Gospels in some of his letters to ecclesiastical scholarsviii.
22
P-o 89, 62: He was about when Scaliger toured Northern Italy <-> In 1572 he was living in Ferrara when Scaliger
appeared, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73: corr. def. (= Nono).
23
P-o 89, 62: slightly puzzled, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73, 61: def. (= Nono).
24
P-o 73, 89: up, mgdxmsn[AMM]; P-o 62: def. (= Nono).
25
P-o 89, 62: De’ Rossi considered the Letter of Aristeas to be unimpeachable evidence for the high quality <-> He
gave it full value as evidence for the quality, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73: corr.def. (= Nono).
41
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
Chaotic as it may seem to us, the Me’or ‘Enayim placed for the first time what was known of
Jewish Hellenistic literature between the Old Testament and the Rabbinic texts. Though enchanted
by the little Greek he knew, de’ Rossi mostly used Latin translations, such as that by Gelenius for
Philoix. Even in Italy his experiment was too much for a Jewish culture which was still firmly
committed to preferring the Talmudic authorities and was simply not used to treating the
Septuagint, Philo and the rest as part of the national legacy. The book was never anathematized in
the form which the great Joseph Caro was supposed to have been planning before he died in 1575.
But there were reprobations and refutations (one of them from Judah Loew Bezalel, the Maharal of
Prague)x. Then there was silence around the book for more than two centuries. The first reprint of
the Me’or ‘Enayim, after the original Mantua edition of 1573, was that of Berlin in 1794xi – which is
enough to confirm that what might have been a prologue in Italy had became a prologue in
Germany.26
[5]
Prologue in Germany27
I
A piece of news circulated among the German intelligentsia on the eve of the nineteenth century:
Kant’s philosophy was a revival of Judaism. It was exactly New Year’s Day 1798 when the poet
Friedrich Hölderlin broke the news to his brother Karl: Kant was the Moses of the German Nation;
like Moses he had brought down the Law from the holy mountain. “Kant ... Moses unserer Nation
... der das energische Gesetz vom heiligen Berge bringt”xii. Kant’s holy mountain was of course
Königsberg. Hölderlin was not alarmed, but others were. In the same winter of 1798-99 young
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Hölderlin’s school-fellow and friend, composed his long fragment
– never published in his lifetime – on “Der Geist des Christenthums”xiii in which he condemned
Jerusalem in order to condemn Königsberg. The transcendence of the Kantian God repeated the
transcendence of the Jewish God; Kantian and Jewish sublimity stood against Greek beauty,
“Schönheit”. It was apparently one of the tasks of Christianity to save Greek “Schönheit”. In young
Hegel’s interpretation the incarnate Logos of St. John was meant to heal the Jewish separation
between God and Nature. The great tragedy of the Jewish people – Hegel pressed on – is not a
Greek tragedy; it cannot inspire either terror or compassion... it can only inspire horror. “The
destiny of the Jewish people is the destiny of Macbeth who detached himself from nature”.
Kant could not to be disposed of so easily. The question whether Kantian morality was Jewish
legalistic morality remained a living issue, as we know, throughout the nineteenth century. It is
therefore much earlier than the appearance in 1880 of the book System der altsynagogalen
palästinischen Theologie by Ferdinand Weber, who is the villain in the recent important work by E.
P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism.28xiv It would be interesting to have precise research about
the effect of this characterization of Kantian ethics as Jewish ethics on the fortune of Kantian
philosophy. Hermann Cohen, who at the end of the century from his chair at Marburg made the
26
P-o 4, 159, 72: manca l’Introduction GL; P-o 72: Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen, what I owe to present
members of this College will, I hope, be made clear, howewer insufficiently, from my lectures. But before I start, I
should like to be allowed to pay homage to the memory of the past members of this College who have left a permanent
mark in the study either of Judaism or of the ancient world or of both. Together with the names of the three leaders,
Kaufmann Kohler, Julian Morgenstern and Nelson Glueck, I shall only mention two other names, those of Jacob
Lauterbach - the incomparable master of sober interpretation of texts - and of Isaiah Sonne who together with Umberto
Cassuto contributed more than anybody else in this century to the history of Italian Jews. Nor can I forget that Isaiah
Sonne became an Italian citizen only to share some of the worst experiences of us Italian Jews, ms[Mom] su c.[1].
27
P-o 72: Reading copy, tsfmgsn, ms[Mom]; revised Northcliffe Lecture I, tsfmgdxmsl[JW]; P-o 159: Northcliffe
Lecture I, tsfms[JW]; P-o 4: Northcliffe Lecture I, tsfmsl[JW].
28
P-o 89: It is therefore much earlier ... the recent important work... Judaism, mginfms[Mom]; P-o 62: It is therefore
much older ... the recent important treatise... Judaism, mginfms[Mom]; P-o 73 e prec.: def. (= Nono).
42
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
identification of the two moralities the corner-stone of his Neo-Kantian position, had been [6]
educated in the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau.
What matters to us here is that Hölderlin, Hegel and their other school-fellow, Friedrich Wilhelm
Schelling, in their anxiety to heal the Jewish separation between God and Nature, between goodness
and beauty, found themselves exposed to the dangers of becoming Jewish gnostics. Three years
after Hegel’s death his pupil Ferdinand Christian Baur discussed the question openly in his book
Die christliche Gnosis oder die christliche Religions-Philosophie in ihrer geschichtlichen
Entwicklung (1835). He revived a distinction proposed in 1818 by Augustus Neanderxv between
Jewish and anti-Jewish gnostics and included Hegel among the Jewish or pro-Jewish gnostics, but
classified Schleiermacher among the anti-Jewish gnostics.
Jewish gnosticism, theosophy, even Kabbalah were words which circulated freely in those years
– to indicate both the starting point of Christian theology and what to many Germans seemed to be
the final development of Christian theology – the philosophies of Schleiermacher, Schelling and
Hegel. It was the Jewish convert David Mendel – universally respected under the name of Augustus
Neander as one of the most important Lutheran theologians – who presented the Jewish philosopher
Philo of Alexandria as the gnostic predecessor of St. Paul.
From a different angle Friedrich Creuzer came to contribute to the same revaluation of
Alexandrian Jewish thought. This was hardly his original intention. In the last volume of his
Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen, the first edition of which was
published in 1812 and the second in 1822, he compared the Palestinian Essenes and the Egyptian
Therapeutae with the Pythagoreans and concluded that the similarity was due to Persian or more
generally Eastern influences on both the Pythagoreans and the Jewish sects29. This was taken a step
further by Ferdinand Christian Baur in his Apollonius von [7] Tyana und Christus oder das
Verhältniss des Pythagoreismus zum Christenthum of 1832 in which he maintained the direct
influence of Pythagoreanism on Essenism and in its turn of Essenism on at least some groups of
early Judeo-Christian such as the Ebionites. In a dissertation of the previous year, 1831, De
Ebionitarum origine et doctrina ab Essenis repetenda, he had already interpreted the doctrines of
the Ebionites as a Christian variety of Essenism. At this point, consciously or unconsciously, Baur
rejoined the theory which had been widespread among deists and rationalists of the eighteenth and
early nineteenth century that Christianity was a variety of Essenism. Some people, like John
Anderson in his The Constitution of the Free-Masons of 1723, had gone even farther: they had
included Pythagoreans and Freemasons in the company of Essenes and early Christians. What had
been free fantasy for propagandists of deism and for Freemasons became a serious historical theory
with Ferdinand Christian Baur. The seriousness is confirmed by the fact that other very competent
scholars expressed similar views more or less at the same time and probably independently from
Baur. In the same year 1831 in which Baur published his dissertation on the Ebionites, August
Gfrörer issued his celebrated work Philo und die Alexandrinische Theosophie, in which he took
Philo to be an Essene – and the Essenes to be Pythagoreans. He also took Rabban Gamaliel to be an
Essene who knew his Philo. As Gamaliel was the teacher of Paul according to Acts (22.3), the
influence of Greek thought on St. Paul did not need further demonstration. Three years later August
Ferdinand Dähne, then a Privatdozent in Halle, published two thick volumes of a Geschichtliche
Darstellung der jüdisch-alexandrinischen Religions-Philosophie (1834) in which he supported a
similar point of view with more sobriety. Pythagoreanism was for him only one element of the
doctrine of the Essenes and of the Therapeutae, whom he considered two different sects. But it
remained true for him that the Essenes influenced early Christianity. Dähne was the first to study in
depth the whole literature by Jews in Greek language. As a by-product of his interest in the relation
between Philo, Essenes and Christians, he became the founder of modern [8] research on the Jewish
literature in Greek.
29
P-o 89, 62: and the Jewish sects <-> and the two Jewish sects, mgnms[Mom]; P-o 73 e prec.: corr.def. (= Nono).
43
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
It may be added that the importance attributed to the relations between Pythagoreans and
Essenes for the origin of Christianity explains the part played by this idea in the mind of Eduard
Zeller, the unsurpassed historian of Greek philosophy. He was Ferdinand Christian Baur’s son-inlaw and considered himself the interpreter and the defender of the Tübingen Schoolxvi, but, needless
to say, would not have been moved by family considerations to devote so much time and space to
the relations between Pythagoreans and Essenes if it had not been a question of the origins of
Christianity. In 1899, at a distance of about 50 years from his first publications on this subject, he
still reiterated Baur’s theory that Pythagoras introduced30 a Greek element into Christianity via the
Essenes. In this particular paper he also involved the Orphics as non-separable from the
Pythagoreans of the Hellenistic period. The title of the paper is “Zur Vorgeschichte des
Christenthums. Essener und Orphiker” (Kleine Schriften II, 1910, 120-84). In the very middle of
Zeller’s activity there is the chapter on the Essenes in the Philosophie der Griechenxvii (III, 2, 4 ed.,
1903, 298-384) – a chapter 100 pages long to illustrate the penetration of Pythagorean, that is,
Greek ideas into the Jewish world. In a history of Greek philosophy one would not expect to find
even one page on the Essenes.
When Zeller’s theory was taken up again and perfected with characteristic subtlety and learning
by Isidore Lévy in his book of 1927 on La légende de Pythagore de Grèce en Palestine, the
theological implications were no longer very clear. Isidore Lévy himself was apparently unaware
that the notion of the Pythagoreanism of the Essenes had been propounded by theologians before
Zeller. Lévy apprehended this theological background only later when, under the impact of the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, he went back to the question of the origins of the Essenes and
took the view that the new documents confirmed the Pythagorean origin of their thought. He wrote
papers on this [9] subject about 1955 which were published posthumously by L. Robert and J.
Février in 1965 (Recherches essénéennes et pythagoriciennes). It is perhaps unnecessary for me to
add that the Dead Sea Scroll, whether Essene or not, have nothing specifically Pythagorean.
The real importance of this theory can only be understood if one goes back to the discussions of
the years between 1830 and 1835 on the significance31 of Jewish Hellenistic thought or, as it was
then called, the Jewish Alexandrian School for the preparation of Christianity.
The debate involved Jews who had accepted baptism like Neander, Jews who were still uncertain
whether to accept baptism and orthodox Jews who saw in this new gnosticism a support for the
cabbalistic and pantheistic trends internal to Judaism. One of Hegel’s most distinguished pupils,
Eduard Gans, was active, together with Heinrich Heine, in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft
der Juden, with the aim of reforming Judaism according to Hegelian principles: both Gans and
Heine ultimately decided for conversion. A relative of Heine, the rabbi Isaak Bernays, found basic
agreement between Schelling’s speculations and cabbalistic doctrines. His most32 rare booklet Der
Bibel’sche Orientxviii (of which he never explicitly admitted authorship) is meant to prove this33.
Isaak Bernays was the father of one of the greatest classical philologists of the nineteenth century,
Jacob Bernaysxix, who shared the orthodoxy and the Schellingian beliefs of his father and played no
little part in the study of Jewish Hellenism. Not to quote the obvious, I would like to call attention
to the letters by Jacob Bernays to Zeller which are to be found in an appendix to Zeller’s paper of
1880 on Philo’s De aeternitate mundi (Zeller’s Kleine Schriften I, 1910, 225-27)xx. It is clear,
however, that Bernays followed Zeller’s speculations on the relations between Essenes and
Pythagoreans with considerable scepticism. On the other hand, a granddaughter of Rabbi – or, as he
liked to be called, Chachamxxi – Isaak Bernays married Sigmund Freud and brought into the
marriage a tradition of Jewish mysticism, classical scholarship and interest in German thought, of
30
P-o 73: introduced <-> induced, ms[AMM] (= Nono); P-o 89, 62 e prec.: corr. def.
P-o 89, 62: significance <-> importance, ms[P-o 89 AAM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73 e prec.: corr.def. (= Nono).
32
P-o 89: His -> most, del; P-o 62, 73: corr. def. (= Nono).
33
P-o 72, 60: is meant to prove this, msn[Mom] <-> is one of the unrecognized treasures of the Mocatta Library of
University College London.
44
31
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
wich Sigmund was acutely conscious34. The basic [10] question was the one raised by Augustus
Neander in 1818: to what extent did Philo’s philosophy, which was by common agreement
interpreted as a Jewish version of gnosticism, mediate between the Old Testament and the New
Testament, or more precisely between Moses and St. Paul? If Philo had performed this operation,
then there was no permanent barrier between the Old and the New Testament, between God and
Nature, between moral law and beauty, between Justice and Love. Hegel could fight Kant and
Moses to his heart’s content and still be classified as a distant descendant of Philo, the Jew from
Alexandria.
II
In the Romantic period there was an intermingling of German-Jewish social relations which
cried out for clarification. Within two generations the families of Moses Mendelssohn and of David
Friedlaender, the champion of Jewish Enlightenment, had turned into leading Christian families. It
fell to the lot of Felix Mendelssohn to channel Johann Sebastian Bach’s music into the mainstream
of German Protestant emotional life. Another Jewish convert, Friedrich-Julius Stahl, was the
theoretician of Prussian reaction against the French Revolution. Another of these young men, called
Karl Marx, later received some attention. His first target was Schelling. But his essay on the Jewish
questionxxii is different from anything produced in the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden,
in so far as Marx had come to identify the social revolution with the abolition of Judaism. But for
those who conceived the abolition of Judaism not as a detail of the abolition of capitalism, but as a
gradual process of conversion to Christianity, or alternatively for those who defended the right of
Judaism to exist within German Christianity, Alexandrian Judaism had suddenly acquired a new
significance. It was an era of contact and transition. The comparison of Moses Mendelssohn with
Philo became a commonplace; it is still popular among Jews of German education35. Hence the
sharp polemics of Hermann Cohen in his last period against Philo as a betrayer of Jewish
transcendence which was also the Kantian transcendence of Godxxiii .
[11] Hermann Cohen was in fact saying nothing new. He was remembering and summarizing
what his teachers of the Breslau Jewish Seminary had said seventy years before. The “Programm”
for the opening of this Seminary on 10 August 1854 contains a dissertation by the director of the
Seminary, Zacharias Frankel, Ueber palästinische und alexandrinische Schriftforschung. It is a
comparison of the Philonian and of the rabbinic exegesis of the Bible and concludes with an
uncompromising proclamation of the superiority of rabbinic exegesis. “Die Schrift blieb Schrift”,
not vague mysticism. The man who wrote this dissertation was the first Jew to study the Septuagint
in depth as a Jewish documentxxiv : an event comparable in importance to the rediscovery of Jewish
Hellenistic literature36 by Azariah de’ Rossi about 157337: and there is of course a direct connection
between these two events. As we have seen38, Azariah de’ Rossi’s book The Light of the Eyes
(Me’or ‘Enayim) – a product39 of the late Italian Renaissance in its Jewish version – was treated for
all practical purposes as a prohibited book by the Jews even in Italy for about two centuries. But it
was rediscovered in the age of Mendelssohn and helped to form the generation of Jewish critical
students of Judaism to which Zacharias Frankel belonged. Frankel 40 was convinced that the
34
P-o 159: conscious -> and which has never been properly investigated, del.
P-o 72, 60: Jews of German education <-> German Jews, msn[Mom]; P-o 159: as the name Philo is the equivalent of
the Jewish name Jedidia, Mendelssohn was called by one of his earliest Jewish biographers as Jedidiah Haseni,
mginfmsb[Mom].
36
P-o 159: Jewish Hellenistic literature <-> Philo as Jewish thinker, interl.msn[Mom].
37
P-o 72: about 1573 <-> in 1571, msn[Mom]; P-o 159: 1571 <-> the late sixteenth century, msn[Mom].
38
P-o 89, 73, 62: As we have seen <-> As we know, interl.ms[AMM]; P-o 72, 159: corr. def. (= Nono).
39
P-o 159: an extraordinary product.
40
P-o 159: Frankel <- Frankel's two volumes on the Septuagint were an achievement which was insufficiently
appreciated both by Jewish and Christian scholars in his own time and makes him one of the pioneers of the study of
Hellenistic Judaism, del; P-o 89 e prec.: def.
45
35
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
Septuagint in each main deviation from the Hebrew Masoretic text or in its peculiar interpretations
of the Hebrew text reflected a definite tradition of understanding the Bible which had to be
measured against the Palestinian and the Babylonian traditions. He guided his pupil Bernhard Ritter
to write the first research on “Philo und die Halacha” (that is, Rabbinic Law) which finally appeared
in 1879xxv. The problem of the relation between Philo’s Judaism and Talmudic Judaism was still
alive in the Breslau Seminary in 1931-32 when Rabbi Isaak Heinemann, a pupil of Wilamowitz and
one of the last great masters of the Seminary before its destruction by the Nazis, published his
Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung. Already in 1857 in his Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der
Bibel Abraham Geiger, the leader of the Reform movement, had opposed to Frankel an attempt to
evaluate all the variant readings of the Bible, including the Masoretic ones, as expressions of
internal conflicts in Judaism.41 To keep the problem alive there was the intense effort42 of a liberal
Jew with both Talmudic and classical training, Moritz Friedländer, who in a series of books written
between 1872 and 1908xxvi (if not later) presented the Essenes and Philo [12] as the alternative to
Pharisaism which in his view the Jews ought to have made their own in the first century A.D. What
Moritz Friedländer, who worked so devotedly in Vienna for the improvement of the situation of
Galician Jews, never made clear is whether he thought that the victory of Essenic and Philonic
Judaism would have meant a total conversion of the Jews to Christianity or alternatively would
have made Christianity unnecessary.43
But was Philo indeed enough? Could Philo really represent the transition between the Old and
the New Testament? Could he bear the weight put on him? The question was bound to be asked in
an age in which the study of the ancient Oriental civilizations had entered a new stage. In 1771
Anquetil-Duperron had published the first translation of the Zend-Avesta. In the next decades the
treasures of Sanskrit poetry and law had been made accessible by the efforts of Sir Charles Wilkins,
Sir William Jones and their successors. The Book of Kings by Firdausi was being translated and
edited by Julius Mohl. Champollion deciphered hieroglyphics; Georg Friedrich Grotefend and
Henry Rawlinson found the key to cuneiform. All the great civilizations which Alexander had
conquered and his successors had ruled were beginning to speak for themselves – in truth, for the
first time. It was natural to ask what had happened in this wider encounter of East and West after
Alexander the Great.
Theologians would naturally prefer the narrower comparison between Greeks and Jews: though
modernized by the insertion of Philo, this was a traditional approach. Historians of politics and of
literature would be tempted to measure the consequences of the Greco-Macedonian conquest of
Egypt and Asia. Most notably in 1833, Johann Gustav Droysen started to publish a History of
Hellenism, the avowed purpose of which was to enlarge the enquiry into the origins of Christianity
by examining what Greeks and Orientals gave to each other in the three centuries between
Alexander and Augustus. Droysen was another pupil of Hegel, though his classical scholarship
came from the teaching of August Boeckh. He was himself involved in the tangle of JewishGerman [13] relations. The son of a Lutheran parson, he married the daughter of a converted Jew
and had converted Jews, among them Felix Mendelssohn, among his closest friends. One of his
juvenile ambitions was to revive the spirit of Greek tragedy in collaboration with Felix
Mendelssohn. His influence on Wagner would deserve further studyxxvii . Droysen never attributed
great importance to Philo and Alexandrian Judaism. He saw the rise of Christianity as the resolution
of a wider conflict between Greek and Oriental civilizations. We cannot say how exactly he
conceived the conflict and how precisely he visualized its resolution because he never went beyond
the section of his History of Hellenism which was concerned with the political history of the third
century B.C. He was soon attracted by modern history and probably also realised that the evidence
at his disposal was not sufficient to answer the question he was asking himself. With our hindsight
41
42
43
P-o 89, 62: Already in 1857 ... conflicts in Judaism, mginfms[Mom]; P-o 73 e prec.: def. (= Nono).
P-o 72: effort <- and by no means incompetent, del.
P-o 62, 89, 73: unnecessary. -> I hope to publish special research on Moriz Friedländer, del. (= Nono).
46
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
we can recognize that it was a premature task while the Oriental texts were still only half
understood and the social and religious background was still vague. In its programmatic aspects,
which are quite explicit, Droysen’s work presented a clear alternative to the view that the Jewish
culture of Alexandria should be seen as the decisive step towards Christianity. He invited his
readers to study the religious and social life of the Near and Middle East in order to understand why
paganism collapsed, Judaism was superseded and Christianity triumphed.
III
Thus two points of view opposed each other. One attributed decisive importance to Alexandrian
Judaism in the preparation of Christianity, the other saw Christianity as the result of the religious
syncretism favoured by the conquests of Alexander. Mithras, Zoroaster, Isis, Hermes Trismegistus,
Orpheus, indeed even Buddha were credited with some part in the process.
With these two views went two different terminologies. The champions of Alexandrian Judaism
spoke readily, as we have heard, of gnosticism. Droysen chose the word Hellenism to indicate the
dissolution of classical Greek civilization in consequence of its diffusion over Oriental countries.
[14] The choice of this word was paradoxical and confusing because at least from the end of the
sixteenth century it had ofted been used to indicate the Greek language as spoken by Jews and
consequently Greek thought as interpreted by Jews.
The story of the word Hellenismus, which used to be mysterious, is now reasonably clear. Since
the Renaissance the Greek of the Gospels had worried its Western students. It is obviously a rather
barbarous Greek, if the Greek of Lysias and Demosthenes is the term of comparison. It was soon
suspected that Hebrew or Aramaic influences were behind it. The curious reference in the Acts of
the Apostles to a synagogue of Hellenists44 in Jerusalem (VI: 9) seemed to support the notion of a
special type of Greek spoken by Jews. One could not expect the purity of Attic Greek from the Jews
of Jerusalem. We now know that Semitic influence accounts for only a small part of the
peculiarities of New Testament Greek. Indeed even in the seventeenth century it did not escape the
polymathic genius of Hugo Grotius that the Greek of the Gospel of Luke is reminiscent of
Polybiusxxviii . Claudius Salmasius (Saumaise), who had a great familiarity with late Greek texts, also
expressed doubts about the existence of a special Greek dialect spoken by Jewsxxix . But the contrary
opinion, which somehow originated with Scaligerxxx and was supported by Daniel Heinsiusxxxi ,
prevailed. Hellenismus, Hellenismos, came to signify the linguistic influence of Hebrew and
Aramaic on the language of the Gospels: more generically it indicated the kind of Greek the Jews
were supposed to speak, when they spoke Greek. There were45 scholars who thought that even Jesus
had spoken Greek. In 1767 Domenico Diodati published in Naples a book De Christo graece
loquente exercitatio, to prove that Greek had been the language of Jesus: it had also been the
language of the Neapolitans in ancient times. Diodati’s patriotic book was admired by
contemporaries, including the Empress Catherine of Russia who saw the relevance of this point to
her war on behalf of the Greeks46 against the Turks. Diodati’s work was reprinted in England in
1843. Edward William Grinfield declares in his Apology for the Septuagint, published [15] in 1850,
that he discovered this book too late for it to be decisive in the formation of his thought about the
inspiration of the Septuagint, but was obviously encouraged by it to formulate his theory that in
Galilee Jesus read his Bible in Greek. So there is a Neapolitan element in the Grinfield Lectureship
on the Septuagint.
From the language the word Hellenismus was extended to the thought of Hellenized Jews, and as
such we find it used by Herder and, even later, by specialist students of Jewish Alexandrian
thought. For instance, Jacques Matter, a French scholar under German influence, spoke in 1820 of
44
45
46
P-o 62: Hellenists <-> a synagogue of Hellenists, msn[Mom];P-o 89, 73 e prec.: corr.def. (= Nono).
P-o 89, 62: there were -> let us not forget, del.; P-o 73 e prec: corr. def. (= Nono).
P-o 89, 62: on behalf of the Greeks, interl.ms[P-o 89 AMM, P-o 62 Mom]; P-o 73 e prec.: def. (= Nono).
47
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
Hellénisme as a manner of thinking and writing typical of the Jews of Egypt (Essai historique sur
l’école d’Alexandrie). But this meaning of the word did not prevail. Even Herder had occasionally
stretched the word to signify a generic mixture of Oriental – rather than Jewish – and Greek
elements. Perhaps the Greek of Philo was recognized to be too pure to be described with a word
which indicated a mixture of Greek and non-Greek. Gnostic rather than Hellenistic appeared to be
the correct description of Philo’s mind. In any case it was Droysen’s decision to use the word
Hellenismus in its amplest meaning to indicate the meeting of East and West in the period after
Alexander. Thanks to Droysen, Hellenism came to signify the historical period between Alexander
and the Roman conquest of the East. As such the term progressively passed from German into the
other European languages – not without difficulties. In French and English hellénisme and
Hellenism had been used for a long time47 to indicate either the language or the culture of classical
Greece. It was rather confusing to have the same word used now to indicate the dissolution of Greek
civilization in the period after Alexander. But somehow even in England the majority of classical
scholars seems to have become reconciled to this ambiguity. Hellenism is now increasingly used to
indicate what is not purely Hellenic. The possibility of using a different adjective, Hellenistic, to
correspond to the new meaning of Hellenism has undoubtedly helped.
[16] There is no justification for trying to reverse a well-established semantic development.
Hellenism is now the international word to indicate a specific historical period: the rise and fall of
the monarchies which originated from Alexander’s conquest.
Historians have been ready to characterize the Hellenistic period as a period of ancient
capitalism or colonialism or imperialism. Julius Belochxxxii and Michael Rostovtzeffxxxiii described
the Hellenistic Age as a happy and prosperous capitalistic phase of the ancient world which the
Roman conquest destroyed. For Sir William Tarn the Greeks and the Macedonians who conquered
the East and reached India were quite obviously the predecessors of the English and Scots who
controlled the Near East and founded the British Empire in India in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries xxxiv . Neither Beloch nor Rostovtzeff nor Tarn was concerned with the origins of
Christianity though Tarn liked to see the Macedonians as puritanical Scots and even attributed love
of mankind to that improbable being, Alexander the Great.
We must not forget, however, that Droysen, who introduced the word Hellenism to indicate this
historical period, did have an explicit theory about the origins of Christianity. This theory was
opposed to the other theory which attached decisive importance to the Jewish-Greek schools of
Alexandria and more specifically to Philo.
To follow up the development of these two lines of thought would be equivalent to writing the
history of the research on early Christianity in the last century. There is a direct line from Droysen
to Frank Cumont, Richard Reitzenstein and Hermann Gunkel, the masters in the study of ancient
syncretism. On the other side the question of the relation between Jewish Hellenistic thought and
Early Christianity was still central for such diverse theologians as Adolf Harnack, Albert
Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann and Gerhard Kittel48.
I am not going to discuss these developments here because my purpose [17] is rather to underline
the radical reorientation of such studies, as a consequence of the discovery of new evidence in
Palestine and Egypt in the last thirty years and of a general revaluation of the Jewish material. No
observer can fail to recognize the decline of the interest in syncretism, that is, in the alleged Iranian
influences on the origins of Christianity or in the relation between Greek mysteries and Christian
mysteries.49 No one, I believe, would today repeat with Gunkel that Christianity is a syncretistic
47
P-o 62: a long time outside theological circles, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 89,73 e prec.: def. (= Nono).
P-o 62: Kittel, or indeed C. H. Dodd, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 89, 73 e prec.: def. (= Nono).
49
P-o 89, 62, 73,72: I am not going to discuss ... Christian mysteries; P-o 159: I am not going to discuss ... Christian
mysteries <-> If a radical change has to be noticed in the research of the last thirty years is the decline of the interest in
syncretism, interl. e mginf, msn[Mom].
48
48
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
religion or with Reitzenstein that St. Paul must have read Hellenistic mystical literature and derived
from it his apostolate and his freedom.50
IV
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and of the gnostic texts of Nag Hammadi has given plenty
to do and to ponder nearer home. It is increasingly realized that Egyptian and Iranian texts can only
provide background information for the development of Christianity. Even classical Greece is less
relevant than the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jewish texts, whether in Greek, in Hebrew or in Aramaic,
offer an enormous amount of far more relevant unexploited material.51 Naturally enough, this has
given a new impetus to the study of Greek elements in Judaism. After all, the rise of Christianity
within Judaism was soon followed by the Hellenization of Christianity. The52 impression seems
now to prevail that it is enough to read any Jewish text written between Alexander the Great and
(say) Constantine the Great to find Greek influences in it. Thus the term Hellenistic is being applied
more and more to the whole of Judaism between these chronological limits. The opposition between
Hellenistic Judaism and normative, rabbinic Judaism, which was still the point of departure for
Erwin Goodenough’s monumental work Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period (1953 ff.)xxxv ,
is now increasingly recognized as obsolete.53
An authoritative54 representative of the new attitude is the German historian and theologian
Martin Hengel who suddenly emerged into international [18] fame with his book Judentum und
Hellenismus published in 1969 and now available in an English translationxxxvi . In a more recent
book Juden, Griechen und Barbaren (1976) Hengel proposes to call “Hellenistic Judaism” the
whole of the Judaism of the period between Alexander the Great and the end of the Western Roman
Empire, because Greek elements are present everywhere. True enough, for Hengel this Hellenistic
Judaism is, as a whole, a “praeparatio evangelica”: it leads directly from Alexander the Great to
Jesus and St. Paul. This point, if developed, will probably involve Hengel in difficulties he had not
foreseen. It is therefore important to emphasize that Hengel’s interpretation of Judaism is not
necessarily dependent on this peculiar version of the notion of “praeparatio evangelica”. In fact55
the same attitude is to be found, and more subtly without the theological implications, in Morton
Smith, Palestinian Parties and Politics that shaped the Old Testament (1971). What is even more
significant is that both Martin Hengel and Morton Smith ultimately derive their point of view from
the undisputed master of Jewish Hellenistic studies, Elias Bickerman, though they seem to me to
simplify his position – indeed his experience of Jewish life from inside. In the view of Hengel and
Smith, but not necessarily of Bickerman, there are so many Greek elements in Judaism from the end
of the fourth century B.C. to the end of the ancient world that there is no point in making a
distinction between Jews of Palestine and Jews of Alexandria, between traditional Jews and
Hellenized Jews. This school of thought consequently denies that one can make a distinction
50
P-o 4: To follow up the development of this two lines of thought... his freedom <->Theologians have longer
memories than political historians. They have never forgotten the religious undertones of the word Hellenism.For them
the word immediately suggests questions of syncretism. Until twenty years ago it chiefly reminded them of the great
importance attributed by Richard Reitzenstein to Iranian influences on the origins of Christianity, or of discussions on
the relation between Greek mysteries and Christian mystery. But in more recent times theologians and historians of
religion have been less and less inclined to turn to classical Greece, Iran or Egypt for their understanding of
Christianity, ms su c. 9 bis.
51
P-o 72: unexploited material. -> The study of what is loosely known as Talmud has traditionally been an esoteric
activity for rabbis only. It would be ridiculous to add in this place that the scientific exploration of the Talmud, open to
men of all creeds, has just begun – though nobody will ever beat a traditionally trained rabbi in the understanding of the
texts. Judaism is again, more than ever, at the centre of scholarly attention in relation to the history of early Christianity,
del.; P-o 89, 62, 73: id. (= Nono).
52
P-o 62: The <- After all… Christianity, del.
53
P-o 159: The opposition ... obsolete, interl. e mgsn, ms[Mom].
54
P-o 159: An authoritative <-> The most authoritative, msn[Mom].
55
P-o 72: True enough, for Hengel ... In fact, ms[Mom], su c. [13bis], con segr; P-o 159, 4: def.
49
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
between Pharisaic Judaism irreducible to Christianity and Hellenistic or Alexandrian Judaism
paving the way for Christianity. Negatively, Hengel and Smith agree with Droysen in finding
Hellenism outside Alexandrian Judaism. On the other hand, Hengel and Smith – and in this case
most specifically their master Bickerman – are no longer prepared to attribute central importance to
the non-Jewish, Oriental influences, which were prominent in Droysen’s thought and were later at
the centre of the research of Franz Cumont, Richard Reitzenstein and their followers xxxvii .
Bickerman’s school, if I may use this [19] simplification, reserves the word Hellenism for the interpenetration of Greek and Jewish elements which are to be found everywhere in Judaism after
Alexander the Great and before Constantine. They include in their horizon the more recent books of
the Hebrew Bible, such as Ecclesiastes, Ecclesiasticus, and Daniel; the totality of Jewish literature
in Greek, the Dead Sea Scrolls and finally all the juridical, legendary and exegetical texts which go
under the name of Talmudic literature. For the interpretation of56 the last group of writings they
naturally depend much on the pioneer work done by Saul Lieberman57xxxviii . In this view Hellenism
becomes a specific period of Jewish thought after the Persians and before the Arabs. While the
distinction between Alexandrian and normative Judaism is abolished, the meaning of Hellenism, as
applied to Judaism, is far more restrictive than that of Droysen.
Before we take position on all this, it is necessary to mention another theological point of view,
largely to be identified with the name of Père, later Cardinal, Jean Daniélou. Daniélou reacted
against what he considered the overvaluation of the Greek elements in late Judaism or in early
Christianity. He tried to isolate and define those theological doctrines and liturgical practices which
seemed to him irreducible to Greek thought. He extended his notion to the peculiarities of early
Syrian Christianity, given that the Syrians thought in a Semitic language. The main purpose –
explicitly stated – of his famous book Théologie du Judéo-Christianisme (1958)xxxix was to reverse
the process initiated by St. Paul. Whereas traditional Christian apologetics tended to oppose the
Synagogue to the Church, Père Daniélou emphasized the debt of the Church to the Synagogue and
therefore the elements of continuity. In the very different athmosphere of post-Nazi Europe in the
late fifties Daniélou was taking into account a situation which had some elements in common with
the situation of the German Jews in the age of Romanticism. Behind Père Daniélou it is easy to
recognize the shadow of Simone Weil who in her quest for a meditation between the Old Testament
and the New, between the Greeks and the Christians, underwent self-inflicted [20] martyrdom, but
refused baptism. Nor was Simone Weil alone. Henri Bergson, too, accepted Christianity but refused
baptism. Daniélou explicitly offered his “Judéo-Christianisme” as a means of re-absorbing the
modern Jews into the body of the Church without doing violence to their cultural and linguistic
peculiarities. He looked from Paris to Jerusalem. In his view the Early Church offered abundant
justification for those who wanted to remain Jews while becoming Christians. If Bickerman and his
followers seem to say (but I doubt whether Hengel would agree)58 that the Jews can remain Jews
because after all they are not unlike Greeks, Père Daniélou emphatically asserted that the Jews can
become Christians without having to become Greeks, because Christianity is so deeply rooted in the
un-Hellenic soil of Judaism.
We are not here to discuss questions of survival or of conversion, but it is a simple fact of life
that such questions crop up every time Judaism is seriously discussed. What interests me is that the
two attitudes I have described represent two real possibilities for the present-day researcher on the
Judaism of the Greco-Roman period. The researcher can either concentrate on the elements which
Judaism had in common with the surrounding culture or cultures or choose to emphasize what
differentiated the Jews from their neighbours. The choice is of course determined by the facts the
researcher is able to collect and interpret: it is a question of fact, not of wishes or motivations. But
the choice does not simply depend on crude evidence. It depends rather on the relative importance
56
57
58
P-o 62: interpretation of the Greek elements in, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 89, 73 e prec.: corr.def. (= Nono).
P-o 159: Lieberman -> quem honoris causa nomino, del.
P-o 72: (but I ... agree): interl.msn[Mom].
50
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
one is prepared to attribute to certain aspects of the evidence. If, for instance, the creation of the
Synagogue and the pursuit of apocalyptic speculations are considered to be typically Jewish and are
recognized to occupy a central part in Jewish life, it will be difficult to maintain that the Jews were
thoroughly Hellenized.59
There is, however, a third possibility which I should like to present as my own. The question
which I want to answer is slightly different from the question which my old friend Elias Bickerman
on the one side and Cardinal Daniélou on the other asked themselves. What concerns me is not [21]
whether the Jews looked like Greeks or whether they looked like Jews, but what happened when the
Jews were faced by Greek civilization in the form or forms which Greek civilization took after
Alexander the Great. 60 My question is: must we interpret the development of Jewish culture
between Alexander the Great and the final destruction of Jewish61 political autonomy under the
Emperor Hadrian in the early second century A.D. as a conscious attempt to organize Jewish life in
antithesis to the Greek way of life? In short, can we speak of post-biblical Judaism as a reply to
Hellenic culture as a whole?
Local situations and individual preferences must of course be respected. It makes a difference
whether you have Greek or Aramaic as your first language. Nor is Philo a Palestinian or Babylonian
rabbi transplanted to Greek Alexandria62. But with all its varieties Judaism remained a recognizable
entity both in ideas and in institutions. Those who wanted to create a new society in which there
was no difference between Jews and Hellenes ultimately became the founders of a new religion. As
long as Jews remained Jews when challenged by Greek doctrines and institutions we must ask what
they opposed to this challenge.63
V
It is as a trained Hellenist that I have been studying Judaism under Greek rule and in Greek
surroundings. Unless I have forgotten what the Greeks are like – an accident which has happened to
other Hellenists – my Jews, even when they spoke excellent Greek, will appear to have produced
most un-Greek answers to Greek questions. Very often they seem to me even to have produced
Greek questions in order to give un-Greek answers.64 If I venture to differ from both Bickerman and
Daniélou it is because I feel that before he attempts to explain why Judaism produced Christianity
the historian has to explain how Judaism survived as a distinct culture in a Hellenistic context65 and
beyond its Hellenistic context.
59
P-o 72: Hellenized. -> There is an urgent need to visualise Jewish life of any period as a whole, instead of pursuing
the aspects one likes or dislikes most, del.; P-o 4: There is... dislikes most. In these lectures I shall confine myself as a
rule to the period between Alexander the Great and the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70. It will not be my purpose
to separate what is Greek from what is non-Greek in the Judaism of that period. I am interested in seeing what emerges
from the evidence when taken in its complexity. My question is: can we speak of a Jewish reply to Hellenic culture?
However, as I am supposed to have done my homework before giving these lectures, I may anticipate that I find myself
nearer to the historical interpretation of Père Daniélou than to that of my life-long friend Elias Bickerman. Judaism, in
its three or four hundred years before the destruction of the Temple, seems to me a very Jewish thing. It is as a trained
Hellenist that I have been studying Judaism under Greek rule and in Greek surroundings. Unless I have forgotten what
the Greeks are like - an accident which has happened to other Hellenists - my Jews will appear very un-Greek.
60
P-o 62: Alexander the Great. -> What interests me, in other words, is the texture of Jewish society, its style of life
and thought, del.; P-o 89, 73: id. (= Nono).
61
P-o 89: Jewish culture between Alexander the great and the final destruction of Jewish political autonomy; P-o 73:
def. (=Nono).
62
P-o 159: Alexandria -> as Eduard Schwartz once implied. When Eduard Schwartz called Philo a rabbi he was
overreacting to those who treated Philo as a Greek philosopher, del.
63
P-o 62: to this challenge. -> What interests me is not so much the separation of what is Semitic from what is Greek
in Jewish religion, as the texture of Jewish society with its style of life and beliefs as a whole, del.
64
P-o 72: Very often ... answers, mgsn con segr, msn[Mom].
65
P-o 159: in a Hellenistic context. -> If I shall not speak of Christianity in my following lectures it is because the very
logic of research as it has developed in the last 150 years seems to me to impose a preliminary clarification of what
51
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
I am myself convinced, of course, that the old distinction between Alexandrian Judaism and
Palestinian Judaism is no longer viable. One of the [22] many reasons for abandoning it is that we
have no reason to believe that Alexandrian Jews were the only ones to write in Greek and to show
acquaintance with Greek thought. The Wisdom of Solomon, with its well known semiticismxl, could
have been written in Palestine just as well in Egypt. And it is a fact that a translation of the Book of
Esther into Greek was made in Palestine and sent to Egypt probably about 75 B.Cxli.
However, if Hellenistic elements can be found everywhere in Judaism after Alexander, one
fundamental difficulty faces the historian and can be exemplified by reference to the great name of
Eduard Meyer. Eduard Meyer is indeed a great name, but one to which students of the interTestamentary period do not turn frequentlyxlii. This may seem absurd in view of the fact that he had
the unique satisfaction of seeing his theories on the religious policy of the Persian kings and on the
function of Aramaic as the language of the Achaemenid chancery vindicated and confirmed against
Wellhausen by the discovery of the papyri of Elephantina. Yet his very triumph there concealed real
problems.
The substance of Eduard Meyer’s masterpiece on Die Entstehung des Judentums of 1896 and of
his chapter on Judaism in the third volume of the Geschichte des Altertums of 1901 was to present
Judaism as the creation of imperial Persia in the double sense that the political and social
organization of the Temple-State of Jerusalem had been established by the kings of Persia and that
the specific combination of universalism, individualism and legalism in the post-exilic religion of
the Jews was made possible by the insertion of the Jews in a civilized and basically peaceful
empire. When Eduard Meyer tried to continue his tale and reach the age of Jesus, he could not quite
harmonize his earlier findings with the obvious fact that what we know about the Judaism of the
first century A.D. is very different from what we more or less see of the Judaism of the fifth century
B.C. Meyer had assumed that rabbinic Judaism was basically the creation of Ezechiel, Ezra and
Nehemiah: he found himself facing a Judaism which with its apocalyptic books, the Damascus
document [23] (which he carefully studied when the Dead Sea Scrolls were still buried in their
caves) and with the writings of the Books of Maccabees, Philo and Flavius Josephus, had travelled
very far from the books of the Bible attributed to the Persian period. Meyer was too good historian
not to pause and reflect that the author or authors of Daniel use Persian scenery to conceal
Hellenistic contents. But the curious duality of this Judaism, which is both Persian and Hellenistic
in origin, baffled him and to a certain extent is still baffling and challenging us. Meyer’s masterly
work is unsatisfactory in its logical construction rather than outdated in its evidence.
VI
This leads to my conclusion for this evening. We started from a type of questions which were
raised by German theologicians in order to explain the origins of Christianity. We have now found
ourselves with quite a different type of questions66 which really aim to explain the origins of
Judaism itself. Let us not forget that the change happened very largely in Harvard under the
influence of George Foot Moorexliii . This means, first of all, that we have to understand how Judaism
developed in its transition from the Persian surroundings to the Greek surroundings imposed by
Alexander the Great. But as soon as we see the Jews surrounded by the Greeks, and later ruled by
the Romans, the very question of the survival of Judaism presents itself to the historian. Between
Alexander the Great and, say, A.D. 70 not a few civilizations either went underground for centuries
or disappeared altogether. The Celts, the Phoenicians, the Syrians and the Egyptians had to wait for
Christianity to reassert themselves. The Roman phase of this process was punctuated by the literal
annihilation of centres of political power and civilization like Carthage, Corinth, Numantia,
became of Hebrew life and thought under the impact of Hellenism before one can try to understand those Jews and non
Jews who decided to replace the Synagogue by the Church, del.
66
P-o 89, 73: quite a different type of questions; P-o 72: questions of quite a different type (= Nono)
52
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
Gergovia, and Jerusalem. Only two civilizations survived the Roman onslaught with undiminished
vitality, the Greek and the Jewish. Greek civilization survived through a cultural symbiosis with
Latin civilization. The Jews were the only ones both to be creative under the [24] Greeks and not to
mix with the Romans. There is here a problem of survival of a civilization in very peculiar
circumstances. The problem of how Judaism survived is equivalent to the problem of how Judaism
emerged from Persian rule capable of reacting67 to Hellenism68 and later69 saved itself from the
Romans.
I have neither the time nor the competence to go into the second question of how the Jews saved
themselves from the Romans. I shall, however, try to remember at the right moments that the basic
documents of Rabbinic Judaism were put together in a world ruled, not by Greeks, but by Romans.
While the destruction of the Temple was still commented upon in Greek by the historian Flavius
Josephus, the rebellions under Trajan and Hadrian resulted in the virtual end of Greek as vehicle for
the expression of new Jewish thought. The rabbis who are behind Mishnah and Tosefta are surely to
be compared with the Roman jurists rather than with the Greek philosophers, however inadequate
even this comparison may be.
If we want to go on speaking about Hellenistic Judaism we should separate it from Roman
Judaism. But my suggestion is that we should do without either notion.70
As you may by now have realized, this first lecture was intended to be a valediction to the notion
of Hellenistic Judaism. This notion was useful as long as it served to distinguish one type of
Judaism (normative, Palestinian, Judaism) from another type of Judaism (Philonic, Alexandrian,
Judaism) – though I must add that even in its heyday it was perhaps more useful for the
understanding of Christianity than for the interpretation of Judaism.
As we are now convinced that Hellenistic elements are to be found in every aspect of Judaism
after Alexander the Great, the proper71 question to ask is why or rather how the Jews turned
Hellenization into a very effective challenge to the Hellenistic style of life and thought. By
comparing the Greek and the Jewish views of the Persian Empire we can begin to understand what
separated the Jews from the Greeks; which was after all Edward Meyer’s [25] problem. Secondly,
we have to ask ourselves how the Jews went on communicating among themselves and looking
upon themselves as one nation when they were no longer all talking the same language and sharing
the same political institutions. Thirdly, we have to define more precisely the limits of
communication between Jews and non-Jews.72 No doubt there are many other problems in the
history of Judaism between 300 B.C. and A.D. 100. But everyone has to make his own choice, and
it may help to avoid vagueness if, even within the three themes I have chosen, I give preference to
expressions of historical judgement and historical self-awareness. I am after all a student of
historiography.
In my next chapter73 I shall try to show how Greeks and Jews, even before knowing each others,
gave some intimation of the different structures of their respective civilizations by reacting
differently to the world-empire of the Persians.74
i
"Mio secondo maestro" lo definisce Momigliano nella Prefazione a Pagine Ebraiche, XXX; "indimenticabile
maestro" è chiamato nello stesso anno in CRACCO RUGGINI 1989A, 112, n. 1. Cfr. inoltre MOMIGLIANO 1949A, con
aggiunte (=Terzo, 843-849). Sul ruolo di Felice Momigliano nella formazione del nipote si rimanda a FUBINI 1998; cfr.
67
P-o 89,62: emerged from ... reacting <-> reacted, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 72, 73, 159: corr.def. (= Nono).
P-o 159: fine ts. CL 1977 I.
69
P-o 89, 62: later, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 73,72: def. (= Nono).
70
P-o 72: fine ts. EL 1978 I.
71
P-o 89, 62: proper <-> real, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 73: corr.def. (= Nono).
72
P-o 62: Jews and non-Jews. These three themes will occupy me in the remaining two lectures of this year and in
three lectures which I hope to deliver next year, mginf con segr, ms[Mom];P-o 89, 73: def. (= Nono).
73
P-o 89: chapter <-> lecture, mgsnmsn[Mom]; P-o 62, 73: corr. def. (= Nono).
74
P-o 89, 62: In my next chapter ... of the Persians, mginfmsn[Mom]; P-o 73: def. (= Nono).
53
68
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
inoltre le valutazioni di BERTI 1987, XII, e ISNARDI PARENTE 1988A. Un ampio profilo biografico si ricava, infine, da
CAVAGLION 1988.
ii
MONTEFIORE 1910.
iii
Rossi, A. de’, Zeh Sefer Me'or `enayim, le-R. `Azaryah min ha-Adumi. Mantuva, Nidpas `a.y. Mosheh Elishama`,
23 Kislev 5334 [18 Nov. 1573]. Per altre edd., cfr. J. WEINBERG 1978, 493, n. 1 e ID. 2001 (con bibliografia).
iv
Cfr. Caroli Sigonii De republica Hebraeorum libri 7. Bononiae 1582, e la raccolta postuma: Caroli Sigonii De
antiquo iure ciuium Romanorum, Italiae, Prouinciarum, ac Romanae iurisprudentiae iudiciis, libri 11. Eiusdem, De
republica Atheniensium, eorumque ac Lacedaemoniorum temporibus, libri quinque. Aubrii, 1609.
v
WEINBERG 1978.
vi
Cfr. WEINBERG 1978, 499, n. 17.
vii
Aurelii Augustini opus absolutissimum de Ciuitate Dei ... emendatum per Ioan. Lodouicum Viuem, Basileae 1522.
viii
Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1932B per un’opinione giovanile.
ix
Philonis Judaei Lucubrationes omnes quotquot haberi potuerint, nunc primum latinae ex graecis factae per
Sigismundum Gelenium, Basileae apud Nicolaum Episcopium juniorem, 1554 (2a ed. Basileae 1561).
x
Loew ben Bezalel, J., Be'er ha Golah [The Well of the Diaspora], Praha 1598 (rist. Jerusalem 1970).
xi
Rossi, A. de', Sefer Me'or Enayim, Berlin, Ne-Arim 1794.
xii
Hölderlin, F., Sämtliche Werke, Briefe und Dokumente, 12 voll., hrsg. von D. E. Sattler, München 2004.
xiii
Hegel, G. W. F., Der Geist des Christentums und sein Schicksal, Tübingen 1907.
xiv
SANDERS 1977.
xv
Neander, A., Genetische Entwickelung der vornehmsten gnostischen Systeme, Berlin 1818.
xvi
Per l’opinione dell’autore sulla scuola di Tubinga cfr. soprattutto MOMIGLIANO 1970F.
xvii
ZELLER 1903, III.2, 298-384.
xviii
[Bernays, I.], Der Bibel’sche Orient, 2 v., München 1821. Per la storia e i temi del testo si rimanda a R. GottheilM. Kayserling, in JE, s.v.
xix
Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1969A.
xx
ZELLER 1880.
xxi
La scelta del titolo di chacham ("saggio", al posto dell'allora usuale rabbi) nell'assumere il ruolo di rabbino capo
ad Amburgo va intesa come rivendicazione d'autorevolezza e prestigio (il titolo denotava gli antichi maestri della Legge
– cfr. Abot 1, 4; 2, 15 - e fu più tardi riservato dal rabbi, in segno d'onore, ai predecessori morti), e insieme come
sottolineatura del carattere ufficiale del compito di riforma dell'istruzione elementare ebraica che Isaak Bernays
intraprese nella propria comunità nel 1822. Cfr. JE: G. Deutsch-A. Feilchenfeld, s. v. Isaak Bernays; K. Kohler, s.v.
Wisdom; S. Schechter-L. Ginzberg, s.v. Hakam.
xxii
Marx, K., Zur Judenfrage, [geschrieben August bis Dezember 1843], in “Deutsch Französische Jahrbücher”, 1,
Februar 1844 (trad. it.: La questione ebraica : Zur Judenfrage, a c. di G. Scuto, Bolsena 2003).
xxiii
Cfr., e.g., H. COHEN 1910.
xxiv
FRANKEL 1841.
xxv
RITTER 1879.
xxvi
Friedländer, M., Patristische und talmudische Studien, Wien 1878 (rist. Farnborough 1972); Das Judenthum in
der vorchristlichen griechischen Welt. Ein Beitrag zur Enstehungsgeschichte des Christenthums, Wien-Leipzig 1897
(rist. Farnborough 1972); Der vorchristliche jüdische Gnosticismus, Göttingen 1898; Der Antichrist in den
vorchristlichen jüdischen Quellen, Göttingen 1901; Geschichte der jüdischen Apologetik als Vorgeschichte des
Christentums, Zürich 1903; Griechische Philosophie im Alten Testament, Berlin 1904; Die religiösen Bewegungen
innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu, Berlin 1905; Synagoge und Kirche in ihren Anfängen, Berlin 1908.
xxvii
Per i recenti sviluppi del tema, cfr. e.g. MAGEE 1988; ROSE 1992; MALTE 2000; ROSS 2009.
xxviii
Grotius, H., Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, 3 voll., Amsterdam-Paris 1641-1650.
xxix
Salmasius, C., Funus linguae hellenisticae, sive confutatio exercitationis de hellenistis et lingua hellenistica,
Lugduni Batavorum ex Officina Ioannis Maire 1643.
xxx
Sull'uso del termine Hellenistae in Scaligero per indicare gli Ebrei che conoscevano solo il greco cfr. e.g. DE
JONGE 1996. L'argomento era già stato affrontato in termini simili da MOMIGLIANO 1970A.
xxxi
Heinsius, D., Aristarchus sacer, in Sacrarum exercitationum as Novum Testamentum libri XX, Lugduni
Batavorum ex Officina Elseviriorum 1639, 653 e 668.
xxxii
BELOCH 1893 – 1904. Per un precedente contributo dell’autore, cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1966E.
xxxiii
ROSTOVTZEFF 1926. Per la prospettiva momiglianea sull’opera e la figura di Rostovzev, vd. MOMIGLIANO
1933A; ID. 1943; ID. 1954; Id. 1966F. Si rimanda infine alla pubblicazione postuma di due lettere in BONGARD – LEVIN
E MARCONE 1995 e a MARCONE 2000.
xxxiv
TARN 1938; cfr. inoltre ID. 1952 (ed. riv.).
xxxv
GOODENOUGH 1953-1968. Cfr. in proposito MOMIGLIANO 1956. Diversa (ma evidentemente non
contraddittoria) la valutazione espressa in gioventù sui lavori filonici di Goodenough (MOMIGLIANO 1930D, part. a p. 34
del Nono)
54
GL 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Prologue in Germany
xxxvi
HENGEL 1969. Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1969C. Sulla valutazione di questo lavoro come testo di svolta verso una
interpretazione sostanzialmente resistenziale del giudaismo ellenistico, cfr. particolarmente PARENTE 1989A e 1989B e
GRANATA 1999, 74-75.
xxxvii
Su Reitzenstein e Cumont come "seguaci inconsapevoli" del primo Droysen, cfr. già MOMIGLIANO 1935A, part.
alle pp. 191-2).
xxxviii
LIEBERMAN 1950; preceduto da ID. 1942.
xxxix
DANIELOU 1958.
xl
Cfr. GL 1979 IV - The Defence, cc. 22-24.
xli
Cfr. GL 1979 IV - The Defence, cc. 9-10.
xlii
Per l’attenzione di Momigliano alla riflessione e alla figura di Meyer, cfr. Weber – Meyer [= MOMIGLIANO
1977B]; Dopo Weber [= MOMIGLIANO 1978A]; MOMIGLIANO 1981A.
xliii
FOOT MOORE 1927-30.
55
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
GL 1979 II The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
Sedi e date:
EL 1978 (1 novembre – cfr. * D-a 1)
GL 1979 (31 gennaio – cfr. GRANATA 2006, 419)
Documenti:
a) EL 1978 II – GL 1979 II
P-o 41 ms.
P-o 43 top c. di P-o 41.
P-o 42, P-o 79, P-o 80: c.c. di P-o 43.
P-o 74, P-o 81, P-o 169: xerox di P-o 79
b) Persian Empire and Greek Freedom [= Bibl. 605]
P-o 90, P-o 63, P-o 168
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Con l’aumento a sei del numero di lectures, il ciclo Efroymson 1978 consente (o giustifica)
l’espansione dell’indagine sul rapporto tra Persia ed Ebrei a un confronto preliminare con lo
scambio intercorso tra Persia e Grecia. È qui che viene letta per la prima volta The Greeks outside,
lezione destinata a essere riproposta a breve distanza (il 31.1.19791), e pressoché senza modifiche,
all’interno del primo ciclo Grinfield. Nello stesso anno, Momigliano stesso licenzia la lecture con il
titolo di Persian Empire and Greek Freedom all’interno della Festschrift oxoniense dedicata a
Isaiah Berlin, apportando al testo poche variazioni riconducibili al rinnovato titolo e contesto.
Come testimoni della lecture l’AAM conserva P-o 41 (ms. pulito e quasi del tutto privo di
annotazioni, verosimilmente una bella copia), la sua top copy corrispondente, P-o 43 (anch’essa
priva di annotazioni, se non per un paio di refusi) e le tre c.c. derivanti, P-o 42, 79, 80. Rispetto alle
altre P-o 79, documento scelto come base per l’edizione, offre un testo migliore perché interamente
corredato da note mss. tra cui si rinvengono, in testa alla c. 1, anche indicazioni di collocazione
della lecture (“II”, “Sept. 1978”).
Da P-o 79 sono state a loro volta tratte tre xerocopie: P-o 169, interessata da pochissime
annotazioni (tutte riportate in apparato); P-o 74, xerocopia di un’ulteriore copia – non conservata –
di P-o 792, e infine P-o 81, documento privo di note dal quale sono state tratte ulteriori copie xerox
preparatorie al testo edito. Queste ultime sono rappresentate da: P-o 168, fascicolo che conserva
qualche significativo appunto di lavoro mai ripreso successivamente; P-o 63, reading copy EL (=
GL) ricca di interventi significativi (soprattutto proposte di cancellazione) che testimoniano una
prima fase di ripensamento della struttura della lecture in prospettiva della pubblicazione e che però
vennero complessivamente tralasciate nella preparazione del testo definitivo; e infine P-o 90, c.c. di
sole 16 carte, che una nota ms. di AMM (“For I. Berlin Festchrift O.U.P.19.12.78 [also part of
Grinfield II, 31.I.79]”, c. 1) identifica con la versione Festschrift, contribuendo a confermare al
tempo stesso come il testo Grinfield coincidesse non con l’edito, ma con la sua versione “lunga”,
letta in sede Efroymson. Rispetto a P-o 90 la versione pubblicata presenta però piccole discrepanze
(in particolare alla fine dell’introduzione) che vengono segnalate, all’evenienza, in apparato.
2. Argomento della lecture
Le speculazioni ottocentesche sui contatti tra Erodoto e gli Ebrei tentavano di rispondere al
problema della mancata presenza, nelle fonti storiche greche anteriori ad Alessandro, del popolo
ebraico. Le informazioni sul giudaismo postesilico ci provengono da fonti interne (profeti, Ezra e
Neemia) nel paradosso per cui i reperti materiali sembrerebbero però attestare scambi commerciali
con i Greci che, abituati ai “barbari”, verosimilmente non dovettero notare la variante ebraica.
1
2
P-o 90, c. 1, annotazione ms. di AMM.
Reca infatti annotazioni fotocopiate assenti su P-o 79.
56
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
Ebrei e Greci condividono il fatto di essersi definiti in relazione alla Persia. Se la società ebraica
si sviluppa all’interno dell’impero, maturando una prospettiva filiale e reverenziale,
l’autoconsapevolezza culturale acquisita dai Greci in conseguenza degli sviluppi istituzionali,
tecnici e militari di VI sec. li porta invece a incontrare i Persiani con sguardo critico. La crescita di
interesse per la solidità delle istituzioni mediterranee è il fattore che induce i sovrani persiani a
tentare le prime alleanze con i Greci. Alla fama di magnanimità e cultura acquisita con questi primi
contatti subentra tra i Greci un sentimento di ostilità suscitato dallo svelamento delle mire
espansionistiche dell’impero: matura un ideale di identificazione tra democrazia e libertà autentica a
cui si affianca l’equazione tra opposizione alla tirannia e opposizione ai Persiani. Sia durante che
dopo le guerre i Greci continuano però a studiarne usi e costumi, per quanto l’ostacolo
rappresentato dalla loro resistenza all’apprendimento di lingue straniere li porti talvolta a travisarne
il pensiero politico o religioso. L’indagine ha il pregio di contribuire all’autodeterminazione di punti
salienti della cultura greca, come la coalescenza tra l’amore per la libertà e il rispetto per i veri dèi.
Benché la reputazione dei Persiani fosse indubbiamente peggiorata nel corso dei conflitti, si
frappongono a grossolane semplificazioni le prospettive critiche di Eschilo e di Erodoto. Se il primo
mostra nei Persiani come i sudditi siano i primi a soffrire per la hybris di Serse, il secondo,
riferendo dell’eliminazione dei tiranni dalle città ioniche operata dal re Dario all’indomani della
rivolta in Asia Minore, dimostra la compatibilità potenziale tra governo persiano e la democrazia: il
ruolo di provocatrice affidato ad Atene evidenzia la reputazione tirannica acquisita dalla città,
conducendo il lettore a un’identificazione dell'imperialismo persiano con quello ateniese.
Scopo di Erodoto non è la cancellazione delle differenze tra nazioni, quanto la riconduzione
dell’ascesa di entrambe allo stesso dissidio: la scelta tra il dominare e l’essere dominati. Tra gli
storiografi successivi nessuno formulerà lo stesso concetto con pari profondità, benché la lettura
senofontea ne erediti parzialmente i principi interpretativi, sia pure attraverso uno schema di lettura
viziato dall’esaltazione acritica del passato e dell’ideale militare. Le nozioni vaghe e idealizzate di
Zoroastro e dei Magi, diffuse nei circoli platonici e pitagorici durante il IV sec., mostrano come
l’opinione dei Greci sui Persiani finisca presto per oscillare, con scarsa soluzione di continuità, tra
disprezzo e idealizzazione. I limiti comunicativi mantengono però vivo il pregiudizio che la
coesione dell’impero si fondi esclusivamente sul sistema burocratico-amministrativo: la valutazione
passerà ai sovrani macedoni, determinandone il sentimento aggressivo di superiorità politicoculturale che caratterizzerà il primo secolo della dominazione in Asia e in Egitto.
3. Note di contenuto: l’evoluzione della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi.
The Greeks outside è un testo Efroymson nella misura in cui viene concepito e messo per iscritto
specificamente per il ciclo dell’ottobre/novembre del 1978: l’aumento del numero di lectures e il
conseguente ripensamento della struttura del ciclo determina a Cincinnati uno spostamento del
focus di indagine dallo sguardo sintetico e diacronico alle grandi istituzioni del giudaismo di età
ellenistica, la sinagoga e il rabbinato (su cui cfr. Appendici I, II), all’analisi in itinere dei mutamenti
determinati dal confronto e dallo scambio degli Ebrei con i dominatori del passato, i Persiani, e con
quelli del presente, i Greco-Macedoni. Se a questi ultimi è dedicata una lecture a parte (EL/GL 1979
IV), ai Persiani spetta invece il dittico costituito dall’analisi del rapporto con gli Ebrei (EL/GL 1979
III, The Jews inside) e da una preliminare ricognizione dei rapporti tra Persia e Greci che fornisce
un solido punto di appoggio nell’individuazione delle peculiarità della reazione giudaica.
Se la lecture nasce quindi in occasione del ripensamento di Cincinnati, non lo stesso può essere
detto del materiale di cui si compone. Con l’eccezione della derivazione dalla CL 1977 II (The
Temple and the Synagogue) della sezione di apertura, dedicata alla menzione della bizzarra tesi di
Guérin du Rocher per cui Erodoto sarebbe stato storico del popolo ebraico senza saperlo e alla ben
più seria questione storiografica che le è sottesa (il disinteresse degli etnografi greci per gli Ebrei,
fino ad Alessandro), The Greeks outside spicca per autonomia rispetto alle altre lezioni del ciclo.
Qualche punto di contatto si individua con il riccamente articolato ma ancora essenzialmente
preparatorio saggio Ebrei e Greci del 1976 (la genericità della nozione di Palestina presso i Greci;
57
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
la speculare occorrenza dell’etnico Yawan, Ionia, in alcuni passi biblici); è soprattutto Alien
Wisdom, tuttavia, il testo rispetto al quale The Greeks outside tradisce non solo dipendenza, ma
dialogo costante. Il richiamo implicito – e obbligato – è evidente già dalla cursoria menzione di
quelle testimonianze archeologiche, epigrafiche e numismatiche (cc. 1-2) esposte nel dettaglio in
Alien Wisdom, 75-6 (cap. 4, The Hellenistic Discovery of Judaism); la questione dell’apparente
ignoranza degli Ebrei da parte dei Greci trova riscontro nelle pagine successive (77-8), mentre la
presenza di Greci nei testi della Bibbia, accennata alla c. 2, riprende pressoché verbatim le pp. 78 e
79. A partire dal cap. II dell’edito (cap. III in P-o 79) la lecture sviluppa invece un legame
privilegiato con un ulteriore capitolo di Alien Wisdom, The Iranians and the Greeks (pp. 123-50),
rispetto alla cui ampiezza cronologica (che spazia dalle ipotesi linguistiche di Benveniste su
eventuali contatti risalenti al X sec.a.C.3 fino all’idealizzazione della cultura iranica in età romana),
la lecture procede per isolamento e approfondimento degli eventi di VI - IV secolo alla luce di una
domanda specifica, in che modo il confronto con l’impero achemenide abbia sollecitato
l’individuazione e l’elaborazione di punti imprescindibili nella costruzione dell’identità culturale
greca. Acquista così nuova profondità il ruolo ermeneutico di Erodoto, di cui Momigliano apprezza
lo sguardo non pregiudiziale e il rifiuto delle facili semplificazioni nell’analisi delle dinamiche tra
Grecia e Persia; viene meno invece il discorso preparatorio, ampiamente ipotetico-ricostruttivo,
relativo alle fonti anteriori al sesto secolo (cronache reali persiane, presocratici), per quanto la
lecture contenga una ritrattazione in merito alla possibilità di individuare influenze greche sull’arte
persiana, avallata in Alien Wisdom4 e qui giudicata, di contro, un’illusione (c. 13). Viene meno
anche la diffusa analisi sulla ricezione della sapienza iranica nel dopo Alessandro, contenuta nelle
ultime pagine di The Iranian and the Greeks (pp. 142-9); e tuttavia, la fugace menzione
all’idealizzazione della figura di Zoroastro presso i circoli di Platone e Pitagora (c. 20) la
presuppone.
Il testo della lecture, così come emerge da questo processo compositivo, non coincide
perfettamente con quello che sarà dato alle stampe, nello stesso 1979, con il titolo di Persian
Empire and Greek Freedom. Testimonia una fase preliminare di ripensamento P-o 63, reading copy
EL (= GL) su cui Momigliano torna a lavorare in preparazione dell’edito. Il documento è percorso
da una serie di proposte di cancellazione finalizzate all’eliminazione di piccoli incisi ed excursus5,
conservati nel testo edito a vantaggio di quella che parrebbe un’operazione di “omogeneizzazione”
contenutistica: ai tagli sparsi viene preferita l’eliminazione dal testo Festschrift delle sezioni
incipitarie, considerate plausibilmente eccentriche rispetto al tema affrontato. Persian Empire and
Greek Freedom risulta quindi ricavato per sottrazioni, se si esclude l’aggiunta della dedica di
apertura6: comincia infatti direttamente dall’enunciazione di quell’elemento comune a Greci ed
Ebrei – la definizione di sé, o autocoscienza, sviluppata nel confronto con la Persia – in grado per
Momigliano di legittimare una messa in relazione fra i due popoli ancor prima che contatti reciproci
divengano documentabili. Nel testo della lecture qui edito, P-o 79, tale sezione è invece preceduta
3
BENVENISTE 1966.
“Greek architects, sculptors and stone cutters worked to build Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis. Though the details
are uncertain, and there is an element of subjectivity in the evaluation of the contribution of the Greeks to these works,
their participation is certain (C. Gullini, La Parola del Passato 12-4, 1972, 13-39)”, p. 125.
5
Vengono cancellati, in P-o 63: il riferimento all’excursus sugli sforzi dei Persiani per il controllo del territorio e
l’inciso su Demarato e Temistocle (c.8); l’aneddoto erodoteo sulla cena tra Tebani e Persiani alla vigilia della battaglia
di Platea (c.9); la citazione di Focilide (c. 10); la menzione tucididea della lettera scritta in caratteri assiri (c. 11); il
riferimento ai Gathas (c. 12) e tutta la sezione relativa all’influenza dell’arte greca su quella persiana (c. 13); l’aneddoto
sulla proskynesis (c. 14) e quello su Serse quasi persuaso da Artabano a rinunciare alla conquista della Grecia (c. 16); la
parziale eccezione rappresentata dagli Egizi (c. 21).
6
“I offer here to Isaiah Berlin an attempt to define the Greek attitude (or attitudes) toward the Persians, reserving the
comparison with the Jewish attitude (or attitudes) for a little volume which I am writing at present. Isaiah Berlin is, in
any case, the last man to need to be reminded of this side of our common Jewish heritage”, Persian Empire, 139 (= P-o
90, c. 1).
58
4
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
da due pagine incentrate sulla teoria di Guérin du Rocher sopra menzionata e su premesse
relazionali fra Ebrei e Greci composte sulla falsa riga di Alien Wisdom, reputate verosimilmente
tralasciabili in sede editoriale. Il taglio di maggiore significatività appare però quello che coinvolge
il cap. II della lecture, dedicato allo sviluppo dei caratteri della civiltà greca (cc. 3-8): la sua
eliminazione comporta infatti la perdita nell’edito dell’inciso relativo alla questione, fondamentale
nella riflessione di Momigliano a partire almeno dagli anni Quaranta, sul concetto greco di libertà,
anche e soprattutto nella sua variante costituita dalla parrhesia, la libertà di parola.7.
7
Cfr. soprattutto Momigliano, A., Liberty and peace in the ancient world, Nono, 483-501; Id., Peace and Liberty in
the Ancient World, Decimo, 3-105 (part. alle pp. 65-77); ma vd. anche MOMIGLIANO 1974A. Per una generale
illustrazione sul tema in Momigliano si rinvia inoltre a DI DONATO 1995; ID. 1996; cfr. inoltre DIONISOTTI 1997.
59
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
II
The Greeks outside the Persian Empire8
I
[1] Among the books of my library that I particularly cherish there is9 one entitled Hérodote
historien du peuple hébreu sans le savoir. It is anonymous and was allegedly published in The
Hague in 1786. It is in defence of a previous book by l’Abbé Guérin du Rocher, Historie véritable
des temps fabuleux, and is clearly written by l’Abbé Guérin himselfi. He has a theory that in his
book on Egypt Herodotus wrote the history of the Jews under Egyptian names; apparently the
Egyptians told Herodotus the history of the Jews instead of telling their own. This fancy is by no
means isolated in eighteenth century historiography. It tries to answer a question which had already
troubled the mind of Flavius Josephus and other Jews in antiquity and was inherited by Christian
historians: why is Herodotus silent about the Jews while he knows so much about Egyptians and
Phoenicians? It must be admitted that I should probably be here to tell a different story if Herodotus
had gone up to Jerusalem instead of stopping at the sinful harbour of Tyre.
Two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, suddenly lighten10 up the sky of Judaea about 520 B.C.
and allow us to see something of the return of the exiles from Babylon. About seventy years
Nehemiah was writing down his memoirs in what must have been for the Jews, as it was for the
Greeks, a new literary genre – which we call autobiography, using a term probably invented in A.D.
1793ii. Either a few years earlier than Nehemiah, about 458 B.C., or more probably many years later
about 398 B.C., Ezra the Scribe also compiled his memoirs. If the evidence is not badly 11
misleading, both Nehemiah and Ezra gave an account in self-defence of their struggle to reorganize
the State of Judah12. How and when their memoirs were mutilated, used, integrated and at least
partially recomposed to make the present Book of Ezra and Nehemiah is unknown. This is all – or
nearly all – the primary literary evidence we have about the birth of Judaism such as it was passed
down from generation to generation [2] even to us. Archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics help,
but not very much. In so far as they help, they accentuate the paradox of our ignorance. For13
archaeology and numismatics leave us in no doubt that Greek traders and mercenaries went up and
down in Palestine before and during the Persian regime of the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.iii The
first coins of Judaea acknowledge this fact and display the Hebrew word Jehud together with the
Athenian owl – to indicate that Athenian silver currency was respected. The Greeks and the Jews
evidently knew each other on the daily scene. But before Alexander the Great the Greeks seem to
have ignored even the name of the Jews and to have known nothing about the peculiar religion of
the Jews.
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 79, c.c. di P-o 43 contenente il ts. EL (=GL) della lecture corredato di annotazioni
mss. di mano di Momigliano. Si riportano in apparato eventuali discrepanze del documento con la sua c.c. gemella, P-o
42 e con le copie xerox P-o 169 e 74, interessate da annotazioni non sempre riportate nell’edito. Le divergenze tra P-o
79 e la versione edita vengono segnalate tramite riferimento a P-o 90, identificato da una nota di AMM su c.1 come ts.
edito, tranne quando in cui la lecture stampata diverge anche da questo documento (in tal caso si fa riferimento
direttamente a Persian Empire). Vengono infine segnalate le note di lavoro presenti su P-o 168 e le varianti
(soprattutto i tagli) riportate su P-o 63, reading copy EL che testimonia una fase intermedia di ripensamento del ts. in
prospettiva dell’edizione.
8
P-o 79: Sept. 1978, mgsupmsb[AMM].
9
P-o 63: I started my first lecture with a book I had not at home: the Septuagint. I shall start this lecture with a book I
had, mgsupmsb[Mom].
10
P-o 74: light <-> lighten.
11
P-o 74: seriously <-> badly.
12
P-o 169: within the State of Persia, mgsnmsn[Mom].
13
P-o 63: Tyre -> Two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah [c.1] … our ignorance. For, del.
60
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
Trained as they were to observe and describe the specific features of each barbarian nation, they
did not notice that particular variety of barbarians we call Jews. The Jews remained to them
indistinguishable from the other Palestinians. The Jews themselves took rather more notice of the
Greeks in their holy books. They had a name for the Greeks – the one current throughout the East,
Yawaniv – and, though they knew them above all as second-hand traders of Jewish slaves, somehow
included them in the economy of the Messianic age. The pericope in the last chapter of the present
text of Isaiah – pointing to Tarsis, Pul, Lud, Tubal, Yawan and the distant islands as those who have
not yet seen the glory of God but will in the future come to the holy mountain – can hardly refer to
the ingathering of Jewish exiles from all these countries: it14 must refer to the Gentiles of these15
countries. But Athens and Sparta, Miletus, Massalia and the other centres of Greek civilization are
not mentioned in the Bible, and the wisdom of the Greeks was a thing for the future. Before
Alexander the Great, Greek "paideia" was hardly better known to the Jews than Jewish barbarism
was known to the Greeks.
When the Jews and the Greeks faced each other, both had behind them what we can call the
classical period of their history. By then they were conscious of having been shaped by something
which had happened in their past. They defined themselves in terms of the values of a tradition to
which they intended [3] to remain faithful. It is the depth and the length of their respective traditions
and of their respective differences that gave importance to their encounter in the Hellenistic age.
However much we play down the facts, there is Christianity to be explained. And before
Christianity the actions of Antiochus IV Epiphanes remain the first full-scale religious persecution
in the Greek world just as much as16 the Maccabaean reaction remains the first religious rebellion in
the Greek world.17
18
There is a common feature in Greek and in Jewish history which allows a direct comparison of
the two nations even before their cultural contacts become tangible in the ordinary sense of the
word19. Both Greeks and Jews defined themselves in relation to Persia. But Greek religious,
political and social life had already reached it classical form before the Greeks fought against the
Persians. Their victory against the Persians added much to their self-consciousness and no doubt
contributed to the specific developments of the fifth century B.C. in Athens and elsewhere. Yet,
fundamentally, the Greeks were right in feeling that they were what they were before the Persians
entered upon the scene. The Jews, on the other hand, shaped their theocracy inside the Persian
Empire and were aware of their permanent debt to the founder of the Persian Empire v . A
paradoxical consequence was that the Greek came to notice certain basic points of similarity
between their own political predicaments and those of the Persians, whereas the Jews, while calling
Cyrus a Messiah, never dreamt of being like the Persians or of finding acceptable model of
behaviour in Persia. A more precise analysis of this aspect of the difference between Greeks and
Jews may repay the effort, even if it inevitably compels us to include much that, in itself, is
obvious20.
II
14
P-o 79: they; P-o 42: it <-> they, msn[Mom].
P-o 79: those; P-o 42: these <-> those, msn[Mom].
16
P-o 74: as -> much as, del.
17
P-o 63: to the Greeks -> When the Jews and the Greeks faced each other…. Greek world, del.
18
Qui inizia il ts. di Persian Empire; P-o 90: For I. Berlin Festschrift, O.U.P. 19.12.78 [also part of Grinfield I,
31.I.79], mgsupmsb[AMM].
19
P-o 90: recognizable by ordinary criteria <-> tangible in the ordinary sense of the word.
20
P-o 79, 90: may repay the effort… obvious; Persian Empire: may be worth the effort. I offer here to Isaiah Berlin
an attempt to define the Greek attitude (or attitudes) towards the Persians, reserving the comparison with the Jewish
attitude (or attitudes) for a little volume which I am writing at present. Isaiah Berlin is, in any case, the last man to need
to be reminded of this side of our common Jewish heritage.
61
15
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
By the end of the sixth century B.C. some characteristic features had emerged in Greek societies.
First, they formed a civilization which spread extensively from the Black Sea to Spain and Africa
but, outside Greece proper, [4] was almost exclusively confined to the coasts. It was therefore a
civilization which relied on the superiority of military techniques and on seamanship to defend itself
against aggressors. The strong sense of unity was due to common language (notwithstanding
dialectal differences), common literature, common religion, common artistic taste, common basic
political institutions and common games. The outsider was the man who "speaks
incomprehensibly", that is, the barbarian. The mystery ceremonies at Athens were opened with a
proclamation excluding all those who speak a barbarous language. But each Greek city tended to be
more aggressive towards other Greek cities than towards barbarians: the fear of being ruled by other
Greeks and losing one's own independence was constant. Self-identification inside Greek culture
presupposed separation from non-citizens. To be Greek meant the capacity to organize one's own
life against other Greeks, if they did not belong to the same polis. This alone implied that religion,
however strongly felt, did not dominate life, for there was a definite trend in Greek religious beliefs
and cults towards overcoming city boundaries. Religious conformism was more presupposed than
imposed. There was no priestly class to speak of. Reflections on the nature of gods were left mainly
to private initiative. Myths – stories of gods and heroes – were mainly transmitted and elaborated by
poets who at the utmost claimed private inspiration. The more mystically inclined were initiated
into mysteries which seldom changed the pattern of ordinary life.
The business of earning one's daily bread by agriculture, crafts or trade was accepted as normal,
though with no enthusiasm. Few, outside Sparta, were in a position to do without work. But the
spread of slavery and the relative cheapness of slaves gave a considerable margin of leisure, even to
those who were engaged in manual work. Slavery was basically rooted in war and conquest: in
older times it produced the serfdom of whole populations; in more recent times (mainly from the
seventh century onwards) it took the form of selling and buying prisoners of war (chattel slaves).
For obvious reasons the Greeks preferred to buy foreign, non-Greek, slaves. Slaves could be freed
but, unlike Roman slaves, did not become citizens. Slavery for debt was probably never [5] an
important source of chattel slaves (as distinct from serfs) and disappeared from the more civilized
centres during the sixth century. The liberty of the citizens was dependent on the existence of
slavery: the greater the number of the slaves, the greater the solidarity of the citizens in the defence
of their privileges as mastersvi. The psychology of the ordinary free citizen was conditioned by the
implicit assumption that his behaviour towards other free men was different from his behaviour
towards slaves. The slave could be tortured, sexually exploited and humiliated even in cities which,
like Athens, had a justified reputation for treating their slaves with generosity. On the other hand,
the fact that much of the education of children was in the hands of slaves must have had disturbing
consequences: in what ways could slaves educate children to be free?
It must be noted for future reference – and no doubt will have been noticed by my audience –
that so far I may have seemed to have expanded certain remarks made by Josephus in Against
Apionvii when he was concerned with the same problem of understanding the difference between
Greeks and Jews. Josephus, too, emphasizes the coastal character of Greek settlements and the
Greek inclination towards piracy and war, for which he found precedents in Thucydides. He
significantly observes "we pride ourselves on the education of our children" (1, 60)viii. What I have
now to add is, however, not so easily to be found in Josephus, and his silence on these further points
may ultimately also turn out21 to be relevant. Conscious of their freedom, the citizens of Greek
towns gathered for public deliberation in open spaces or public buildings and developed a special
manner of reasoning and persuasion. Freedom of speech, especially in Athens and in the Ionian
cities, became the hallmark of democracyix. Freedom of speech always remained a sign of political
and social freedom rather than intellectual superiority. But where political freedom was firmly
established it was easier to examine religious beliefs and to formulate questions about the nature of
21
P-o 79: out, msn[Mom].
62
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
things without fear of persecution. This was made even more easy by the basic distrust which the
Greeks felt for their own gods. They envied [6] the gods because the gods could do almost anything
and because they were immortal. But the gods eliminated in their own societies all the contrasts by
which human life was made tolerable and intelligible: the contrasts by which human life was made
tolerable and intelligible: the contrasts between justice (dike) and insolence (hybris), between law
(nomos) and nature (physis), between active and contemplative life, between peace and war,
between knowledge and ignorance, between civilization and savagery, etc. When a man tried to
behave like a god he was a tyrant or a madman; rape, adultery, cruelty, guile and murder were
inextricably connected with the power of the gods, while these activities could be repressed, if not
eliminated, in the world of men. The gods could help; indeed Zeus was the guarantor of justice. But
their company was not reassuring: they asked of men what they were not prepared to do themselves.
The observation of nature was less terrifying. Knowledge was power: "Wisdom is much more
valuable than the strength of men and horses"x said Xenophanes when Ionian philosophy was in its
beginning. Medicine was consequently regarded, not as an enquiry into the weaknesses and misery
of human life, but as the art of healing; and the doctor was universally respected. Outside the realm
of medicine, and perhaps of the visual arts, manual work did not rank highly. Artisan activity
(techne) was never recognized as belonging to the World of Knowledge (episteme). The artisan was
too near the slaves – and perhaps too near the gods who had shaped the world like artisans.
In the sixth century B.C. Ionia was the most advanced in the field of the study of natural
phenomena, but Athens, after the tyrants, rapidly became a centre for free discussion and free
thinking and attracted Ionian philosophers. The Greek colonies in Sicily and Magna Grecia fostered
a more religiously orientated enquiry (Pythagoras, Empedocles) but the underlying principle was
the same: discovery of the organization of the universe by observation and reasoning. If medicine
was the most obvious approach to the understanding of the human body, mathematics was the most
trusted approach to natural (including astronomical) phenomena. Geography was intensively
studied and included an examination both of the shape of the earth and of the diversity of its [7]
inhabitants. Myths were freely analysed and often found unbelievable. Teaching of all these
subjects began to be formalized: there were schools at various levels in the sixth century B.C. What
did not yet exist – and even later never acquired a precise status in the curricula of the schools – was
history. But history, as we understand it, began to be considered an autonomous pursuit of
knowledge in connection with the Persian conflict. Even more than epic and tragic poetry, history
became the proper literary genre for reflecting on the causes, the conduct and the outcome of the
clash between Greeks and Persians. History therefore plays a prominent role in clarifying for us
what the Greek learned from their encounter with the Persians xi . Correspondingly, though
historiography was an established subject in Hebrew literature long before the Persian rule, it takes
a new turn in Judaea to accommodate the new experiences of life inside the Persian Empire.22
III23
[8] The rise of the Persian Empire was not only dangerous to the Greeks: it had placed them in an
ambiguous position. The Persian State was pulled in two directions: one ended in the
Mediterranean; the other, if pursued fully, would have led the Persian kings towards India, as it did
their successor Alexander the Great24. What at best contributed to coordinating the expansion in the
two directions (and at worst prevented the Empire from falling to pieces) was the careful
22
Cap. II: def. in P-o 90.
P-o 79: III; P-o 90: II <-> III.
24
P-o 90: Towards the Mediterranean and towards India <-> One ended in the Mediterranean… Alexander the Great;
Persian Empire: corr. def.
63
23
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
organisation of internal communications and the constant search for new river and sea lanes. We
know comparatively very little of the efforts of the Persian kings to control the whole of the Iranian
plateau and to create a barrier against the nomadic tribes on the North-East of their State. Persian
control there meant the introduction of a system of taxation and military vassalage among people in
conditions of natural economy.25 In the East the Persian kings had their most difficult work to do
and therefore looked with special relish in the opposite direction – where power could be organised
on the basis of pre-existing institutions, glory was obtained against a background of monumental
cities and respected temples, and collaborators could be won from old-established urban
aristocracies.
Persian interest in Greek collaboration went beyond the field of Greek mercenaries and artisans,
whose reputation among the Persian was undisputed. The Persians attracted intellectuals, especially
doctors, from Greece and turned for political and military advice to Greek exiles. We know perhaps
about 300 names of Greeks who served26 the Persians in the two centuries before Alexander
(ordinary mercenaries and artisans are by definition excluded as their names would be known only
exceptionally). An ex-king of Sparta, Demaratus, and one of the leaders of Athens, Themistocles,
belong to this company; and of course the two historians, Ctesias and Xenophon, are in it, the first
as a court doctor, the second as a leader of mercenaries27. If a large part of the Greece – including
the Thebans and, de facto, the Argives – sided with the [9] Persians during Xerxes’ invasion of 480479 B.C., if even the oracle of Delphi ‘medised’ on that occasionxii, this must be accounted for by
more than sheer fright before what appeared to be the overwhelming power of the Achaemenids.
There must have been an element of attraction towards a stable international order which seemed to
ensure protection for the wealthy class and furnished28 shelter from restless neighbours like the
Athenians or the Spartans. Even in Athens public opinion was by no means unanimously against
Persia. The tyrants had left friends behind. And Sparta, like Delphi, had not forgotten her failure to
defend Croesus of Lydia against the Persians – with consequent loss of prestige. The Persians had
acquired the reputation of being wealthy, generous and easy going masters; they had been seen at
close quarters to be civilized, god-fearing, ‘truth-telling’ aristocrats, good at riding and hunting just
as Greek aristocrats liked to be.
We shall never know for certain, but29 a little story told by Herodotus must be authentic. Before
the battle of Plataea a wealthy citizen of Thebes gave a banquet to which he invited the Persian
commander Mardonius, fifty of the noblest Persians, and fifty of the most distinguished Boeotians.
One of the Greek guests (from Orchomenos, not from Thebes) was Thersander, who lived long
enough to entrust30 his recollections of the evening to Herodotus. A Persian and a Greek sat side by
side on each couch, and the Persian who shared Thersander’s couch addressed him in the Greek
tongue and ‘inquired from him from what city he came’. After these formalities the Persian frankly
expressed his fears of a Persian (and therefore Theban) defeat and added: ‘Many of us Persians
know our danger, but we are constrained by necessity to do as our leader bids us. Verily it is the
sorest of all human sorrows, to abound in knowledge and yet have no power over action31’ (9.16).
Here we learn of a Persian who could speak Greek, and even more of the very human anxiety he
could express to his Greek comrade on the eve of the decisive battle.32
25
P-o 63: Alexander the Great -> What at best contributed… natural economy, del.
P-o 90: We know perhaps… served; P-o 79: A German dissertation has collected about 300 names of Greeks who
are known to have served.
27
P-o 63: exceptionally). -> An ex-king of Sparta… leader of mercenaries, del.
28
P-o 74: provided <-> furnished.
29
P-o 74: but <- Although we shall never know for certain, I feel that, del.
30
P-o 74: pass on <-> entrust, msb[Mom].
31
P-o 79: over action; P-o 90: def.
32
P-o 63: behind -> And Sparta, like Delphi, had not forgotten her failure to defend Croesus… eve of the decisive
battle, del.; P-o 90, 63: of the decisive battle. Both in the fifth and in the fourth century there were Iranian or Iranized
aristocrats who displayed in Greek those sentiments which made them respectable to Greeks. The Lycian prince
64
26
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
And yet, at any given moment, the Greek world was only of peripheral importance to the Persian
State. Even in Asia Minor the Greeks were after all [10] a small minority. The commercial groups
prospering under Persia were centred in Mesopotamia, like the Murašu family, and in the
Phoenician towns rather than in the Greek cities. Aramaic letters and neo-Babylonian tablets have
told us much about the affairs of Aršan (Arsames to the Greek), who was a satrap of Egypt in the
second part of the fifth centuryxiii. A member of the royal family, he had wealth in Babylonian real
estate and close connections with the Murašu family. Carthage, a Phoenician colony which was
involved in continuous struggles with Greek competition and remained influential among the
Phoenicians of the motherland, certainly encouraged the latter to side with the Persians rather than
with the Greeks. Ancient tales and modern speculations about the alleged alliance between Persians
and Carthaginians against the Greeks in 480 can be discounted. But the fact remains that in 480
both the Persians and the Carthaginians made war against the Greeks.33 It is another fact that for
many Greeks – and more specifically for the citizen of Sparta and Athens – the attractions of Persia
and the solid merits of life in a Greek polis were incompatible. They were developing a style of
political discussion, judicial decision and intellectual debate which they knew to be peculiar to
themselves. They thought that by obeying their own laws they avoided human masters and could
truly be considered free. As Phocylides said of Assyria, and his reference could easily be extended
to Persia: ‘an orderly city, though small and set on a rock, outranks senseless Niniveh’. We do not
know where and by whom freedom was first associated with democracy, freedom of speech thus
becoming one of the most important aspects of democracy. Whether or not those Ionian citizens
who passed from Croesus’ control to Cyrus’ rule regarded democratic freedom as the antithesis of
Persian despotism, the antithesis was clear to Spartans and Athenians – and to those who fought
with them. There are clear indications that as soon as the Persian replaced the Lydians as rulers of
Asia Minor many of the Greeks felt that the whole fabric of their life was in danger. There where
projects, duly reported by Herodotus, of abandoning Asiatic Ionia for distant and barbaric Sardinia,
and at least the citizens of Phocaea and Teos actually emigrated to other countries and faced
unpleasant adventures in their search for new homes.34 Internal social conflicts in the Greek cities
helped to identify the anti-Persian groups with the enemies of tyranny. Though the connection
between the internal social conflicts of the Greek cities of Asia and the presence of the Persians was
ambivalent in contemporary eyes, there was no doubt about the support which the Persians gave to
the exiled tyrant of Athens, Hippias. In Athens Phrynicus depressed the Athenians by his tragedy,
The Capture of Miletus, which he composed before 480 B.C., in a very different mood from that
of35 The Phoenician Women, which is later than 480. Nor were the Greeks alone in finding the
Persians [11] less accommodating than they had wished or hoped. The story of Pythius, the Lydian
magnate who “entertained Xerxes and his whole army in a most lavish fashion, offering at the same
time to give him a sum of money for the war”, is too good not to be enjoyed in its Herodotean
context, 7.27-8. But the second instalment of the story, in chapters 38-9, must be spelt out because
it36 shows that collaboration with the kings of Persia had its dangers: the king expected not only
lavish entertainment and money from his protégés, but presence on the battlefield. Pythius, who
tried to get his eldest son excused from service, doomed him to death.
Arbinas who was advised by a Greek devine who boasted of being good at everything in which wisemen are good:
archery, virtue and equitation (L. Robert, Journ. Sav. 1978, 5), mginfmsn[AMM] con ser; Persian Empire: def.
33
P-o 90: it is another fact that for many Greeks… there was no doubt about the support which the Persians gave to
the exiled tyrant of Athens, Hippias <-> P-o 79: Most of the evidence we possess about the Greek attitude toward the
Persians is later than 478 and come from Athenians or from those who sympathised with Athens. Reaction before 480
must have been even more extreme.
34
P-o 63: considered free -> As Phocylides said of Assyria… for new homes, del.
35
P-o 79: in a very different mood from that <-> and before congratulating them in, interl.msn[Mom].
36
P-o 74: What is particularly relevant to my theme is the second instalment of the story in chapters 38-39, which <->
But the second … because it, interl.msb[Mom].
65
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
IV37
It was only to be expected that the Greeks during and after the wars with Persia should look with
attention at the Persian constitution, history and customs. Herodotus had both predecessors and
successors, though probably none with his brilliance and intellectual generosity. Empedocles
composed a poem, Persika, about the expedition of Xerxes. The story reported by Diogenes
Laertius (8.2.57) is that either his sister or his daughter destroyed it. The Hellenized Lydian Xanthus
informed the Greeks about the Persian Magi. One Greek at least really learned Persian:
Themistocles. But he did so out of necessity. In the late fifth century, however, the Athenians and
the Spartans must have had some experts to interpret Aramaic texts 38 . An Aramaic letter
(Thudycides says ‘a letter written in Assyrian characters’) was sent by the Persians to the Spartans.
It was intercepted by the Athenians and duly translated (4.50).
39
We must immediately add that neither the linguistic nor the religious situation for the Persian
Empire was likely to impress the Greeks deeply40, at least in the fifth century. The fact that imperial
Persian texts were also available in Elamite, Accadian, Egyptian and Aramaic translations, though
not necessarily all of them together, only made the [12] inferior status of the Greek language in the
Persian Empire more obvious. No doubt official letters to Greek States and individuals were often
drawn up41 in Greek by the Persian chancellery, and there were displays of bilingual texts in
Persians (or Aramaic) and Greek when they could be of special relevance to Greek speakers
(Herodotus 4.78). But Greek was not one of the privileged languages of the Empire. And – with the
exception noted above – what was not in Greek was usually not read by the Greeks. Darius’ stelae
celebrating the reopening of the old Suez Canal in Persian, Elamite, Accadian and Egyptian – or the
statue of Darius, which turned up in Susa in 1972 with inscriptions in the same four languagesxiv are symbolic of the invisible barrier separating the monolingual Greeks from the multilingual
Empire42.
The linguistic barrier was enough to prevent any Greek from appreciating the subtleties of
Persian religious thought, even if the Gathas had already been written down by the fifth century
B.C. and had been know in the imperial circles of Persia – which is of course very doubtful. But
perhaps we ought not to mention the Gathas because we risk being asked how much of them we can
understand ourselves.43 Linguistic incompetence alone would make it impossible for any Greeks to
appreciate the religious policy of the Persian kings in its real terms and in its local and temporal
variations. Even Herodotus was compelled to be, to say the least, one-sided in his report of the
persecution of the Egyptian priests by Cambyses because the epigraphical evidence was
inaccessible to him (3.28-9). Cyrus’ respect for Yahweh and for Marduk made all the difference to
the Jews and to the Babylonians. As it happens we do not even know of any step taken by Cyrus in
favour of Greek cults44. What is usually put on a par with Cyrus’ policy towards Jews and
Babylonians is a letter from Darius to his satrap Gadatas for the purpose of confirming privileges to
a wealthy temple of Apollo in Magnesia45xv. The text, which I for one consider authentic, provides
excellent comparative evidence for the Persian legal terminology used in edicts reported in the
37
P-o 79: IV; P-o 90: III <-> IV.
P-o 79: if necessary; P-o 90: if necessary, del.
39
P-o 79: As we are here to compare the Greek and the Jewish evaluation of the Persians in order to understand
Greeks and Jews: P-o 90: def.
40
P-o 63: favourably <-> deeply, interl.msb
41
P-o 74: drawn up <-> redacted, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 79: redacted.
42
P-o 168: Why? As Hdt. IV.87 suggests, if a statue or stele of Darius were set up in Greek speaking territories it
would be written in P-E-A and Greek, interl.msl[Mom].
43
P-o 63: Persia -> which is of course… understand ourselves, del.
44
P-o 168: No. But in 358 we have the Aramaic-Greek-Lycian stele text from Xanthus. I bet this wasn’t an isolated
instance, mgsnmsl[Mom].
45
P-o 79: (Tod, I, 10).
66
38
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
Bible in favour of the Temple of Jerusalem.46 But the benefits which the Greeks of Asia Minor in
general could derive from privileges granted to one of their temples were almost negligible. Outside
Asia Minor Darius’ letter to Gadatas probably [13] remained unknown. In any case, after the Ionian
rebellion and Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, there was another side. The Persian had shown the
Greeks how they could treat the temples belonging to their enemies. They had sacked the templeoracle of Branchidae (Herodotus 6.19) and had burned down the sanctuary on the acropolis of
Athens while killing those who had sought refuge in it as suppliants (8.53).
A last misapprehension to be cleared up concerning the attitude of the Greeks to the Persian
Empire is that about47 Greek influences in Persian art. In 1929 archaeologists were alerted by the
discovery of the Susa foundation text which stated: ‘The stone cutters who worked the stone they
were Ionians and Sardians’xvi. Later the influence of Greek artistic techniques and styles was
established at Pasargadae and Persepolis just as much as at Susa. A well known inscription in a
quarry of Persepolis tells us that the Greek Pytharchos was its superintendent, if not the ownerxvii.
Although today nobody would repeat what Gisela Richter stated as a fact in 1946, that Persian art
was “peripheric Greek art”xviii , the impression seems still to prevail that the architecture and the
sculpture of the capitals of the Persian Empire must have looked familiar and understandable to the
Greeks because the Greeks contributed so much, in workers and techniques, to their creation. This
is probably an illusion. Persepolis remained almost unknown to the Greek world until Alexander
burned it down. Even Susa, where Greek ambassadors used to go, was visited by few Greeks, and
there is no telling what they felt about Achaemenid imperial buildings. There is no sign that the
Persian liked Athenian pottery (as the Etruscans did), and there is no sign that the Greeks liked the
emphasis of Persian art on the majesty of the King of Kings. There is not even clear evidence that
they noticed itxix.48
V
What defined the reaction of the Greeks to the Persians was of course political49 evaluation.
They were reconfirmed in their faith in law and freedom and consequently in their dislike of tyrants.
Their experience of tyranny was after all very recent, and the wars with Persia had indicated that it
was by [14] no means a foregone conclusion that the word ‘tyrant’ should for ever be confined to
the memories of the past.50 What emerges from Aeschylus and from Herodotus, who knew his
Aeschylus well (2.156), is trust in freedom. Democritus said that ‘poverty in democracy is better
than wealth in serfdom’ (Fragment 251); he must have thought of the Persians who had generally
the reputation of being rich. According to Herodotus, Demaratus made the same point about the
Spartans in one of his alleged conversations with the King of Persia: ‘Law is the master whom the
Spartans have; and this master they fear more than thy subjects fear thee’xx. When the Spartan
commander Pausanias, who had previously despised Persian luxury (Herodotus 9.82), adopted
Persian dress, he was discredited (Thucydides 1.130). In Greek eyes there was little to choose
between Greek tyrants and Persian kings.
In its turn the trust in freedom was rooted in the awareness that Greek tyrants or Persian kings go
beyond the natural limits of humanity and try to acquire divine attributes. Dislike of the Persian
monarchy consequently crystallized round the notion of proskynesis – the act of homage to the
Persian kings. It was considered unworthy of a Greek. The prevailing opinion of the Greeks appears
to have been that proskynesis meant falling prostrate before the master (this must be Aeschylus’
meaning in Persians 588). Plutarch has the curious story of how the Theban Ismenias avoided the
indignity by a subterfuge: “he threw his ring down on the ground in front of him and then stooped
46
47
48
49
50
P-o 63: Magnesia -> The text, which I for one… Temple of Jerusalem, del.
P-o 90: about; P-o 79: concerning.
P-o 63: suppliants (8,53) -> A last misapprehension to be cleared up… noticed it, del.
P-o 90, 63: political, not religious, interl.msn[Mom]; Persian Empire: corr. def.
P-o 63: Their experience… of the past, del.
67
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
and picked it up, thus giving the impression that he was making the proskynesis” (Artaxerxes 22,4).
The symbolism of proskynesis was apparently a troubling one when Alexander tried to have himself
recognized as the Persian King of Kingsxxi. What precise acts and gestures the different categories
of subjects were supposed to perform in front of the King is another matter. It would appear that a
Persian dignitary kissed his own hand and bowed in the presence of the kingxxii, but this is irrelevant
to what the Greeks [15] thought and felt. In any case, both bringing one’s hand to one’s mouth and
prostration were, for the Greeks, acts of cult: extending them to mortals was sacrilege. Love of
freedom and respect for the true gods here coalesced.
It was also to be expected that after the defeats at Salamis, Plataea and Mycale the Greeks would
conclude that the Persians were bad soldiers. Neither Aeschylus nor Herodotus had a high opinion
of their military attitudes. The Hippocratic author of the treatise on Airs, Waters and Places (written
perhaps about 440 B.C.) emphasises the non-martial character of the Persiansxxiii . In the fourth
century B.C. the same evaluation was strongly expressed by Xenophon. It is Xenophon who
transmits to us the report of a Greek ambassador that he had found in Persia many cooks, but no
man fit to fight the Greeks (Hellenica 7.1.38). Stories circulated both in the fifth and in the fourth
century that Persian soldiers had to be driven by the lash into battle (Herodotus 7.56 and 223;
Xenophon, Anabasis 3.4.26). It was said, in conflict with other statements, that the Persians were
corrupt, cruel, soft, faithless, incestuous and generally51 pleasure-loving: their many wives and
concubines and their harem intrigues (all evidently upper-class phenomena) were contrasted with
Greek sexual and family life. These facile and contemptuous judgments are most frequent in the
fourth century.
The Greek reaction to the Persians might easily have terminated at this low point. If it had, we
should have been deprived of its more thoughtful suggestions. Some Greeks realized that there was
a difference between a king like Darius, who repressed the rebellion of his own subjects and tried to
punish the Athenians as supporters of rebels, and a king like Xerxes, who aimed at conquering the
whole of Greece. What is more, this distinction, once introduced, led to some questions on the
nature of Persian ambitions which were bound to emphasise the similarities, rather than the
differences, between Greeks and Persians. At a superficial level victory encouraged the Greeks to
consider themselves different from, and superior to, the Persians. At a deeper level the differences
became blurred. Neither statement would have made sense to the Jews under Persian rule or after
it52.
[16] Granted the improbability of the Greeks’ going beyond the most overt aspects of Persian life
because of lack of linguistic equipment, it was inevitable that some Persian kings should be found
more guilty than other of overweening53 pride, hybris. Pride, to the Greeks, was an individual, not
an institutional characteristic. Attention was therefore diverted from Persian institutions to the
individual attitudes of the Persian kings. Xerxes became one of the worst examples of oriental
tyranny, whereas Darius – not to speak of Cyrus the Great – got away with little criticism and much
sympathy. In Aeschylus’ Persians, performed eight years after the battle of Salamis, Xerxes’
superhuman attitudes are condemned by the ghost of his father Darius. Xerxes, in his father’s
judgment, had not respected the limits imposed by the gods on the Persian Empire, he had wanted
too much.xxiv Thus the Persians were the first to suffer from the transgressions of their kings54: as
subjects they were not held responsible for the deeds of their masters. The tragedy as seen by
Aeschylus was the tragedy of a nation let down by its leader; it explained the Greek victory with
reference to what the Persian King had done to his own people. However alien the customs of the
Persians could seem to the Greeks (and Aeschylus was certainly ready to underline their slightly
comic peculiarities), the Athenian spectators were asked to give their sympathy to the Persians.
51
52
53
54
P-o 90: generally, msn[Mom]; P-o 79: def.
P-o 79,74,81: At a superficial level victory… or after it, def.; P-o 169: ts. aggiunto mginfmsn[Mom].
P-o 79: overwhelming; P-o 169: overweening <-> overwhelming.
P-o 79: king
68
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
Herodotus is even more restrained in his judgment of the Persian defeat. There is no need here to
recapitulate the initial chapters of his seventh book, which must surely be reckoned among the most
penetrating pages ever written about human temptations. Xerxes himself, however avid for glory, is
on the point of being persuaded by his uncle and adviser Artabanus that he must give up the
ambitions of conquering Greece. As Artabanus forcefully puts it, when the choice is55 between
counsel tending to increase pride and counsel tending to its abatement, the latter must be preferred.
Yet some demon repeatedly in dreams coerces not only Xerxes, but Artabanus too, to follow the
worse counsel.56 The doom of Xerxes and his armies is willed by the gods. Xerxes’ arrogance is not
so much a sin as an indication of divine disfavour. This conclusion is bound to [17] affect the whole
question of Greco-Persian relations. It puts other statements by Herodotus into proper perspective.
Herodotus is not certain that the conflict between Persians and Greeks was inevitable. He has no
sympathy for the instigators of the Ionian rebellion against Persia. He says in so many words that by
involving themselves in this rebellion the Athenians were ‘the beginning of many evils for Greeks
and Barbarians’ (5.97). He had already said in the first chapters of his history that according to the
Persians the Greeks were greatly to be blamed because in the Trojan War they had invaded Asia
before the Persian had attacked Europe (1.4). Quite pointedly Herodotus remarked that after the
repression of the Ionian rebellion Darius eliminated the tyrants from the Greek cities against all
expectations. This proved according to Herodotus that the Persian government was not essentially
incompatible with democracy (6.43). In its turn this Persian understanding for democratic
institutions shows, always in the eyes of Herodotus, that at a certain moment of their history the
Persians had genuinely faced the choice between monarchy, aristocracy and democracy and had
preferred the first after debate (3.80-2). Herodotus obviously enjoyed reporting the story that Cyrus
the Great rebuked the Spartan ambassador with the words: ‘I never yet feared men who have a place
set apart in the midst of their city where they deceive each other by committing perjury57’ (1.153).
This is backed by the remark presented as Herodotus’ own that in allowing themselves to be
persuaded to help the Ionian rebels (whereas King Cleomenes of Sparta had refused to do so) the
Athenians proved that it was easier to deceive thirty thousand men than one (5.97). In other chapters
Herodotus amuses himself by comparing the powers of the Spartan kings with those of the Persian
and Egyptian kings (6.59).
Herodotus does not see any contradiction in extolling the courage and love of liberty of Spartans
and Athenians while recognising that Athens at least had been guilty of gratuitous provocation
towards Persia and was vulnerable in its institutions. He does indeed announce what he declares to
be [18] an unpopular truth in his day: that the Athenians had been the saviours of Greece. ‘Having
chosen to keep Greece free, they [the Athenians] raised up that portion of the Greek nation which
had not gone over to the Medes and so, next to the gods, they repulsed the invader... They had the
courage to remain faithful to their land and await the coming of the enemy’ (7.139).
Herodotus is obviously careful not to give himself away by commenting on anything that
happened after 479. He mentions Pericles, but only in the context of a dream which his mother had
a few days before giving birth to him: ‘She fancied she had delivered a lion’ (6.131). To call a man
a lion is not, in Greek imagery, a safe complimentxxv. We shall not try to guess what Herodotus had
in mind. He was obviously aware of criticism against Athens in general and Pericles in particular.
He lived to recognise what Thucydides was to express in so many words, that the Athenians had
gained the reputation of being tyrants of unwilling subjects. But whereas Thucydides concentrates
on the inner logic of the development of power in Greece, Herodotus regarded results as being
beyond human calculation. All that human beings can do is not to forget what is good because
badness is mixed with it. The last words of Herodotus’ history are of suspense and warning. The
lesson is attributed to Cyrus the Great. No one can mistake the importance of what Herodotus is
55
56
57
P-o 79: when the choice is, def.
P-o 63: temptations -> Xerxes himself, however avid for glory… the worse counsel, del.
P-o 90: where… perjury; P-o 79: where they perjure themselves and deceive each other.
69
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
saying, or the meaning of the choice of speaker. When they were already the masters of Asia, the
Persians asked Cyrus to give them a better land. Cyrus answered that a more comfortable climate
would make them weaker, less capable of ruling an empire. ‘And the Persians [concludes
Herodotus] departed with altered minds, admitted that Cyrus was wiser than they, and chose rather
to dwell in a barren land and be rulers than to cultivate plains and be slaves of others’ (9.122). The
names of Cyrus and the Persians are interchangeable with those of Pericles and the Athenians. The
anti-Persian league founded by the Athenians in 478 had soon turned into an instrument of Athenian
power. The Athenians created their own empire and pointedly imitated the Persians by imposing a
tribute on their subjects and by repressing any rebellion. In Athens, as in Persia, [19] freedom
required power, because power is a condition of freedom, but power proved in fact unobtainable
without ruling others. We have been ushered by Herodotus into the age of Greek imperialism via
Persian imperialism. Herodotus clearly did not intend to obliterate the difference between the two
nations. His sympathetic characterisation of the Persians, who teach their sons three things only – to
ride, to draw the bow, and to tell the truth (1,136) – is also an indication of the limits he saw in their
minds. This is confirmed not so much by some specific statements on the Greeks, which may even
be suspected of being tinged with irony (especially 1.60), but by the picture of Greek life as it
emerges as a whole from his history. What, however, Herodotus proclaims at the end of his long
search, his long historia, is the common predicament of Greeks and Persians in their acquisition of
power. For Greeks or for Persians, the choice is between ruling or being ruled.
Nobody after Herodotus expressed the same view with similar depth and shrewdness. His rival
Ctesias, who had lived inside the Persian court for many years, rather developed that analysis of
dynastic conflicts and harem intrigues which makes him such a useful counterpart to the Book of
Esther; and this usefulness would be greater if his text were preserved in its entirety58. But the
interpretation of the character of the Persians, and more specifically of Cyrus the Great, which we
find in Xenophon – the many-sided student of Persian affairs – is based on presuppositions
comparable with those of Herodotus. In Xenophon the Persians act according to political principles
which are intelligible to the Greeks, owe much to Greek collaboration and, in the specific case of
Cyrus the Great, are inspired by a type of education in which the Greeks can mirror themselves.
Two major assumptions of Xenophon are the legitimacy of imperialism – that is, of unlimited rule
and economic exploitation of conquered enemies – and the pre-eminence of the political and
military institutions capable of supporting imperialism.
The difference between Herodotus and Xenophon is of course that Xenophon reaches the point
at which idealization of the past (Cyrus the Great and, [20] to a lesser extent, the younger Cyrus)
conceals reality and becomes a factor in misunderstanding the present, and therefore a weakness. In
the same way there is a disturbing element of mere imagination in the vague and idealized notions
which begin to circulate in the circles of Plato and Pythagoras about the figure of Zoroaster and the
teaching of the Magixxvi . After all, in the fifth century the Greeks had been the masters of their own
destiny and had alone taken the decision to fight the Persians. In the fourth century they were led to
conquer the Persians by the Macedonians. There is a lack of self-control in what the Greeks say
about the Persians in the fourth century: their judgments oscillate between the extremes of contempt
and idealisation. Xenophon is even half-conscious of his own contradictions, which became more
acute in old age when he wrote the pamphlet on the ‘Revenues’ – an essentially pacifist pamphlet.
But one thing the Greeks continued seriously to believe before and after the conquest of Alexander
the Great. The Persian Empire was an aggregate of subject territories held together by a central
force. No religious link, no common language or literature, no common art helped to make the
Empire what it was. It was basically a question of the relation of strength between the centre and the
periphery. The personality of the King contributed to this relation in the Greek terms of greater or
lesser wisdom: it contributed so much that after Herodotus no one in Greece asked himself (to the
best of my knowledge) whether there could be an alternative to monarchy in Persia. But there was
58
P-o 90: in its entirety; P-o 79: completely.
70
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
no effort to see what kept the Empire together behind the administrative facade; and – most
significantly – there was no attempt to understand how people lived under Persian rule. If the
Egyptians were an exception, it was because the Egyptians had been well known to the Greeks
before the Persian conquest and managed to regain independence from the Persians with Greek help
for long periods between Cambyses and Alexander59.
When the Greeks provided the Macedonians with the necessary technological and ideological
apparatus to govern what had been the Empire of the Achaemenids, [21] they transmitted their
conclusions to their new Macedonian sovereigns. These conclusions determined the policy of the
heirs of Alexander. We know now what these conclusions were. The superiority of the Greek way
of life had once again been proved on the battlefield, and nobody was there to make sophistic
distinctions between Greek hoplites and Macedonian phalangists. Conquest was self-justifying.
Monarchy was necessary in the East, if not elsewhere. And therefore a monarch had to exercise
self-control – as Alexander’s lack of control had just made evident60. But there was not much one
needed to know about the Persians, and even less about their subject. No real acquaintance with
their language or, indeed, with their religion was required, except at the most external points of
contact between cults and government. An imperial climate singularly devoid of religious and
ethical scruples characterizes61 the first century of Greco-Macedonian rule of Asia and Egypt. This
did not exclude pleasant surprises in which intellectuals had every reason to indulge in discovering
pockets of wisdom either in India or in Persia or in that most unfamiliar territory – Judaea. But the
meaning and the consequences of these discoveries will have to be considered against the
background of an aggressive feeling of superiority displayed by the Greco-Macedonians. The
Greeks settled in the countries they conquered to an extent which was unthinkable under the
Persians. They made relations with the natives conditional on their acceptance of Greek language
and customs. They offered the natives many more opportunities of employment and emigration than
the Persians had probably ever done. If they cared little about what their subjects believed, even in
so far as this might be relevant to the administration of their State, they nevertheless62 made
Hellenization the condition for favour and advancement. They adopted the imperialism of the
Persians and rather incongruously added to it a policy of Hellenisation. The Jews who had been
given two centuries by the Persians in which to think about themselves now found that they had to
think about their new masters, too63.
i
Bonnaud, J.J., Hérodote historien du peuple hébreu sans le savoir, Ou, Lettre en réponse à la Critique Manuscrite
d’un jeune Philosophe, sur l’ouvrage [sic] intitulé: Histoire véritable des Temps Fabuleux par l'Abbé G[uerin] du
[Rocher], La Haye 1786.
ii
L’eliminazione di un cenno a Isaac D'Israeli come inventore del termine "autobiography" si lega verosimilmente
all'intento di non introdurre una questione qui collaterale, che aveva interessato Momigliano fin dalle Carl Newell
Jackson Lectures, tenute ad Harvard nel 1968 e pubblicate nel 1971 come The Development of Greek Biography (=
Development; cfr., sulla questione, p. 16 della trad.it.). Il dotto inglese Isaac D'Israeli (1766-1848), noto per i cinque
volumi ancora ristampati delle sue Curiosities of Literature (London 1791-1823) e per essere stato il padre del primo
ministro Benjamin Disraeli (la modifica del cognome risale agli anni Venti dell’Ottocento), è generalmente ritenuto il
primo ad utilizzare il termine "self-biography" (benché non nel 1793 ma nel 1796, in I. D'Israeli, Some Observations on
Diaries, Self-Biography, and Self-Characters, in Id., Miscellanies, London 1796, 95-110). Userà il termine "autobiography" (con trattino separatore) solo in seguito, nella Review of The Memoirs of Percival Stockdale, "Quarterly
Review", May 1809, p. 386, pubbl. anonima; la coniazione di "autobiography” si attribuisce invece al divulgatore della
59
P-o 63: Persian rule -> If the Egyptians… Alexander, del.
P-o 79: as Alexander’s lack of control was soon to make evident <-> as Alexander was soon to confirm,
interl.msn[Mom].
61
P-o 79: scruples characterizes <-> concerns prevails in, interl.msn[Mom].
62
P-o 90: nevertheless, msn[Mom]; P-o 79: def.
63
P-o 168: They were faced by an empire which unlike the Persian empire compelled them to think about
assimilation. The answer is in Daniel: a book against empires, because it is a book against Hellenization,
mginfmsl[Mom].
71
60
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
II. The Greeks outside the Persian Empire
cultura romantica tedesca William Taylor, che in una recensione al lavoro di D’Israeli apparsa nel 1797 in "Monthly
Review" (n. 24, p. 375; la recensione è citata da Momigliano come di autore anonimo) ne fa registrare il primo uso.
Sull'emergere della parola e del tema nella letteratura inglese fra Settecento e Ottocento, cfr. e.g. OGDEN 1961 e il più
recente KEYMER 2004.
iii
Per una disamina momiglianea dei documenti e delle testimonianze in questione, cfr. Alien Wisdom, 75-6.
iv
Cfr. la genealogia del mondo che compare in Gen. 10, 2-4, e ancora Isa. 66, 19; Ezech. 27,13; Dan. 8, 21; 10, 20;
11, 2; Zacc. 9, 13.
v
Sullo sviluppo del tema all’interno del ciclo cfr. la lecture successiva, GL 1979 III (The Jews inside); ma vd.
anche GL 1979 I (Prologue), c. 21, per lo spunto di riflessione offerto a Momigliano dagli studi di E. Meyer sul
giudaismo postesilico come ‘creatura’ dell’impero persiano.
vi
Sull’antichità dell’idea greca di eleutheria, intesa come libertà dalla schiavitù (e quindi come indipendenza dagli
stranieri), cfr. Peace and Liberty, 66. Le prime occorrenze del termine con tale accezione (in forma aggettivale) si
riscontrano già Il.6.455, 6.528. Per la ricorrenza del significato nella lirica e nell’elegia arcaica, cfr. Alceo fr. 45 Diehl
(=PLF 72, 12-13), Solone fr. 24,7 Diehl (= IEG 36, 7).
vii
Cfr. e.g. Ios. Ap. 1,24 (cura formale dei Greci per il linguaggio), 1,60 (carattere marittimo e commerciale della
civiltà greca), 2.250-54 (libertà e licenza nella rappresentazione degli dèi). Per le prospettive di Giuseppe sulla cultura
greca, sia all’interno che fuori del Contro Apione, si rimanda a TROIANI 1977; RAJAK 1983; DROGE 1996.
viii
Ios. Ap. 1, 60. “Ora, noi né abitiamo una regione marittima né troviamo piacevoli la pratica dei commerci né i
contatti con gli altri che ne derivano; invece, le nostre città sono costruite all’interno, lontane dal mare; abitando una
terra fertile, la lavoriamo con alacrità, soprattutto mettendo ogni studio nell’educazione dei figli” (trad. it. di L. Troiani).
ix
Cfr. Liberty and Peace, 491 (con bibliografia in nota) e part. Peace and Freedom (lecture VI), 68, sulla nozione di
parrhesia, termine che sin dalle sue prime attestazioni (Democrito, fr. 226; fr. 554 Nauck adesp.; Eurip. Hipp., 422)
assurge a tratto fondante dell’idea greca di libertà.
x
Xenoph. B 2 Diels-Kranz (apud Athen. 413 F), 11-12.
xi
Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1992E. Per la ripresa e rielaborazione delle Sather Lectures del 1962 negli anni 1975-1978, cfr.
DI DONATO, ibid., IX-X (ed. ingl.): si rimanda in particolare a MOMIGLIANO 1965B e 1975H.
xii
Hdt. 7. 140-3
xiii
DRIVER 1954 88-96. Per l’aristocrazia ellenizzata cfr. invece ROBERT 1978, 5.
xiv
PERROT 1974.
xv
MEIGGS – LEWIS 1988, 20-22, n.12. Sul problema dell’autenticità del documento, contestata da Beloch (GG ii2. 2.
154 s.) e a favore della quale si esprime Momigliano, cfr. part. p. 21.
xvi
KENT 1953, 144.
xvii
PUGLIESE CARRATELLI 1966.
xviii
RICHTER 1946.
xix
ROOT 1979.
xx
Hdt. 7.104.
xxi
BICKERMANN 1963.
xxii
FRYE 1972.
xxiii
Hipp. De aere acquis lociis, xvi.
xxiv
Aesch. Pers. 749-51.
xxv
Per un’eventuale allusione erodotea alla prepotenza di Pericle si rimanda a STRASBURGER 1955; contro
un’interpretazione “ambigua” del passo cfr. invece NENCI 1998, 310-11, commento ad loc.
xxvi
Cfr. Alien Wisdom, 142-9, per una disamina momiglianea del ruolo “ambiguo e paradossale” giocato da Platone
nell’incremento del prestigio di Zoroastro nell’immaginario filosofico greco e per un’indagine sulla sua ricezione a
partire da Filippo di Opus, Ermodoro, Eraclide Pontico, Eudemo, fino a Plotino e Porfirio. Per una rassegna della
questione, con bibliografia aggiornata, si rimanda a BECK 2003.
72
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
GL 1979 III The Jews inside the Persian Empire
Sedi e date
EL 1978 (5 novembre – cfr. *D-a 1)
GL 1979 (7 febbraio – cfr. GRANATA 2006, 419)
Documenti
a) EL 1978 III
P-o 44 ms.
P-o 45 top c. di P-o 44.
P-o 46, P-o 64, P-o 65, P-o 126: c.c. di P-o 45.
P-o 47 xerox di P-o 126.
b) GL 1979 III
P-o 64 c.c. di P-o 45 corretta.
P-o 91 nuova versione basata su P-o 64, top c.
P-o 92 c.c. di P-o 91.
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Terza lezione del ciclo EL e GL, The Jews inside prosegue la riflessione momiglianea sui
processi di autodefinizione che il confronto con la potenza persiana innesca in Greci ed Ebrei, e
torna, dopo la parentesi ellenica, a rivolgere l’attenzione al versante mediorientale. Fin dalla
versione Efroymson risulta evidente la consistente ripresa tematica di materiale proveniente dalla
CL 1977 II (The Temple), soprattutto per quanto riguarda gli aspetti politici ed istituzionali,
economici e sociali della funzione del Tempio in rapporto alla potenza achemenide1.
Testimoniata da una prima stesura ms. in 24 cc. (P-o 44), la Efroymson lecture è documentata,
oltre che dalla corrispondente top c. ds. P-o 45, anche da tre successive c.c. variamente annotate: Po 46, datata al 22.9.78, interessata da un ridotto numero di correzioni essenzialmente formali; P-o
64, reading copy riconducibile anch’essa al settembre 1978 e fornita di un numero consistente di
annotazioni autografe mss.; P-o 65, ulteriore copia corretta del febbraio del ’79; e P-o 126, c.c. del
settembre del 1978, rivista formalmente da AMM e da cui a sua volta è stata tratta la copia xerox Po 47. Fra le copie Efroymson P-o 64 offre la versione meglio rappresentativa dello stato del testo,
non solo per la significatività e per il numero delle annotazioni autografe, quanto anche per la
collocazione stemmatica della copia che ne fa il punto di partenza della revisione oxoniense.
Come testo della definitiva lecture Grinfield si individua P-o 92, un fascicolo di 25 carte dss.
basato su P-o 91, a sua volta una rielaborazione di P-o 64: per evidenziare l’evoluzione del testo
dallo stadio Efroymson a quello successivo si riportano quindi in apparato sia le fasi di intervento in
P-o 64 rispetto a P-o 45 che quelle in P-o 92 (= 91) rispetto al testo di P-o 64.
2. Argomento della lecture
In età ellenistica Gerusalemme è divenuta una solida città-tempio affine a tante analoghe
strutture presenti in Asia, benché la ricostruzione del Tempio concessa da Ciro di Persia al termine
dell’esilio babilonese non prevedesse la creazione di uno stato annesso. Sulle ragioni per cui
l’evoluzione imprevista si fosse affermata già nel corso delle vicende del ritorno in patria degli
esiliati gettano qualche luce i libri biblici di Ezra, Neemia, Ester e Daniele. Ne emerge
l’impressione che gli stessi Persiani abbiano favorito la politicizzazione dei templi per timore del
rafforzamento di autonomie civiche, potenziali acquirenti di mercenari.
L’evoluzione della struttura sociale ed economica della Giudea è successivamente accelerata
dalla figura carismatica di Neemia. Al cuore rimane il Tempio, che raccogliendo trasversalmente
tutte le classi sociali assolve la funzione di mitigarne i conflitti sociali; nasce però in suo supporto
l’istituzione sinagogale, le cui origini remote potrebbero essere ricondotte già all’esilio babilonese,
ma il cui sviluppo definitivo è determinato dal rinnovato sentimento di vita comunale e religiosa del
1
Per un’analisi puntuale delle riprese cfr. infra, Appendice II (the Temple and the Synagogue, una lezione dissolta).
73
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
giudaismo del Secondo Tempio. Entrando in Palestina nel 330, i Greco-Macedoni trovano un
gruppo etnico complesso e autoconsapevole, sviluppatosi in autonomia rispetto alle civiltà
circostanti. Ѐ all’unicità delle istituzioni che Momigliano fa infatti risalire il successo nella
resistenza all’ellenizzazione: se il Tempio, ben inquadrabile negli schemi culturali ellenici, è
destinato a essere riconosciuto e assimilato, l’incompresa istituzione sinagogale passa inosservata e
sopravvive a Greci e Romani.
Il nuovo senso di urgenza, generato dalle continue imprese dei Greci e dalle loro rivendicazioni
di terre, determina tuttavia la fine di quell’atteggiamento di distaccata gratitudine che era stato
riservato dagli Ebrei ai Persiani. I successori di Alessandro trasferiscono progressivamente il
controllo dei contadini alle classi altolocate (ellenizzate o elleniche), riducendoli a una condizione
servile e coinvolgendoli in processi di emigrazione spontanea o forzata, destinata a esiti di maggiore
o minore integrazione. La nuova e imprevista fase di espansione provoca negli Ebrei sostanziali
mutamenti di prospettiva: si esaurisce la vena profetica e uno stretto monoteismo soppianta i lasciti
del politeismo canaaita. Il confronto con il modello greco li induce a cercare nuove vie di indagine
su se stessi, di cui il libro di Qohelet offre la prima fondamentale testimonianza. Pur non
menzionando mai la cultura greca, lo sguardo perplesso che l’autore rivolge a una situazione sociale
in cui il potere di Dio non è confermato dalla sua giustizia è percepito da Momigliano come indizio
della sua riconducibilità al primo ellenismo. La successiva canonizzazione del libro conferma la
vasta risonanza che le sue domande dovettero incontrare presso gli Ebrei di età ellenistica.
3. I motivi della rielaborazione e i rapporti con GL 1979 IV (Defence).
L’effettiva possibilità di un’intersezione tematica tra The Jews inside e la lecture successiva, The
Defence against Hellenization, determina il principale problema editoriale che coinvolge le due
lezioni, la presenza di duplicati testuali: in altre parole, la versione definitiva o Grinfield di The
Defence2 ripropone in due punti materiale tematico già presente in The Jews inside nella sua
versione Grinfield P-o 92 (= P-o 91). Il primo caso riguarda un breve excursus sulle origini e
sviluppi della sinagoga, presente alle cc. 13-14 e 16 di P-o 92. Benché la versione adottata come
testo base per The Defence, P-o 75 (nuova versione ds. di GL 1979), ne sia priva, le sue c.c. P-o 68
(reading copy GL) e P-o 93 (datata da AMM al 26.1.79) ripropongono l’excursus come allegato al
cap. IV (cc. 13 a-d). In P-o 69, altra c.c. di P-o 75, l’allegato manca, ma è menzionato da una nota
ms. di Momigliano (“add some pp. 13 a-b-c-d on Synagogue”). Sembra quindi possibile concludere
che lo stesso paragrafo, già presentato in The Jews inside, sia stato reinserito anche nella lecture
successiva. La scelta è stata plausibilmente dettata da esigenze di completezza (plausibilmente in
prospettiva di una riflessione editoriale), vista la già considerata intersezione tematica tra le due
lectures e soprattutto il valore della breve pericope in cui Momigliano formula la teoria che la
sopravvivenza della sinagoga rispetto al Tempio sia da ricondurre all’incapacità del sistema
culturale greco-romano di classificarla e assorbirla. Da un punto di vista editoriale, resta però chiara
la provenienza dell’excursus da The Jews inside3: uno spostamento in via definitiva del paragrafo
alla lecture successiva avrebbe comportato, secondo l’usus momiglianeo, la parallela rimozione del
paragrafo dal contesto di origine, che invece lo conserva; va inoltre tenuta in considerazione la
glossa di AMM sulla c. 1 di P-o 93 “Grinfield part of III (7.2.79) and part of IV”, che allude in
modo esplicito alla presenza nel documento di materiale appartenente a due distinte lezioni.
Il secondo caso di duplicazione testuale coinvolge il tema del politeismo semitico e
dell’eventuale filiazione, contestata da Momigliano, del partito degli “ellenisti” sviluppatosi sotto
Antioco IV dal culto di Baalim ancestrali. Il testo, ds. su un foglio allegato alla c. 21 di P-o 92 e
2
I principali documenti testimoni della lecture sono P-o 75 e le sue c.c. P-o 68, 69, 93. Le aggiunte al testo in P-o 68
e 93 (pp. 13 a-d) contengono i duplicati in questione. Si rimanda al par. 1 dell’introduzione al capitolo successivo per
una rassegna analitica.
3
E prima ancora da CL 1977 II (The Temple and the Synagogue), lezione di peculiare estesione dedicata all’analisi
delle principali istituzioni del giudaismo post-esilico, sulla cui decostruzione e recupero all’interno del rinnovato ciclo
Efroymon 1978 cfr. infra, Appendice I.
74
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
collegato con segno di rimando alla sezione finale del cap. VI, costituisce la riproposizione delle cc.
21-22 di P-o 75. Contrariamente al caso precedente, il paragrafo risulta estrapolato dalle IV lecture
per la III, e non viceversa: in entrambi i testi il discorso si ricollega alla riflessione sulla relazione
degli Ebrei con i culti ellenistici, ma in The Jews inside l’aggiunta, apposta come precisazione
finale a una riflessione più generica su affinità e differenze tra Ebrei e Greci, tradisce la sua natura
di appendice e sembra rispondere più a un’esigenza estemporanea di integrazione del testo.
Nella presente edizione si è scelto di non riproporre all’interno del testo di The Jews inside il
paragrafo in questione, segnalando in apparato il punto di inserzione dell’aggiunta e rimandando per
la lettura alla corrispondente pagina in The Defence. In relazione invece al caso di duplicazione
sopra discusso, ossia quello relativo all’excursus sinagogale, la questione è complicata dal fatto che
alla sostanziale coincidenza del paragrafo originario e del suo duplicato nella sezione finale fa da
controparte una consapevole variazione tematica nella sezione d’apertura. Per questo, malgrado una
certa sovrapponibilità tra i due testi, si è scelto di conservare il paragrafo sia all’interno del suo
contesto d’origine (The Jews inside) che in quello di adozione (The Defence), in considerazione
della natura complessivamente incompiuta e “aurale” del ciclo di lectures.
75
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
III
The Jews inside the Persian Empire*4
I
When the first Greek observers began to take notes on Judaea for the satisfaction of their
curiosity, if not for the benefit of the Macedonian rulers, they had no doubt that Jerusalem had
always been a Temple-State, such as these which were numerous in Asia. Hecataeus of Abdera,
who wrote about the Jews before 300 B.C., firmly stated that the famous and good man Moses built
the Temple and put a High Priest in charge when he was compelled to leave Egypt (fr. <III A264
F6> Jacoby = fr. <11> Stern). A hundred and fifty years later Polybius defined the Jews as these
who live around the Temple called Hierosolyma (fr. <32 Stern> ap. Joseph. Ant. Jud. 12, 3, 3, 136).
In the Hellenistic age it was difficult for a non-Jew (and in a sense, as we shall see, even for a
Jew) to be aware that when Cyrus, the King of Persia, decided to allow the Jews to rebuild their
Temple in 538 B.C. he did not contemplate the creation of a temple-state. Mysterious as remains the
process of the return of the exiles – the first substantial batch of them appears only in 520 B.C. and
the Temple was dedicated in 515 B.C. – there seems to be little doubt that the leader of the return
was Zerubbabel, a member of the previous royal family. He is the man with whom, according to the
Book of Ezra, the alleged enemies of Judah and Benjamin deal when they claim a share in the work
of the construction of the Temple (4, 1-2). The prophets Haggai and Zechariah presented
Zerubbabel as a Messianic King. It was a marvellous dream, with the universalism one can expect
from members of a world empire. The new community, Zechariah asserted, will include many
nations, and the days of fast will be turned into days of joy, when many people and strong nations
shall come to see the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem and to pray before the Lord. Haggai is even more
sanguine in his prophecy when he speaks (according to the most probable interpretation of 2, 7-8i)
of the nations bringing tribute to the Temple, obviously as they had to the Persian [2] king. Six
centuries later his words still echoed, at least partially, in the mind of the author of the Epistle to the
Hebrews (12, 26-28). But Zerubbabel disappeared from history as quickly as he had appeared. We
are not even given time to consider whether his repudiation of the Samaritans was in the spirit of
universality which characterizes his prophetic supporters. We are thrown back into a definite space
in which walls have an essential function and in which the precise regulation of corporate and
individual behaviour is of paramount importance. Nehemiah’s deep concern for the state of the
walls of Jerusalem, understandable and moving as it is, is far removed from Zecheriah’s expectation
that Jerusalem will not need a wall because God himself is the wall (2, 3-9).
The King of Persia remained at the centre, but not because direct divine inspiration moved his
heart, as we had sensed in reading the Deutero-Isaiah and had been given to understand in the
introductory chapter of the present Book of Ezra – which is also the last chapter of the
Paralipomena. Nowadays there is not much we can say in favour of Spinoza’s theory that the
Books of Ezra, Nehemia, Esther and Daniel were all written by one man (Tractatus TheologicusPoliticus X, p. 509 van Vloten and Land). But Spinoza recognized that the four books had
something in common. The basic stories of Ezra, Nehemia, Esther and Daniel – whatever degree of
historicity you attribute to them and in whatever chronological order you put them – start with an
event inside the royal palace: the initiative of a Jew inside the royal palace (most frequently the
Persian royal palace) determines the sequence. This was of course sound knowledge of Oriental
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 92, c.c. di P-o 91 (top c. GL 1979); allo scopo di evidenziare l’evoluzione della
lecture dallo stadio Efroymson al successivo, si riportano inoltre le varianti di P-o 64 (c.c. corretta EL 1978), della sua
top c. P-o 45 e, eventualmente, delle ulteriori copie EL P-o 46, 47.
4
P-o 92: Re-typed 20.1.79. NB. x in margins to be corrected in top copy, mgsnmsb[AMM]; Grinfield II and part of III
(31 Jan. and 7 Feb. 79), mgdxmsb[AMM].
76
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
courts and more specifically, as the Greek historians confirm, of the Persian court. Palace intrigues
were structurally inherent in the Persian state.
The same texts, however, show little curiosity for the institutions and the political developments
of the Achaemenid Empire. Nothing is said about the administration of the state and very little
about its wars. There is a reference to the proskynesis in Esther (3, <2-5>); the plurality of
languages in the [3] empire is magnified (Esther 8, 9); an alleged rule that the Persian laws cannot
be repealed is quoted in Daniel (6, 15) and perhaps presupposed in the Esther story (ch. 8-9).
Within the space of time granted to the Persians in Daniel there is only one allusion to a specific
war – the expedition of Xerxes against the Greeks as the precedent for the expedition of Alexander,
incidentally a point of view of clear Greek origin (11, 1). If we had to rely only on the biblical texts,
we should derive the impression that after Cyrus and before Alexander the Persian empire was
almost constantly at peace. This is particularly remarkable as, after all, the Book of Daniel was
concerned with the position of the Persian empire in the divine economy of the succession of
kingdoms. We have to recover accounts of the rebellions by the Jews themselves against the Persian
rule in Palestine from late Christian and pagan sources (Hieron. Chron., II, 113 Schoene; Solinus
35, 4). If, as seems probable, Sulpicius Severus (Migne, P.L. 20, 136 ff.) was correct in finding
some connections between the story of the Book of Judith and the troubles in Palestine under
Artaserses III Ochos, we are left to wonder how the historical nightmare we all know could have
developed. The connection of Psalm 445 with these troubles is a modern and uncertain theoryii.6 Our
texts do not even give us reliable information about the administrative organization of Judaea under
the Persian ruleiii. There is no explicit statement about the reciprocal relations of Samaria and
Judaea as administrative units. We have in the so-called Malachi prophecies an allusion to offerings
due to the Persian governor (1, 8), but no historical text clarifies the allusion. What Esther (at least
in the Greek version) and Daniel emphasize is how important it is to have influential Jews at the
Persian court and how ultimately success at the King’s Palace is not incompatible with obedience to
ancestral law.7
Biblical and post-biblical Jewish sources (and we must here include not only the Megillat
Ta’anit, but also Book XI of the Jewish Antiquitates by Flavius Josephus) are notorious for
mistakes about the number, the names, the order of succession and altogether the chronology of the
Persian kings. It [4] is no sufficient explanation of such mistakes that Daniel in its present form
belongs entirely to the Greek period; that this very probably applies to Esther too; and that a date
after 330 B.C. is on the cards (though never demonstrated) for the present redaction of what we call
Paralipomena, Ezra and Nehemiah. We must assume a basic disinclination of the Jewish historians
to concern themselves with the Persian empire as a political and institutional phenomenon – the
opposite of what we found in the Greek sources. It would be useful to know what precisely
Josephus was thinking of when in the Contra Apionem (1, 41) he wrote: “From Artaxerxes to our
own time the complete history has been written, but has not been deemed worthy of equal credit
with the earlier records because of the failure of the exact succession of prophets”. Did Josephus
have specific works in mind in this characterization of Jewish historiography about the Persian and
Greek epoch? What he himself produced as Jewish history under the Persians is a paraphrase of the
Biblical books with the addiction of a few episodes derived from a source8 interested in Temple
affairs and consequently in the relations with the Samaritans. The best known item is the
intervention of the Persian general Bagoas when a High Priest killed his brother in the precincts of
the Temple. This must have happened in the context of a rebellion against the Persians, but
Josephus – that is, his source – seems to be unaware of or uninterested in the connectioniv.
5
6
7
8
ָ ,ֱֹהים׀ בְּאָזְ ֵ֬נינוּ
P-o 64, P-o 65: שׁ ַ֗מעְנוּ
֤ ִ א, mgsnmsn[Mom?]
P-o 64: The connection of Psalm 44 ... uncertain theory, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 64: What Esther ... ancestral law, mginfmsn[Mom].
P-o 64: sources, interl.msn[Mom].
77
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
This is not the place to go into the question of Iranian influences on the religious belief of the
Jews. But it must be stated that what emerges from a consideration of the religious beliefs of the
Jews is not different from what emerges from the political attitudes of the Jews toward the
Achaemenids. The evidence for Iranian influences on Jewish religion during the Persian period and
the first two centuries of Greek rule does not indicate any deep penetration of Iranian tenets or any
familiarity with Iranian religious institutions and rituals. The word for mistery, raz, and the devil
Asmodaeus are of good Iranian stock, as may be some of the superstitious practices going on in the
Book of Tobit. But the multiplication of angels and devils or, to speak a loftier language, the
reassessment of the twin questions of [5] Evil and of the mediation between God and Man – seems
to be internal to the new situation of Judaism as a proselytizing religion in the late Hellenistic and in
the Roman world.
What Professor Rivkin has called the Aaronid revolution v remains mysterious because the
Jewish texts are so reluctant to define the structure of power in ancient Judaea. The compilers of the
present Books of Ezra and Nehemiah are not interested in telling us at what point of the pyramid the
High Priest found himself after the intervention of the two envoys extraordinary from the King: the
powers of Ezra and Nehemiah themselves are described analytically without any precise reference
to the others authorities of the land. The main preoccupation of the new leaders was the renewal of
the Covenant. The present Book of Nehemiah is symbolically right in making Ezra and Nehemiah
attend together at the ceremony of the renewal (10, 1), though it is practically certain that they could
not have been there together. After the discovery of the Qumran texts the temptation has indeed
been strong to treat the whole story of the renewal of the Covenant as a fiction concocted by
sectarian predecessors of the Qumran sectarians. This radical solution creates more difficulties than
it solves and seems to me unlikelyvi. Even if accepted, it would not change the basic fact that Ezra
and Nehemiah kept faith with their calling by defining for themselves and their followers a zone of
obedience to God, within which no interference from a foreign king was valid. The total effect was
to assume a Jewish commonwealth to which the presence of foreign rulers should be, strictly
speaking, irrelevant. But this irrelevance of foreign rule, neither easy to formulate nor to put into
practice, was to remain a basic problem for Judaism.9
There10 were enough difficulties to be faced in treating Judaea as a sacred territory: delimitation
of the community in terms of purity of descent; rights of priests and Levites; co-operation between
town and country; reduction of debts; payment of dues to the Temple. The list would no doubt be
considerably longer if we could [6] safely isolate the sections of the Priestly Code which were
added or modified in the fifth and fourth centuries B.Cvii.
What ensured the success of what we call Nehemia’s settlement was its broad agreement with
Persian policy of support for national religious organizations. One has the impression that the
Persians either deliberately or instinctively favoured, whenever possible, the politicization of the
Temples as an alternative to civic autonomies which, whether Greek or modelled on Greek poleis,
were proving very difficult to handle. Many of the temple-states so interestingly described by
Strabo in Book XII of his Geography did well under the Persians. They were often very old. In
some case we can even go back to the Hittite period. We know, for instance, how the great temple
of the goddess Hepat of Cumana in Cappadocia struggled through the centuries with the kings of
the land for privileges and exceptions from taxes (A. Archi, La Parola del Passato 64, 1975, 32744). This archaism commended the temple-states to the Achaemenids. What they had to fear most
of all was the concentration of mobile wealth in the hands of political bodies and individuals (like
the satraps) who would use it to hire mercenaries.
Yet the Temple of Jerusalem did not quite fit into the pattern. The Temple was not a landowner,
as most temples11 were. The land of Palestine was in private hands, though it is by no means clear
9
10
11
P-o 64: But this irrelevance ... for Judaism, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 64: At that moment, there mgsnmsb[Mom].
P-o 64: temples apparently were, interl.ms.
78
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
whether at least in principle it remained inalienable within the clans. The priesthood depended on
the contributions it received. It was even subsidized by the sovereigns, that is, successively by the
kings of Persia, Egypt and Syria. It was helped by the offerings of the Jews of the diaspora and of
Gentiles who were interested in the Temple. But above all it relied on the tithes Palestinian Jews
had to pay. No wonder that with the passing of time the enforcement of the tithes produced a body
of regulations and customs to delight any lawyer. As capital accumulated in the Temple of
Jerusalem, and direct investment in land was not foreseen, financial transactions must have
multiplied. It does not follow [7] that the priest were the only, or even the biggest profiteers. The
priestly class itself was divided, as the episodes of violence and even of murder confirm. We also
dimly perceive that the Levites, whom Nehemiah had brought to Jerusalem, did not retain their
rights and privileges and, as far as the Temple was concerned, became indistinguishable from the
singers and the vergersviii. Laymen became partners in the administration of the Temple and in the
use of the revenues it collected. Tax collectors for the foreign sovereigns, backed as they were by
foreign troops, were desirable agents in the collection and administration of the Temple revenues.
What exactly the powerful Jewish sheiks of Ammanitis – the Tobiadsix – and their partners were
doing in the time of Nehemiah is anybody’s guess. They had, however, close links with the Persian
governor of Samaria Sanballat (Neh. 4, 3 ff.) while participating at the same time in the
administration of the Temple where they had had the use of a chamber. Two centuries later the
same Tobiad family was acting as tax collectors for the Ptolemies and still had, or had again, a
foothold in the Temple. They had allies in the priestly class and were related to the High Priests
(Jos. Ant., 12, 60). The story with which the second Book of Maccabees begins shows the
superintendent of the Temple, Simon the brother of the future High Priest Menelaus, calling the
attention of King Seleucus IV to the amount of money which was stored in the Templex. The High
Priest Onias III tried to avoid its plunder by pointing out that part of the money belonged to the
Tobiadsxi. Considering how scanty our information is, there are strong indications that both laymen
and priests were involved in the service and in the exploitation of the Temple and had complicated
relations with the foreigners authorities. Temple treasures were a guarantee12 for tributes, and the
ruling power was not above treating them as emergency funds.
II
Some consequences are immediately noticeable. The social and economic structure of Judaea
evolved towards a city-state more definitely than the Jewish planners and the Persian controllers
could ever have intended. Modern [8] historians of Judaismxii did not go too far astray in comparing
Nehemiah with the Greek city reformers – Solon, Cleisthenes, Themistocles, Pericles and, less
flatteringly, Pisistratus. Nehemiah had to deal with debts, like Solon; with the building of the walls,
like Themistocles; with the local aristocracies, like Pisistratus and Cleisthenes. He introduced purity
tests for citizenship, like Pericles, and had even to deal with a secession of the Levites who had not
received their dues – which may well remind us, if not of Athens, at least of Rome in the same fifth
century. Nehemiah cared about Jerusalem as a city, not only as a Sanctuary, and the seganim, the
officials, to whom he turned to get the Levites back (13, 11), were certainly not priests. In 408 B.C.,
about forty years after Nehemiah, the Jewish settlers of Elephantina in Egypt appealed for help to
the Persian governor of Judaea, to the High Priest Johannes, to his colleagues the priests who are in
Jerusalem, to a man simply called Osthanes brother of Anani, and to the nobles of the Jews (A. E.
Cowley, Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., 1923, nos. 30-31). It is clear that at that moment
the High Priest and his priestly colleagues shared some power with a council of city notables.
Two centuries later the evolution of Jerusalem toward a city-state had gone some steps further.
The first Greek document to give us a picture of the administration of Jerusalem as seen by the
foreign ruler is the letter of Antiochus III to his officer Ptolemy. This is a relatively late text, but it
12
P-o 92: guarantee <-> guaranty, msb[AMM]; P-o 45, 46, 47: guaranty <-> guarantee, msb[Mom?].
79
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
is pre-Maccabaean and therefore seems to reflect the internal evolution of the state of Jerusalem
before evolution was interrupted by revolution. The document shows that about 200 B.C. the
Seleucid King, having succeeded the Ptolemies as rulers of Judaea, treated Jerusalem as a polis in
which priests, scribes and singers stood between Senate and people, the usual ingredients of a Greek
polis. The letter, which is reported by Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities (12, 3, <3, 138-144>),
does not explain how the senate was constituted. Because the [9] High Priest, against all
expectations, is not mentioned, the chances of the letter being authentic are considerably increased.
This indirectly reinforces the claims to authenticity of the following letter by Antiochus III to his
minister Zeuxisxiii about sending two thousand Jews to Phrygia and Lydia as military colonists – a
point of some interest in view of the recent strong attack against the authenticity of this letter by
Jörg-Dieter Gauger (Beiträge zur jüdischen Apologetik, Köln-Bonn 1977, 1-154).
We cannot conclude from the silence of Antiochus’s letter to Ptolemy that the High Priest did
not preside over the Council of Jerusalem. The letter does, however, show that his constitutional
position, not being well defined in Jewish eyes, was also unclear to the ruling power. The two
hundred years which had passed between the murder in the Temple narrated by Josephus and the
celebration of the High Priest Simon in Ecclesiasticus may well have witnessed a decline in the
political power but an increase in the spiritual dignity of the High Priest. The legend reported by
Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud. 11, 8, 5xiv) that Alexander the Great entered Jerusalem hand in hand
with the High Priest presupposed the prestige of the High Priest at the time in which the legend was
formulated.13 What moves Alexander to show friendship to the Jews and to invite them to fight with
him against the Persians is a dream he had had when he was still in Macedonia. In the dream a man
had encouraged Alexander to undertake the war against the Persians. Now, in meeting the High
Priest of the Jews, Alexander recognized in him the man of this dream. The legend in its main
outline must go back to a time14 (not likely to be later than 150 B.C.) when the Jews or at least
certain Jews were anxious to appear to be supporters of the Macedonian monarchies and to receive
some credit for the destruction of the Persian Empire. This is just the opposite of the hostility
towards Alexander which is so emphatic in the initial sentences of the First Book of Maccabeesxv
and which has its counterpart in the transformation of Haman the Agagite into Haman the
Macedonian15 in the Greek version of Esther (16, 10). The pre-Maccabaic dating has several
consequences for the analysis of the text of Josephus which [10] I can only mention in passing. I
assume that it was not part of the original story that the priests should show the Book of Daniel to
Alexander (which would imply a date later than 165 B.C.); and I consider it very unlikely that the
story of the building of the Samaritan Temple was connected with the original version of the visit of
Alexander to Jerusalem. It is in any case evident that neither the presentation of the Book of Daniel
nor the foundation of the Samaritan Temple has an organic connection with the main theme of the
Alexander story as told by Josephus. This passage, the eldest Jewish16 contribution to the legend of
Alexander, characteristically highlights the national religious authority rather than the foreign king.
It attributes the salvation of Israel to the High Priest. It gives a dignified picture of the High Priest
which strongly reminds us of the concluding chapter of Ben Sira.
The power of the High Priest was inseparable from the privileged position of the priestly class as
a whole: “Fear the Lord and honour his priests” was Ben Sira’s advice (7, 29). As there is no sign
that Ben Sira himself was a priest, this is more significant than Josephus’ claim that “membership
of priesthood is with us a sign of nobility of origin” (Vita, 1), for Josephus was a priest. We could
be certain that priests married within their order and tended to be wealthy even if we did not have a
considerable amount of evidence for both phenomena. I shall only recall to memory the endogamy
in the priestly family of John the Baptist (Luke 1, 5), and the estate near Jerusalem of the historian
13
14
15
16
P-o 64: formulated -> P-o 45: The legend is clearly pre-Maccabaic, del.
P-o 64: to a time and places, interl.ms; P-o 92: corr.def.
P-o 45: the Macedonian <-> the Greek, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 64: the eldest known Jewish, interl.msb[Mom] < -> P-o 45: the oldest Jewish.
80
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
Josephus (Vita, 422). But ultimately the power of the priesthood was a reflection of the prestige of
the Temple.
17
The Temple had not been rebuilt easily, it did not live on easily: some dissenters were not sure
that it was the authentic Temple.18 But it was there. In the emptiness of the Holy of Holies, which
only the High Priest visited once a year, the God of the Fathers was again present. The common19
people rejoiced at the Temple. The mere pleasure of being together – men of different social classes
and of different places – remained an attraction up to the [11] end of the Second Temple and was
still remembered later. Philo, who was once a pilgrim in Jerusalem (De Providentia, 2, 64),
recorded this pleasure: “Friendships are formed between those who hitherto did not know each
other and the sacrifices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling and constituted the
secret pledge that all are of one mind” (De Special. legibus, 1, 70, transl. F. H. Colson). This unity
included the peasants and gives to the Judaism of the Second Temple the curious mixture of
aristocratic and plebeian features which did not escape the trained eye of Max Weberxvi . Social
conflicts, as we have said20, did exist: they almost produced a disaster under Antiochus IV and
under Pompey; they certainly contributed to the disaster of A.D. 70. Ben Sira was in no doubt about
the unfitness of the workers to be rulers. But one of the functions of the Temple was to mitigate the
contrasts and to provide common ground for worshipping, rejoicing – and repenting. Perhaps
because it is so familiar the final redaction of Leviticus is seldom appreciated as a genuine
preparation and anticipation of the togetherness which was to become characteristic of the ethos of
the Second Temple. Within the same chapters of Leviticus purity norms alternate with direct
appeals to love one’s neighbours. The Jews are asked to respect the old, the orphan and the widow
and to provide a minimum of subsistence for them. The neighbours were not only the other Jews
but the foreigners in the land. The Jews are reminded that they had themselves been strangers in the
land of Egypt (Lev. 19, 34).
By itself the ritual of the Temple, with its daily round of sacrifices and with the annual offering
of first fruits, had ceased to fulfil basic needs of Jewish social life. The concentration of the cult in
Jerusalem had cut the direct link which had existed before Josiah’s reform of 621 B.C. between
sacrifices and eating animal food. Ordinary killing of animals for the purpose of consumption was
no longer – if it ever had been – a sacrifice to God. The seasonal festivities had lost their immediate
connection with agricultural life. I cannot explain the very strange information of the Book of
Nehemiah 8 that the Jews under the guidance of Ezra celebrated the [12] feast of booths (Sukkot) as
they had not done since the days of Joshua son of Nun. But the information implies a break with the
past – the awareness of a change. The celebration of the festivals in Jerusalem – that is, for most,
away from home – helped to attribute more importance to the Temple and to its priests and less to
their sacrifices. In a curious way the Second Temple was getting nearer to fulfilling the prophetic
prescription that not sacrifices in themselves, but circumcision of the heart and justice were pleasing
to God.
Prayers had always been recited in21 the Temple, even if the dedication prayer by Solomonxvii is,
in its present form, a Deuteronomic product. But it is something new that the Temple should be
defined by Trito-Isaiah as a “house of prayers for all the nations” (56, 7). The relation between the
Psalms and the cult remains mysterious partly because of questions of dating, partly because very
few psalms – if any – explicitly refer to definite ritual practices – which is significant in itself. But it
will not be far from the truth if the Psalms are taken as the most important documents of the
common sentiments of priests and laymen during the Second Temple. The other evidence inevitably
emphasizes ad hoc prayers: the prayers of Ezra and Nehemiah, Judith, Esther and Tobit and his son.
17
18
19
20
21
P-o 64: incipit cap. III.
P-o 64: some dissidents ... the authentic Temple, mgsnmsn[Mom].
P-o 64: common, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 92: As we have said, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 64: recited by individuals in, interl.ms; P-o 92: corr. def.
81
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
But this does not affect the question of when and how standard prayers were introduced22. I shall do
no more than express my scepticism about the attractive theory of Elias Bickerman23 that the
original nucleus of the Eighteen Benedictions was a prayer for the city of Jerusalem introduced
under Hellenic influence about 200 B.C. (Harv. Theol. Rev. 55, 1962, 163-185xviii ).
III24
There is no indication that the ordinary Jew felt out of place in the Second Temple. Documents
as different as the Letter of Aristeas and the sectarian Temple Scroll given to us by Yigael Yadinxix
show to what degrees of idealization the Temple could lend itself. Such was the prestige of the
Jerusalem Temple that its minor imitations in Egypt – first at Elephantina and then at Leontopolis –
could ultimately be accepted. Precautions were [13] taken. It seems that after the destruction of that
Temple about 400 B.C. the Jerusalem priests obtained an assurance from the Persian that holocausts
would not be allowed at Elephantina – though the episode is very obscurexx; and in any case the
temple of Elephantina was not rebuilt25. In the second century B.C. there must have been some
alarm at Jerusalem about the foundation of the temple of Leontopolis by fugitive members of the
Zadokite priesthood. The letters which introduce the present text of the Second Book of Maccabees
and perhaps even the Letter of Aristeas are witnesses to propaganda undertaken both in Jerusalem
and Alexandria for the rights of Jerusalem. But some modus vivendi must soon have been reached.
Philo does not seem to have been aware that Leontopolis represented a problem. The same must be
said even more emphatically about the temple the Tobiads seem have built on their ancestral estate
in Ammanitis, if it is true that there was a temple there. The conflict with the Samaritans is another
matter: they had by then a sanctuary which claimed superiority over Jerusalem. It represented a
divergent form of Israelitic cult – perhaps more archaic and as such more attractive to some people
– even in Jerusalem26.
The Synagogue – revolutionary though it may appear to us – was born to support the Temple. No
biblical text either authentically describing or purporting to describe the life of the Jews under the
Persians knows of the Synagogue. The only exception which has been suggested is God’s promise
in Ezechiel 11, 16: “I will be to them as a little sanctuary in the countries where they shall come”xxi.
But I am, once again, sceptical. The paradigmatic scene of reading of the Law in the Book of
Nehemiasxxii implies that about 450 B.C., after their return from Babylonia, the Jews had no
institution for the regular reading and interpretation of the Torah. Nehemiah read the Torah as
Herodotus read his own Histories27. However, if the Jews remained Jews during the exile, they must
have done something more than sitting down by the rivers of Babylon and weeping. They may be
some intangible element of truth in the theory which Talmudic texts had already suggestedxxiii and
which, to my knowledge, Carlo Sigonio was the first to formulate in scholarly terms in his De
republica Hebraeorum of 1583 – namely, that the Synagogue had its origins in the Babylonian
exile.
[14] What really matters is that the Synagogue grew out of the new feeling of personal
involvement in religious practices, study of the law and communal life which the Second Temple
fostered by its presence and for which it offered a model. The need for places in which to
congregate, study and pray was obviously greater in the diaspora. It will become progressively
clearer from our exposition that the Synagogue represented also the Jewish counterpart to the
religious associations which were so common in the Hellenistic states. But even in Judaea the desire
22
P-o 64: Traditional hostility to committing prayers to writing is well attested in the Tosefta (Sabbath 13, 4) whereas
the Qumran Covenanters seem to have had no objection to prayer books, mgsnmsn[Mom].
23
P-o 64: Of Elias Bickerman <-> P-o 45 of my friend Elias Bickerman.
24
P-o 64: IV.
25
P-o 45, 46: and… rebuilt, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 64: id., mginf con segr, msr[Mom].
26
P-o 64: It represented ... in Jerusalem, mgsnmsn[Mom].
27
P-o 92: Nehemiah read ... his own Histories, interl.ms[AMM].
82
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
to meet in order to study the Law of the Most High (the occupation which Ecclesiasticus attributed
to his ideal Sefer) must have been widespread. And there was the education of children. Centuries
were to pass before we could grasp in clear outline the character of the institution which a Jerusalem
inscription written in Greek in the first century A.D. defines as “a place for reading of the Law and
for instruction about the Commandments” (Corpus Inscr. Iud. 1404). Though many buildings have
been identified with synagogues, specific architectural features of synagogues have not yet been
found before the second century A.D. A Greek word like proseuché, first documented in the third
century B.C. to indicate the Jewish house of prayerxxiv , is not by itself very instructive. We have no
idea of what teaching, preaching and study consisted in the two Persian centuries and in the first
two Greek centuries – and also our notion of what prayer was at that time is hazy. But praying,
teaching, preaching and study must have happened, because without them the Jewish diaspora
would have been absorbed by the surrounding cultures and the Judaean community would not have
stood up to Hellenization. We may further suspect that the development of the Synagogue was
fostered by specific groups such as the “pious” who played a conspicuous part in the first stages of
the Maccabaean revolt. Though there is no reason for connecting the Synagogue specifically with
the Pharisees28, [15] it seems impossible to separate the lay movements, which Josephus was later
to compare to Greek philosophic sectsxxv, from the free association, discussion and communion
which went on in the synagogues.
IV29
What has emerged, I believe, from this brief discussion of very well known texts is a more
precise definition of the boundaries the Jews of the Return had imposed on themselves during the
two centuries of Persian rule. They had remained substantially indifferent to the structure of the
Persian Empire and were only moderately concerned with their own political structure. In
comparison with the Greeks they showed an extraordinary lack of sensitivity to the political
problems of their own age – even, at least in their constitutional aspects, to their own political
problems. Political debates, theatre, eloquence, and games were no prominent features of social life
in Judaea.30 But the community the Jews had created in and around Jerusalem showed no sign of
entrusting its present or its future to the clergy. Laymen appeared even in the exploitation of the
Temple. The city of Jerusalem was given a shape in which the Greeks were bound to recognize a
close approximation to a polisxxvi .
When the Greco-Macedonians entered Palestine about 330 B.C., they had made their own the
imperialistic aims of the Achaemenids and were trying to reconcile them with a policy of Greek
settlements and general Hellenization which directly affected the territory surrounding Judaea. They
found in Palestine an ethnic group which was neither committed to the Persian political system nor
conversant with Greek civilization, but which could not be controlled by the simple means the
Greek used with barbarians – either indirect rule through reliable local chieftains or military
settlements and garrisons. The form of government in Judaea was different from the Greek one, yet
comparable to it in complexity and in the capacity for self-expression. There was a style of life, a
public opinion, a body of written laws, a set of oral traditions and of values, and a system of
education which unmistakably separated the Jews [16] from their neighbours. The net of relations
between the Jews of Judaea and those of the diaspora added a new complication, for what happened
to Jews in Jerusalem was bound to have echoes in Alexandria or Babylonia and vice versa – the
more so because the acceleration of urbanization and the rationalization of agriculture in the East in
consequence of the Greco-Macedonian conquest increased the opportunities of emigration for the
28
29
30
P-o 64: there is no reason ... the Pharisees, msn[Mom] <-> P-o 45: we have no precise evidence to back our guess.
P-o 64: V
P-o 64: Political debates ... in Judaea, mgsupmsn[Mom].
83
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
Jews. The area of the diaspora was continuously enlarging and by 150 B.C. had reached Rome. All
this made the Jews difficult to understand and difficult to govern – not for the last time in history.
Greek culture had exceptional capacities for translating into its own terminology the ideas and
the institutions of other nations, but it also had limitations which are sometimes surprising. Here we
meet what is perhaps the most interesting paradox of the encounter between Jews and Greeks. The
Temple of Jerusalem was something the Greek could categorize in their own terms without much
difficulty and without much deformation. As I have said, already by the end of the fourth century
B.C. Hecataeus of Abdera spoke of the Temple and of its priestsxxvii with substantial correctness,
not to mention sympathy.31 The Greeks could understand that the God of the Jews had defended his
own sanctuary in Jerusalem against Antiochus IV, as Apollo had defended Delphi against the
Gauls32. Even when the Jews were suspected of worshipping an ass, that is, a Typhon-like god (a
notion which we find explicit for the first time in the second century B.C. in Mnaseasxxviii ), the
estimate of the Temple as the centre of Jewish life was not modified. Also Jewish festivals and
practices – such as Sabbath, circumcision, and some purity laws – could easily be included in the33
pre-existing category of superstition (deisidaimonia). As superstition they were treated by men like
Agatharchidesxxix and Strabo, though Agatharchides did not believe that Jews fast on Sabbath, as
Strabo among many didxxx. But the Synagogue did not enter into any obvious category of Greek
thought. It was given little attention. It did not invite observers – even extremely [17] intelligent
observers like Posidonius or Plutarch – to reflections on what really separated Jews from non-Jews.
The Temple was destroyed, but the Synagogue survived.34 Perhaps ultimately Judaism owes its
survival to this oversight of the Greeks and, consequently, of the Romans.
V
As for the Jews, they found themselves faced by peoples toward whom, to say the least, it was
not easy to maintain the attitude of detached gratitude and puzzled respect which had characterized
the Jewish stand in relation to the Persians. The new Greco-Macedonian rulers were geographically
much nearer than their Persian predecessors. Their administrative language, unlike Aramaic, was
unknown to the Jews and difficult to learn; yet it had to be learnt by anyone who wanted to
communicate with the new masters, because they were not inclined to speak anything but Greek.
Greco-Macedonian officials prepared to pick up some Hebrew or Aramaic are not known to me.
That an agreeable poet, Meleager of Gadara who incidentally may have been of Semitic origin,
could say both chaire and shalom, or something like shalom, proves little either way (Anth. Gr. 7,
419).
If we compare the fifth-century Aramaic letters of the Jews of Elephantina to Persian officers
with the letters which our old acquaintances the Tobiads wrote to Zeno, the Ptolemaic agent, about
260 B.C., we may at first feel that there is no great change of situation. Ordinary business is
transacted; the immediate concerns of daily life prevail in both cases. If the Elephantina Jews had
blessed in the name of both Yahu and Khnum, Tobias the Jew expresses many thanks to the gods
(C. Pap. Jud. 4). Aramaic epistolary style is just as adequate as Greek epistolary style to express
this type of relations. Why should be otherwise? Yet even at this level of routine the Greeks
introduced new urgency by the variety of their enterprises and consequently of their requests. In the
year in which he looked after the interests of Apollonius, the treasures of Ptolemy II in Palestine
and Syria, Zeno was everywhere, and [18] everywhere established personal connections.
Agriculture, to which the Persians had already devoted considerable attention, had further to be
improved and modified according to Greek standards, trade in grain and olives was supervised,
31
32
33
34
P-o 92: sympathy -> The centrality of the Temple for the Jews is still a matter of course for Strabo, del.
P-o 64: The Greeks could ... against the Gauls, mgsnmsn[Mom].
P-o 92: included in the < -> relegated into the, interl.msb[AMM]
P-o 64: It did not invite ... Synagogue survived, mgsnmsr>n[Mom].
84
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
flocks and herds had to be registered (Sammelbuchxxxi 8008). Wealthy landowners in general – not
only the well established lords of Ammanitis, the Tobiads – were involved both in the trade and in
the administration. One understands why Ecclesiastes puts together kings and wealthy citizens as
those who can be dangerous because of the spies they command: “even in privacy do not revile a
king, nor in your bedroom abuse a rich man, for a bird of the air may carry your voice”xxxii (10, 20).
The system inevitably implied an intelligence service, just as it involved a net of garrisons and
fortresses. Jerusalem itself had Ptolemaic and later Seleucid garrisons, though we do not know how
continuously. Garrisons have always produced more or less legalized mixed marriages. Behind the
traders and the soldiers – and not easily distinguishable from either – there was the new settlers.
Greco-Macedonians and other privileged individuals were given land and rights of citizenship either
in newly founded cities or in old villages and towns which were refurbished according to Greek
models and often with Greek names. Inside the territory which owed allegiance to the Jewish High
Priest there was no Greek city foundation under the Ptolemies, but Samaria and Gaza were rebuilt
as Greek settlements. In Transjordania the Decapolis developed as a complex of Hellenized cities;
Rabbat-Ammon became Philadelpheia in honour of the second Ptolemy. Bet-Shean, though west of
the Jordan, was considered part of the Decapolis (Jos. Bell. Jud. 3, 446), and received the
unexplained name of Scythopolis. Acco was renamed Ptolemais; and Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Jaffa
were Hellenized. Thus Judaea could be defined as an enclave in a Hellenized territory. In the
Tobiad’s land – so a Zeno papyrus of 259 B.C. tell usxxxiii – a Greek mercenary from Cnidus sold a
Babylonian girl to a Greek from Egypt: a Jew and a Macedonian were witnesses. Somewhere in
Palestine an Aramaic-speaking tradesman who characterized himself as kapelos – that is, with the
Greek name for his profession – gave money to a Hellenized [19] Jew. The transaction which may
belong to the time of Ptolemy II or Ptolemy III was registered in a bilingual ostrakon (Bull. Amer.
Orient. Schools 220, 1975, 55-61xxxiv )35. How Exactly the Ptolemies dealt with the priestly class of
Jerusalem we do not know; but it is hard to believe that a new High Priest could be chosen without
the consent of the ruling power.
VI
The strength of the Palestinian Jews lay in the freedom and self-respect of the peasants. The
Ptolemies did not find serfs on the land and did not try to create them. Though the sword of
Alexander had subjugated lands of very different social structures, the impression one receives from
the increasing amount of evidence is that he himself and his successors uniformly tended to transfer
the control of the native peasants to the Hellenized – and often really Hellenic – upper class. W. W.
Tarn’s once famous dictum “The Greek city then was a boost to the Asiatic peasant and tended to
raise his status" (Hellenistic Civilization, 3rd ed., 1952, 135) is now difficult to defend. Isocrates –
or whoever wrote the letter to Philip for him – had precisely asked the contrary of the Macedonian
king. He asked Philip “to compel the barbarians to serve as helots to the Greeks” (3, 5). Isocrates
was nearer to reality than Dr. Tarn. But the Jews accepted the common fate, and [19 a] we should
like to know more about how that happened36. Here it is enough to remind ourselves of two facts.
The partisan army of Judas Maccabaeus was made up of peasants who returned to their fields in the
intervals between campaigns. It was not an army of desperate serfs and slaves, such as became
fairly common throughout the Mediterranean world in the next generations. The First Book of
Maccabees which reflects the point of view of these peasants celebrates the government of Simon
with the formula “Every man sat under his vine and his fig tree, and there was none to fray them”
(14, 12)37. It followed that, however big the pressure, there was some space to manoeuvre, some
right to talk freely. The comparison of Egypt and Babylonia – infinitely more powerful than Judaea
35
36
37
P-o 64: Somewhere in Palestine ... 1975, 55-66), mgsnmsn[Mom].
P-o 64: and we should ... that happened, mginfmsn[Mom].
P-o 64: Here it is enough ... to fray them”(14, 12), mginf,dxmsn[Mom].
85
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
in terms of demographic and economic resources, but paralysed by the exploitation of the peasants
and perhaps by the lack of confidence of these peasants in their priestly and lay masters – shows
how much more effectively the Jews defended their religious and intellectual patrimony by slowing
down the general process of the concentration of land in a few hands38. Nor were the Babylonians
saved by the Arsacides who Iranised Mesopotamia. The Egyptians had to wait for the Christians or
even the Arabs – neither of whom exactly rescued the old native culture. There was no cultural
movement inside [20] Mesopotamia and Egypt to be compared with the Jewish renaissance under
the Greeks and Romans.
The situation of the Jewish peasantry was made safer by the emigration to Hellenized countries
which almost immediately followed Alexander’s conquest and involved all categories of the
population. The details of this emigration are uncertain, and its juridical aspects are even more open
to discussion. Though Josephus and the Letter of Aristeas are not authoritative evidence for either,
it was in the natural order of things that Ptolemy I should carry away a great number of Jews as
slaves in consequence of his occupation of the territory (Jos. C. Ap. 1, 210; Ant. 12, 7; Ps.-Aristeas
4, 12 and 22). Since Jewish slaves do not figure prominently in later Egyptian documents, it is
probable that some change in their status followed swiftly. “The Myth of Jewish Slavery in
Ptolemaic Egypt”, as it has been called (by E. L. Abel, Rev. Ét. Juiv. 127, 1968, 253-8xxxv ), must
perhaps be redefined more modestly as a problem which, given the evidence, we cannot solve. On
the other hand there was plenty of voluntary emigration; and again it would be surprising if there
were no truth in Josephus’ statements that in Alexandria, Antioch and elsewhere there were Jews
with full rights of citizenship (Ant. 12, 8; 14, 188; 19, 281; C. Ap. 2, 32 and 69 for Alexandria; Ant.
12, 119 for Antioch). In the scramble of city foundation nobody was going to be very choosy. But
the Jews who became citizens must have remained a minority; and they never obtained their status
of citizens by virtue of being Jews, but rather, probably, qua soldiers or traders or suitable artisans.
The whole history of the Jews of Alexandria would become incomprehensible if Jews qua Jews had
obtained citizenship there. In a case in which the situation is described objectively, that of Cyrene
by Strabo (here quoted by Josephus, Antiq. 18, 372), the population was divided into Greek citizens,
Libyan peasants, metoikoi and Jews. What the Ptolemies and probably the other Hellenistic
monarchs recognized was the right of the Jews to a certain degree of communal self-government
within the city they inhabited. Whether the term politeuma the modern historians [21] use for such
limited self-government of ethnic groups within the Greek cities is invariably the right one is
another question – not of great importance.
The Jews found themselves39 equipped to expand rapidly and on the whole successfully in the
late fourth century and in the third century B.C. The union of Judaea with Egypt helped, and so did
the need of the Greco-Macedonian minority in Egypt for mercenaries, civil servants, artisans and
traders to control the Egyptian peasantry. But emigration was not confined to Egypt.40 What was
implied was ability to learn to speak and write a difficult foreign language, to fit into foreign armies
and bodies as supervisors, and to understand very alien minds41. Perhaps the experience of the exile
and the collaboration with the Persian had trained the Jews to be good emigrants – whether as
soldiers, or civil servants or free entrepreneurs.42
One further observation may help. There was a basic element in common between Jews and
Greeks in the Hellenistic period. Both had a diasporaxxxvi . Both easily moved from country to
country with a reasonable expectation of finding work. Yet they would not find themselves at home
anywhere outside their country of origin – Judaea for the Jews; Greece, or rather a specific Greek
city, for the Greeks. They faced a different economic and social environment in each country to
38
P-o 64: by slowing ... few hands, mgsnmsn[Mom].
P-o 64: <- P-o 45: What is really the important fact is that, del.
40
P-o 64: -> P-o 45: and we are still left with the basic question of how the Jews found themselves suited to such tasks,
del.
41
P-o 64: -> P-o 45: Perhaps the most satisfactory answer in general terms to such a question is that, del.
42
P-o 64: -> P-o 45: But it is not an answer which takes us very far. mgdxmsn[Mom].
39
86
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
which they went. Forms of production, of taxation and of relations with the natives varied from
state to state. But there was a Greek culture to keep the Greeks together as there was a Jewish
culture to keep the Jews together. Daily life seemed dangerous; wars were frequent. Some of these
wars appeared catastrophic to contemporaries. For both Jews and Greeks religion and/or philosophy
provided a sense of identification and an escape from worldly commitments. Neither Jews nor
Greeks excluded proselytism. Incompatibility between Jews and Greeks, when it developed,
presupposed common factors43, it presupposed above all something which was never made explicit,
that in the East both Jews and Greeks were minorities and supported each other. 44
VII
No doubt the majority of the Greeks did not even care to know about the [22] Jews, and
altogether the ordinary Greek denied monotheism far more aggressively than the Persians could
ever have done. Many Greeks came to dislike the Jews simply as bad mixers45. At a higher level of
culture, the Greeks offered alternative views and values on almost every aspect of Jewish life –
from marriage to education, from art to medicine. What was perhaps even more disturbing from the
Jewish point of view was that on any of these important subjects the Greeks seemed to have more
than one opinion, and none of these views coincided with what the Jews were learning from their
sacred books or were told by the increasing number of their lay masters. Yet the common
propensity towards learning, meditation and dialectics and common experiences of danger,
nostalgia and sorrow soon had their effects. In the case of the Greeks, it was not so much a better
understanding of Judaism46 as an increased respect for Oriental wisdom in general which indirectly
also affected the evaluation of Judaism. Conversion to Judaism became a possibility. 47 For the Jews
it was a far more painful and complicated reaction, which we shall have to try to analyse in the
following lectures, but which cannot be understood without a preliminary recognition that the Jews
were led by the new situation to question themselves in a new way – no longer through prophets,
but through teachers, sectarian doctrines and apocalyptic seers – and consequently had to rearrange
their lives. Some questions may have been formulated by the Greeks and accepted by the Jews as
valid. But the general impression I for one have derived from the evidence is that the Jews
questioned themselves more than they were questioned by Greeks.
In this context it is right to take Qohelet, the Ecclesiastes, as the first Jew who was shaken to his
depths by the encounter with the Greeks. He never mentions the Greeks, and no allusion to Greek
writers has been found in his workxxxvii . Strictly speaking, we do not even know when he lived. The
whimsical author apparently called himself ‘King of Israel in Jerusalem’. He must have lived in
Jerusalem, because he speaks of the Temple in tones of familiarity: “Guard your steps when you go
to the house of God; to draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifices of fools” (6, 1). The
friend [23] who edited his work assures us that Qohelet “taught the people knowledge, weighing
and searching and fashioning many proverbs” (12, 9). The word Qohelet, if it means “speaker,
assembler”, may bear out that he was a popular teacher much as one met in Hellenistic cities. He
uses the Persian word pardes in the way in which the Greeks used its Hellenized form paradeisos to
denote orchard48. Two historical allusions, which must have been clear to contemporaries, are lost
on us: one is to a king “who came out from the prison-house to rule” (4, 13-14), the other to a small
43
P-o 92: common factors ... supported each other, msb[AMM]<-> P-o 64: basic factors of coexistence; P-o 64:
Incompatibility ... basic factors of co-existence. interl.msn[Mom].
44
C. 21 bis, ds., fissata con graffetta e segr alla c. 21. Per il testo vd. The Defence, cc.21-22.
45
P-o 64: Many Greeks ... bad mixers, mgsnmsn[Mom].
46
P-o 64: -> P-o 45: - though the success of Jewish proselytism means something, del.
47
P-o 92: Conversion ... possibility <-> P-o 64: The moderate – but definite – success of Jewish proselytism among
Hellenes is only the prologue of the acceptance of Jewish tenets and institutions implied by conversion to Christianity.
48
P-o 46, 64: He uses ... orchard, mgdxmsr[Mom]; P-o 45: id., mgdxmsb[AMM].
87
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
city which “was besieged by a great king and saved by the wisdom of an obscure citizen” (9, 1415). Both allusions, however, presuppose a Hellenistic context.49
Qohelet was not an Epicurean or a Cynic or any other kind of Greek philosopher. No Greek
thinker ever centred his meditation on man’s inability to discover the meaning of God’s work which
is under the sun. But Qohelet is the first to deserve to be called an Apikoros, an Epicurean in the
sense the Hebrew word came to take of a man who doubts what cannot be doubted: God’s justice.
Qohelet was concerned about his own God whose existence and power he did not question: what he
was not able to perceive was a pattern in God’s actions, especially in the retribution of wickedness.
This appeared to him a situation in which the Jews – or perhaps men in general – were placed not
because their own faults, but as consequence of the general organization of the world. The
traditional Jewish crisis in the relation between God and his people is substituted by a new
puzzlement about the whole world – whether populated by Jews or by Gentiles. What seems to me
unmistakably early Hellenistic atmosphere of the book is not to be found in linguistic patterns or in
facile analogies about “carpe diem”, but in the author’s puzzled look at a social situation in which
God’s power is not verified by God’s justice. The later rabbis who codified Qohelet may have been
impressed by the fact that the author or perhaps his editor implicitly identified King Qohelet with
King Solomon: anything could be expected of King Solomon. But those who supported the
contested canonization – and among them was Hillel, the sage of the first century B.C. – [24] must
have considered Qohelet’s questioning legitimate and must have felt that it would ultimately lead to
the true recognition of God’s Work on earth. The canonization, however, was an admission that
Qohelet’s questioning – very different from that of the Book of Job, which is not interested in social
organization – was justified in its own terms. If you look at the World, the World – so Qohelet
thought – does not make much sense. Clearchus tells us that once Aristotle met a Jewish sage who
was a Greek not only in language, but in soul and was able to instruct himxxxviii . The story is almost
certainly without factual foundation. In any case Clearchus could not have had Qohelet in mind,
though perhaps he was a contemporary of Qohelet. Everything is uncertain about Qohelet, except
that he was no Greek either in language or in soul.50
i
Aggeo 2:7 pone un problema di mancata concordanza tra il verbo, plurale, e il sostantivo singolare (hemdat, il
desiderio) che lo regge. Un’ipotesi di lettura è quella di postulare un’errore nella trasmissione del verbo (“il desiderio di
tutte le nazioni verrà”), interpretando così il passo in senso messianico; migliore risulta l’alternativa, cui allude
Momigliano, di recuperare la lezione della LXX καὶ ἥξει τὰ ἐκλεκτὰ πάντων τῶν ἐθνῶν, "e affluiranno le cose
desiderabili di tutte le nazioni", come riferimento ai tesori portati per abbellire il tempio del Millennio.
ii
La datazione del salmo al 345 a.C., in coincidenza della spedizione in Giudea di Artaserse III, risale a H. Parker
1978.
iii
Per l'attenzione del giovane Momigliano agli assetti amministrativi del territorio, cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1930B; ID.
B
1934 .
iv
Ios. Ant. 11, 297.
v
RIVKIN 1971; ID. 1978. I due momenti fondamentali di autodefinizione ebraica nel contesto del Secondo
Tempio vengono identificati da Rivkin nelle rivoluzioni aaronide e farisaica: la creazione e la promulgazione del
Pentateuco da parte della nuova élite postesilica determina una presa di potere della classe sacerdotale aaronide
destinata a durare fino allo sviluppo della nozione di Legge duplice con cui la classe farisaica si assicurerà l’autorità
sulla vita spirituale del popolo.
vi
Per una recente panoramica (corredata da riferimenti bibliografici) della discussione sul tema del Patto nei
testi qumranici cfr. SCHIFFMAN 2010, part. alle pp. 249-253.
vii
Velata espressione di scetticismo circa la nota teoria di Wellhausen che attribuisce alla fonte P la suddivisione del
clero tra sacerdoti e leviti. Per la distanza di Momigliano dall’inclinazione di Wellhausen a cercare “principi immanenti
di sviluppo dell’Ebraismo”, cfr. Dopo Weber in Sesto, 302; BERTI 1987, xiii.
viii
Il dato è sottolineato anche in WEBER 1921. Momigliano non si addentra nella questione del rapporto tra sacerdoti
e leviti, cruciale all’interno della cosiddetta "teoria di Graf-Wellhausen" (cfr. GRAF 1866; WELLHAUSEN 1884, part. ai
49
P-o 64: Both allusions ... context, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 64: Everything ... or in soul, mginfmsb[Mom]; P-o 45: Qohelet was Greek neither in language nor in soul,
b
ms [AMM].
50
88
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
III. The Jews inside the Persian Empire
capp. 4 e 5). Va tuttavia rilevato come i cenni all’argomento lascino trapelare una maggiore vicinanza alla prospettiva
weberiana, sostanzialmente derivata da Meyer, rispetto a quella di Wellhausen, che nell’ambito di una complessiva
valutazione dell’influenza della fonte sacerdotale P sul Pentateuco nella retrodatazione di dati e realtà risalenti all’epoca
della composizione sostiene ad es. la recenziorità di Ez. 44, 6-16.
ix
Cfr. I Tobiadi nella preistoria del moto maccabaico (= Tobiadi).
x
II Macc. 3, 4-6.
xi
II Macc. 3, 10-11.
xii
Cfr. e.g. SMITH 1971, 170 ss., per un confronto di Neemia con Pericle e KIPPENBERG 1982, 55-62, per quello
con Solone.
xiii
Ios. Ant. 12, 148-52 Marcus.
xiv
Ios. Ant. 11.329-39 Marcus.
xv
I Macc.1, 2-3; sui successori (in particolare Antioco Epifane), cfr. 1, 9-10.
xvi
Cfr. Sects and Cults of the Post-Exile Period, in WEBER 1952, part. alle pp. 392 – 400.
xvii
I Re 8, 22-61.
xviii
BICKERMAN 1962B.
xix
YADIN 1983. Momigliano possedeva il resoconto preliminare, YADIN 1967; nel 1985 (o dopo) ne acquistò
anche la versione per il grande pubblico (YADIN 1985).
xx
Cfr. COWLEY 1923, n. 33 (= DAE 104). Il papiro che documenta l’episodio – piuttosto danneggiato e quindi di
lettura incerta– è databile al 407 a.C., ossia tre anni dopo la distruzione del tempio compiuta dalle truppe del
governatore di Siene Vidranga e ci fornisce la risposta di quattro rappresentanti della colonia di Yeb alle condizioni
poste dal satrapo persiano per la ricostruzione: gli Ebrei locali non compiranno più olocausti, ma solo offerte di incenso,
cibi e bevande, versando in aggiunta ai governatori denaro e mille ardab (misura persiana) di orzo.
xxi
King James Version.
xxii
Neemia 8:2-10.
xxiii
Per un quadro sintetico della riflessione sulle origini della sinagoga nei testi talmudici cfr. STEMBERGER 1979,
110-121. Il Talmud offre differenti prospettive sulla questione: se in Targum Jer. I in Es. 18,20, la Sinagoga viene fatta
risalire al tempo di Mosè, in corrispondenza all’affermazione di Ezechiele 11,16 per cui “nei paesi della diaspora Dio è
diventato per il suo popolo un piccolo santuario (lemiqdash meat)”, Bab. Megillah 29a interpreta l’espressione in
riferimento alla Sinagoga. Lo stesso testo fa risalire anche le sinagoghe di Chu Tsal e di Shabjatib di Nehardea
all’esilio. Un’intepretazione parallela è quella che considera modelli dei servizi religiosi sinagogali le riunioni degli
anziani davanti al profeta Ezechiele (Ez. 14,1; 20,1).
xxiv
OGIS, No. 726 = CII, No. 1440 = LIFSCHITZ 1967B, No. 92, p. 78. Si tratta di una iscrizione di Schedia, datata
al regno di Tolomeo III Evergete (246-222 a.C.).
xxv
Ios. BJ II, 8,2-14 Niese.
xxvi
Claudio, citato da Giuseppe in Ant. 20,11 Marcus, si rivolge Ἱεροσολυµιτῶν ἄρχουσι βουλῇ δήµῳ Ἰουδαίων
παντὶ ἔθνει, “agli arconti, boulé, demo di Gerusalemme e a tutto il popolo ebraico”. La figura dei dieci governanti, i
δεκάπρωτοι, viene menzionata in Ant. 20.194, BJ 5.532; il βουλευτήριον compare in BJ 2.405, il segretario della βουλή
in BJ 5.532 (cfr. LEVINE 1999, 84).
xxvii
Fr. 11 Stern (=FrGH 264 F6) Aegyptiaca, apud Diod. Sic., Bibl. Hist., 40, 3, 3-5; fr. 12 Stern (=FrGH 264
F21) De Iudaeis, apud Ios., Ap. I, 183-204, particolarmente 187 (Ezechia), 198-199 (Tempio e sacerdoti).
xxviii
Fr. 28 Stern (apud Ios., Ap. II, 112-114).
xxix
Fr. 30 a-b Stern (=FrGH 86 F20a-b) apud Ios. Ap. I, 205-211; Ant. XII, 5-6.
xxx
Strab., Geogr. XVI, 40 (fr. 115 Stern); Id., Historica Hypomnem., ap. Ios., Ant. 14, 66-68 (fr. 104 Stern
=FrGH 91 F15).
xxxi
SB 8008.
xxxii
La traduzione del versetto parrebbe di Momigliano, non corrispondendo a nessuna delle versioni consultate.
xxxiii
P. Cair. Zen. 1. 59001 = Scholl, R., C. Ptol. Sklav., 37 = BAGNALL – DEROW 1981, 237, n. 143. Il papiro,
duplicato di un atto di vendita del 259 a.C., documenta l’acquisto della schiava babilonese Sphragis alla presenza di sei
testimoni. Per una riproduzione fotografica, vd. CAVALLO – MAEHLER 2008, 13, fig. 11; CAVALLO 2008, 33. tav. 10.
xxxiv
GERATY 1975.
xxxv
ABEL 1968.
xxxvi
Il ricorso alla nozione di diaspora per i Greci di età ellenistica si osserva già in Bickerman (cfr. in proposito
From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees, p. 32).
xxxvii
Per una precedente analisi momiglianea di Qohelet cfr. Ebrei e Greci, 23, in cui già risultano presenti, sia pure
in forma sintetica, i punti nodali dell’argomentazione così come formulati nella lecture: particolarmente la presenza
“sotterranea” della cultura greca, mai nominata ma proprio per questo tanto più pervasiva, e la perdita di fiducia
dell’Ecclesiaste nei confronti del senso della storia, “o meglio il senso di una direzione negli avvenimenti che
caratterizza tutti gli altri testi biblici, compreso persino Giobbe”.
xxxviii
Clearchus apud Ios. Ap. I, 180-181 (cit. anche in Eus. P.E. 9.5) = fr. 6 Wehrli.
89
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
GL 1979 IV The Defence against Hellenization
Sedi e date:
EL 1978 (8 novembre – cfr. *D-a 1)
GL 1979 (14? Febbraio – cfr. GRANATA 2006, 419)
Documenti
a) EL 1978 IV
P-o 48 ms.
P-o 49 top c. ds. di P-o 48.
P-o 50, P-o 66: c.c. di P-o 49.
P-o 51, P-o 67 xerox da una c.c. di P-o 49.
b) GL 1979 IV
P-o 75 nuova versione ds., xerox della top c.
P-o 68 (a), P-o 69, P-o 93 (a), c.c. di P-o 75.
P-o 68 (b), P-o 70, P-o 93 (b) aggiunte al testo.
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
Sviluppata a partire dal ripensamento radicale delle due lectures centrali nel ciclo CL 1977, The
Temple and the Synagogue e The Rabbis and the Communities1, The Defence compare per la prima
volta come EL 1978 IV a chiusura di quello che potrebbe essere definito il ‘trittico’ derivante dalla
loro rielaborazione. La posizione mediana della lecture mette in risalto la natura non conclusiva di
un’indagine che, analizzando le forme di opposizione del giudaismo nel contesto ellenistico, apre
contemporaneamente nuovi interrogativi: posta la resistenza all’ellenizzazione, in quali ambiti
storico-culturali è possibile identificare l’assimilazione e la relazione intellettuale degli Ebrei con i
Greci? All’immediata risposta fornita a Cincinnati dalle due lectures successive (e conclusive),
Jews and Gentiles e The Decline of History and Apocalypse, Momigliano opporrà ad Oxford
un’assenza di risposte: se la versione Grinfield della lecture risulta generalmente improntata alla
ricerca di formulazioni più caute e rigorose, la domanda con cui conclude l’intero primo ciclo
oxoniense sul giudaismo ellenistico non può non rimandare all’esigenza di continuare a indagare
nella direzione individuata.
Come testo base per l’edizione di The Defence si è scelto un testimone del testo Grinfield, P-o
75, classificato da Granata 2006 come xerocopia della nuova versione ds. per GL 1979. P-o 75 pone
un lieve problema di datazione, in quanto reca in calce all’ultima pagina la data “September 1978”,
piuttosto adeguata a una lezione Efroymson che a una Grinfield: considerata la sua natura di
xerocopia, la difficoltà non pare tuttavia insormontabile e si giustifica per dipendenza dal modello.
P-o 75 è infatti l’esito di una rielaborazione del testo di Cincinnati, testimoniato essenzialmente da
una copia ms. (P-o 48, 22 cc.), dalla sua trascrizione ds. (la top c. P-o 49), e dalle sue c.c. P-o 50
(esiguamente annotata da AMM), P-o 66 (EL reading copy). Un’ulteriore c.c. di P-o 49 sembra
infine alla base di due xerocopie di EL, P-o 51 e P-o 672.
P-o 75 risulta a sua volta riprodotto in tre c.c.: P-o 68, annotata in testa alla c. 1 come “reading
copy. Feb. 1979”; P-o 69 (c. 1: “revised Feb. 1979”) e P-o 93 (ulteriore c.c. di P-o 75, ribattuta a
macchina il 26.1.79 secondo le indicazioni di AMM). Tutte e tre le copie carbone sono interessate
da interventi di maggiore e minore entità, riportati all’occorrenza in apparato; il motivo per cui non
sono state adottate come documenti base della lecture risiede in primo luogo nella discordanza tra
alcuni degli interventi e scelte testuali adottate, tra cui risulta impossibile stabilire una priorità
cronologica; in secondo luogo, perché il principale intervento operato rispetto al testo di P-o 75,
l’inserzione delle cc. 13 a-d (un excursus sull’istituzione sinagogale testimoniato dal nucleo b di P-o
68 e 93 e dalla corrispondente versione ms., il fascicolo di 3 cc. P-o 70), risulta in buona sostanza
1
Per una rassegna analitica delle riprese cfr. infra, Appendici I e II.
Che si tratti di copie xerox di una c.c. di P-o 49 e non di copie dirette si evince dal fatto che in entrambi i fascicoli
compaiono fotocopiate correzioni di Momigliano che su P-o 49 sono invece ricopiate a mano da AMM.
2
90
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
un duplicato delle cc. 13-14 e 16 della precedente lecture (The Jews inside). Benché la funzione del
testo possa essere ricondotta non a una scelta di ricollocazione editoriale da parte di Momigliano,
quanto piuttosto alla volontà di riproporre una pericope d’importanza nodale nello sviluppo
complessivo del discorso, in ottemperanza a un’esigenza di completezza espositiva (sulla questione
dei duplicati tra GL 1979 III e IV cfr. supra, alle pp. 74-5), la presenza di lezioni alternative tra il
passo e la sua ripresa, concentrate soprattutto nella prima parte, ha indotto a riproporre anche in The
Defence il materiale di P-o 70. Si riportano infine anche le varianti di P-o 49, allo scopo di mettere
in risalto le principali modifiche apportate nel passaggio dalla versione Efroymson a quella
Grinfield.
2. Argomento della lecture
A trasformare la devozione sacerdotale del giudaismo persiano nel sistema accademico per lo
studio della Torah è l’immersione degli Ebrei nel mondo ellenistico e la conseguente assimilazione
della sua fede nell’educazione organizzata. Non si tratta tuttavia dell’unica manifestazione di quello
che Momigliano considera il formalismo ellenistico dietro al quale si cela, a partire dal III sec.a.C.,
l’anti-ellenismo “di sostanza” del giudaismo. Sotto i Greci, rimasti estranei alla poliglossia
dell’impero achemenide, gli Ebrei di area linguistica greca (Alessandria) vengono ridotti al
monolinguismo: nella conservazione dell’unità nazionale assume così ruolo preminente la
traduzione del testo sacro, in prospettiva di un’operazione di consolidamento culturale in cui il
bilinguismo greco-aramaico degli Ebrei di Palestina svolge funzione di coordinamento. Entro la
fine del II sec.a.C. la Bibbia è disponibile in greco: la più importante fonte sulla traduzione del
Pentateuco, la Lettera di Aristea, riconosce la preminenza di Gerusalemme (da cui provengono testo
e traduttori) nell’operazione, ma ne individua la sede in Alessandria e attribuisce a Tolemeo II
l’impulso per la sua realizzazione.
Il coinvolgimento del sovrano, storicamente infondato, prova come gli Ebrei della città
tentassero di riconciliare la loro devozione a Gerusalemme con la lealtà verso i Tolemei: indizio
della portata dell’operazione di traduzione, la cui inevitabile componente interpretativa appare
sempre più un potenziale pericolo per l’unità del giudaismo. Se per limitare l’arbitrio dei targumim,
le libere versioni in aramaico, i rabbini producono infatti liste di passi “vietati”, è significativo come
sul versante greco Filone si senta in dovere di identificare l’abilità filologica dei traduttori con il
dono divino della profezia.
All’assimilazione linguistica va affiancandosi nel tempo un’accelerazione nell’evoluzione
dell’istruzione ebraica determinata dalla progressiva competizione con quella greca. Il sistema
educativo giudaico resta oscuro sotto vari aspetti: articolato in una fase elementare e una avanzata
(la Yeshivah) dedicata allo studio della relazione tra Legge scritta e orale, è stato a lungo sottoposto
a indagini finalizzate a valutare quanta parte vi rivestissero elementi del sistema filosofico e retorico
greco. L’individuazione di potenziali punti di raffronto, desunti da Filone o dai testi rabbinici
palestinesi (la nozione di diadoche, le sette leggi o middot di Hillel per l’interpretazione legalistica
della scrittura) è tuttavia inficiata in partenza, per Momigliano, dal fatto che nessuno di questi autori
si proponesse di reinterpretare il giudaismo in termini greci, limitandosi piuttosto a prestiti
superficiali finalizzati a dare sostegno alla propria chiave ermeneutica.
Peculiare agli Ebrei appare infine la convergenza degli sforzi per tenere viva e unificata la fede
davanti alla rinnovata minaccia politeista, affiancata dalla tentazione costante della civilizzazione
ellenistica. La straordinaria varietà di prodotti letterari che caratterizza la letteratura giudaica tra il
200 a.C. e il 100 d.C. dimostra come la vera risposta alla domanda posta dalla civiltà ellenistica non
venne trovata nel tempio, quanto nell’educazione.
3. Note di contenuto: le finalità della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi.
Una prima differenza tra la stesura Efroymson e quella Grinfield del testo si apprezza nella
ricerca di formulazioni più caute e rigorose, meno tranchantes: rispetto alla versione GL, la EL è
maggiormente esplicita nell’individuare possibili conseguenze del tentativo imperialista asmoneo a
91
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
livello di psicologia collettiva (“perhaps, a concealed sense of shame and fear in later Jewish
society”, c. 1), mentre la lecture oxoniense contrappone a questa densa ma generica supposizione
una più precisa caratterizzazione della resistenza ebraica in termini religiosi e culturali,
sostanzialmente anti-politici. Un analogo affinamento si evidenzia nella rivalutazione di talune fonti
(ad es. il riferimento alla yeshivah in Ecclesiastico, c. 15), evidentemente sottoposte a revisione,
nello smussamento di divagazioni polemiche (eliminazione del passo sulla ricerca dello Zeitgeist
“interesting to discover, but elusive to analyse”, c. 18), o infine nelle rifiniture relative a notazioni
di tipo sociale (ad es. l’aggiunta di una breve riflessione relativa all’esigenza di tempo e denaro
nella scelta di uno stile di vita rabbinico, c. 20).
L’aggiunta introduttiva al cap. I (cc. 1-2), dedicata all’opzione metodologica di partenza,
fornisce un’indicazione operativa nel delimitare l’argomento della lecture al primo di tre punti
proposti per la comprensione dell’identità ebraica in età ellenistica (la situazione linguistica; il
sistema educativo; le aree di maggiore scambio culturale) rinviando l’esame degli altri due a una
serie successiva3; ma al tempo stesso esprime un’opzione interpretativa di fondo nel riconoscimento
del debito con i Greci: è dai Greci stessi, infatti, che gli Ebrei traggono gli elementi fondanti del
loro rinnovato sistema socio-culturale in grado, a sua volta, di resistere all’ellenizzazione. Va
rilevato come nel corso della lecture Momigliano non si attenga però strettamente al programma
proposto in apertura: malgrado la premessa, il sistema educativo viene trattato di fatto anche in
questa sede, almeno per ciò che concerne gli aspetti imprescindibili nella considerazione della
situazione linguistica. La sinagoga in sé e per sé resterà, invece, questione da affrontare a parte4.
Tra le altre modifiche di rilievo va inoltre considerato come, in relazione alle teorie sulla genesi
della LXX (cc. 8-9), nella Efroymson Momigliano eviti di prendere posizione riguardo
all’affidabilità storica degli eventi descritti dalla Lettera di Aristea (la Settanta come traduzione
“statale” realizzata per impulso dei Tolemei), definendo la scelta tra opposte interpretazioni “a
question of honest preference” (forse allo scopo di conciliare l’auditorio di Cincinnati5, ma non
appare implausibile ipotizzare una forma di riguardo per la posizione di Bickerman già menzionata
in Alien Wisdom, 95; cfr. nota xv alla lecture) Nella Grinfield viene invece esplicitata una
propensione per la lettura della Lettera di Aristea come leggenda nata per spirito emulativo nei
confronti delle traduzioni ufficiali greche, risalenti al 200 a.C. ca., di testi legali egiziani.
Anche in relazione alla questione dei Targumim aramaici, l’aggiunta GL (c. 12) sulle liste di
passi intraducibili sembra rispondere a un’istanza di maggior rigore, così come la precisazione per
cui il “playful element” delle traduzioni non fosse una componente usuale, ma solo occasionale.
Infine, un breve intervento in GL sull’interpretazione filoniana della Legge (c. 16), contribuisce a
ridurre la genericità della corrispondente formulazione EL, presentando l’operazione di Filone come
in grado di trascendere l’uso pratico della Legge alla ricerca di un senso che soddifacesse il filosofo
stesso, prima ancora che i concittadini suoi contemporanei.
3
Notevole il richiamo a un secondo ciclo di lectures, conforme a quanto già annunciato in chiusura della prima GL
1979 I, Prologue (“These three themes [i.e. il rapporto di Greci ed Ebrei con la Persia; le forme di comunicazione tra
Ebrei della diaspora; i limiti dello scambio tra Ebrei e gentili] will occupy me in the remaining two lectures of this year
and in three lectures which I hope to deliver next year”, c. 25). L’annuncio appare rilevante nella valutazione
dell’organicità del progetto momiglianeo e della sua evoluzione nel tempo: considerato come il ciclo a cui lo storico
rimanda non possa essere identificato nella seconda serie Grinfield (GL 1980, dedicata alle origini della storia
universale), ma piuttosto nella quarta, è evidente come fino all’ultima Grinfield lecture 1979 Momigliano fosse ancora
lontano dall’idea di una ripartizione quadripartita dell’indagine complessiva. Per l’evoluzione del progetto in tal senso
sulla plausibile base di modifiche di contratto si rimanda all’Introduzione al testo.
4
L’enunciazione incipitaria del programma risulta contraddittoria anche rispetto alla sua riproposizione in chiusura del
testo: qui Momigliano dichiara infatti di aver trattato i primi due punti (lingua e educazione), promettendo di occuparsi
in altra sede del terzo, le relazioni degli Ebrei con i vicini Greci o grecizzati.
5
Tentativo che potrebbe essere messo in relazione ad altre accortezze plausibilmente riservate da Momigliano agli
ascoltatori di Cincinnati: l’omissione della riflessione relativa alle esigenze economiche dei rabbini, inserita poi in GL
(c. 20), o la battuta su una divergenza di opinioni tra R. Meir e R. Judah (c. 15), eliminata dalla formulazione del testo
GL, che presuppone un pubblico di specialisti.
92
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
IV
The Defence Against Hellenization*
I
We must now try to define how the Jews managed to establish themselves as a well
recognizable cultural entity in the Hellenistic world – the only culture to stand up to Hellenism
within the latter’s borders. Outside there were of course the Parthians and the Romans. It will be
enough here to observe that both probably accepted more Greek habits and ideas than the Jews ever
did and that they maintained their autonomy by passing from defence to offence and ultimately
dividing the Hellenistic world between themselves. True enough, also the Jews embarked on minor
imperialism under the Hasmoneans. What that adventure in conquest and forced conversion did to
the Jews themselves remains an obscure but important question. Certainly it did not give them more
security: on the contrary, the almost immediate result was their having to accept a king, Herod,
whom they were never able to trust. It remains obvious, however, that the Jews were neither in a
position nor in the mood to proceed to the offensive against the Greeks on a grand scale. Their
resistance against Hellenization had to be religious and cultural. 7 I propose to choose for
consideration three aspects of the overt situation: the linguistic8 problem involved in entering into
the Hellenistic world; the building up of a Jewish system of education; and the areas of greater
intellectual exchange between Jews and Gentiles.
This year I shall only be able to say something about the first point – the linguistic situation9.
The rest of my analysis of the methods by which the Jews organized their intellectual world inside
the intellectual world of the Greeks must be left to my second series of lectures.
But any analysis of this unusual phenomenon – the building of a Jewish culture within the Greek
culture – must start from an elementary constatation. While the Jews had their own religion, their
own national customs and their own traditions of writing poetry and history before they knew the
Greeks, they [2] had no organized, self-conscious class of intellectuals and no elaborate system of
education before they had to stand up to the Greeks. Whether we look at Qohelet – lonely, but not
so lonely as to be without an admiring pupil ready to collect his many proverbs (12, 9) – or at
Ecclesiasticus “much given to the reading of the Law and the prophets and other books of our
fathers” (Prologue) – or at Daniel with his group of mashkilim “who understand among the people
and shall instruct many” (11, 33), we find new types of intellectuals among the Jews of the third
and second centuries B.C. They are the predecessors of the rabbis who were slowly to become the
teachers and the religious leaders in the following centuries. In the same way the “house of
learning” of Ecclesiasicus 51, 23, whatever its precise meaning, is the forerunner of the rabbinic
schools of later days.
What transformed the Judaism of the Persian period, with its priestly piety and worldly
ambitions, into the lay, self-centered, unworldly, academic organization for the study of the Law10
6
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 75, xerocopia della nuova versione ds. per GL 1979. Si riportano in apparato le
varianti significative delle c.c. di P-o 75 P-o 68 (reading copy Feb. 1979), P-o 69 e P-o 93. Si considerano
all’evenienza anche lezioni di P-o 49 (top c. EL 1978), allo scopo di evidenziare l’evoluzione da EL a GL.
6
P-o 68: the, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 75 def
7
P-o 75, 68: True enough, also the Jews ... had to be religious and cultural. <-> P-o 49: The Jews embarked on minor
imperialism under the Asmoneans but – apart from the fact that the almost immediate result was their having to accept a
king, Herodes, whom they were never able to trust – it would be difficult to argue that that adventure in conquest and
forced conversion tangibily contributed to the cultural physiognomy of Judaism in the Hellenistic period; the
consequences, if any, are of a more intangible nature, perhaps a concealed sense of shame and fear in later Jewish
society.
8
P-o 68: the linguistic and social, interl.msn[Mom].
9
P-o 68, 93: in its connection with the origins of the Synagogue, interl.ms[P-o 68 Mom, P-o 93 AMM].
10
P-o 68: - and by law I mean the Torah -, interl.msn[Mom].
93
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
of the later periods is the immersion of the Jews in the Hellenistic world. They learned from the
Greeks the importance of education. From this point of view Judaism has remained Hellenistic ever
since. It derives from its Hellenistic past its tenacious faith in organized education and learning. But
it would only create confusion to infer that most of Jewish culture of the Hellenistic age, even when
formulated in Greek, had a Greek origin and was acceptable to the Greeks. Understanding Judaism
as it developed between the third century B.C. and the end of the first century A.D. is to find the
exact relation between the Hellenism of the forms and the anti-Hellenism of the substance.11
II
Educated men of the first millennium B.C. were normally bilingual. Bilingualism had profound
roots in Mesopotamia where Sumerian as a literary language accompanied Akkadian through the
ages. The Persian Empire made Aramaic almost compulsory as the language of administration.
Even Egypt was [3] affected by it. The Jews increasingly used Aramaic instead of Hebrew in
ordinary speech. They passed from Hebrew to Aramaic in the same book of the Bible without
giving much attention to the facti. In the Western Mediterranean it was Greek that provided
Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans and, to a certain extent, Celts with a second language. But the
Greeks themselves were, as we all know, the great exception. They remained almost
uncompromisingly monolingual. Those who had to learn a second language, like Democedes and
Ctesiasii, both doctors to Persian kings, concealed the fact. Themistocles, who promised to spend a
year learning Persianiii, remains so far the only known exception to the great exception. It was as a
consequence of living among Greeks that certain Jews were reduced to monolingualism, the one
language being Greek. If there is any sign12 of Philo’s really having absorbed Greek culture, it is
that he was stupendously ignorant of Hebrew. Some kind scholars have tried to help him out of his
Greek monolingualismiv – an embarrassment to them, but not to him. The prestige of Hellenism
created a new phenomenon: Jews separated from other Jews because they did not know either
Hebrew or Aramaic.
In fact, at least from the end of the second century B.C. not all the Jews lived within the Greek
and later Roman world. The Jews of Mesopotamia were placed outside it by the Parthian conquest
about 130 B.C. Judaism was thus divided into three zones: that in which Aramaic dialects were
normally spoken, with some Iranian dialects as an auxiliary language; that in which Aramaic
prevailed with Greek as the second language; and that in which Greek prevailed (later, in some
places where Greek prevailed, Latin became a possible second language). Where Aramaic
prevailed, Hebrew remained alive as a written and perhaps spoken language of the intellectual élite.
After the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, a conspicuous part of which is in Hebrew, scholars are
less sure than they used to be that Hebrew had entirely ceased to be a spoken language in Palestine
in the Hellenistic Age. If unity was to be preserved in Judaism, channels of communication had to
be maintained between people speaking different languages in different countries. Translation [4]
played a pre-eminent part in keeping the Jews united around the Bible: I do not know of any similar
phenomenon in Antiquity. With the Bible as the unifying element, prayer and – what mattered most
– regulations for daily life had a chance of remaining reasonably uniform. A Jew could recognize
his fellow-Jews from Seleucia in Mesopotamia to Rome, whatever language they happened to
speak. In this vast operation of continuous repair and consolidation the Jews of Palestine were
bound to exercise for centuries the most important role, not only due to the prestige of Jerusalem,
but because Palestine was more genuinely bilingual in Greek and Aramaic, and more abundantly
provided with intellectuals in command of Biblical Hebrew, than any other region.
As nothing is simple, there were difficulties for the Palestinian Jews in keeping their Greek in
working order. Even Josephus needed Greek-speaking helpers to write his historical books in
11
12
P-o 75: This year I shall only be able…. and the antihellenism of the substance; P-o 49: def.
P-o 68, 93: proof <->sign, interl.msb[Mom].
94
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
Greek. Some of the anguish ordinary people felt in having to speak or write in Greek is expressed in
a letter from an unknown correspondent to Zeno (Zenon Papyri II no. 66): “They treat me with
contempt because I am a barbarian ... Please order that ... they pay me my salary, so that I am not
starved to death because I do not know Greek well enough”. In Palestine there was furthermore a
strong temptation to treat Greek as an enemy language. Greek was after all the language of
paganism and of Greek tax collectors. But it is interesting to note that to the best of my knowledge
the learning of Greek was not prohibited in Palestine during the period of conflict with Hellenistic
kings. A rabbinic prohibition is first vaguely attestedv in relation to the attack by Pompey against
the Temple. It is well attested for the great rebellions of the time of Trajan and Hadrian (in the
relevant text of Mishnah, Sotah 9, 14 the right reading is Quietus, that is the general of Trajan, not
Titusvi). The fact that in a letter discovered by Y. Yadin at Nahal Hever one of the officers of Bar
Kochba in the rebellion against Hadrian should have to apologize for writing in Greek may confirm
that Greek was altogether discouraged in those years [5] (cf. B. Lifshitz, Aegyptus 42, 1962, 240vii;
cf. Tal. Yer. Shabb. 1, 6). It is outside my purpose to discuss the limits and meaning of this
prohibition which in any case, when it came, can hardly have been lasting and effective. About
A.D. 100 the Academy of Gamaliel II, as we all remember, had the reputation of bringing together
500 students of the Torah and 500 students of Greek Wisdom (B. Sotah 49b) – a piece of
information which cannot have been totally invented, though registered at a late date and obviously
not to be taken literally. About A.D. 200 the Mishnah allowed a certain number of prayers to be
said in any language (Sotah 7, 1) and was altogether sympathetic towards the Greek language. The
hostility towards the Greek language – in whatever form it was expressed – appears to be one of the
new features of the Jewish reaction to the Roman world in the first century A.D. (and perhaps
earlier in the first century B.C.)13 which will occupy us later. The pre-Roman reaction to Greek in
Palestine seems to have been to use it to good purpose.
III
The Bible had to be kept at the centre of Jewish life, even if Jews no longer understood the
language in which it had been written. In Aramaic-speaking congregations the Bible was read in
Hebrew and translated extempore into Aramaic. The use of a written Aramaic translation of the
Pentateuch in synagogues, at least for Sabbath worship, was for a time explicitly forbidden (Talmud
Jer. Megillah 4). But nothing could prevent private use of Aramaic translations of the Bible. The
discovery of an Aramaic translation of the Book of Job in one of the Qumran caves has proved that
such translations did exists: the14 Qumran Job has been dated in the second15 century B.C. The
discovery incidentally gave new respectability to the Talmudic story that an Aramaic translation (or
Targum) of Job had existed in the time of Rabban Gamaliel I in the early first century A.D. and had
reappeared, after having been withdrawn, in the time of his grandson Gamaliel II (Talmud Bab.
Shabbat 115 a; Tosefta Shabbat 14 etc.). On the whole recent research on the Aramaic translations
of the Bible has been increasingly inclined to make them more ancient than one used to believe
them [6] to be. Scholars now speak of the Peshitta, the Syriac translation, as being based on a
Palestinian Aramaic text of the first century A.Dviii. The Targum Onkelos seems to have its roots in
second-century A.D. Palestine. The complete text of the Pentateuch Targum identified in the
Neophyti Codex I of the Vatican Library is dated by its discoverer and editor Alejandro Diez
Macho in the second century A.D. Others would go even earlier. Even if Diez Macho and his
followersix are proved to have been too sanguine, this text, which remained unknown until 1956 and
began to be published in 1968, can hardly be later than the fourth century A.D. Though on the
13
14
15
P-o 75: (and perhaps ... century B.C.); P-o 49: def.
P-o 68: traslation of, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 68: and even in the third, interl.msn[Mom].
95
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
present evidence the Greek translation of the Bible remains older than the earliest Aramaic texts16,
the gap is narrowing.
The whole corpus of the writings which we call the Bible, perhaps with the exception of Esther,
had apparently been translated into Greek by the time the grandson of Ben Sira wrote the
introduction to his own version of Ecclesiasticus about17 132 and 116 B.C.: he speaks of the Law,
the Prophets and the rest of the books. 18 The question of what to translate into Greek may well have
contributed to the formation of the Hebrew canon. A Greek translation of the Book of Esther made
in Jerusalem seems to have arrived in Egypt about 78 B.C. This at least is the most likely
interpretation and date of the mysterious colophon of the Greek Book of Esther which says: “In the
fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, Dositheus who said he was a priest and a Levite,
and Ptolemy his son brought the preceding letter of Purim which they said was genuine and was
translated by Lysimachus the son of Ptolemy one of the residents in Jerusalem” x . Like
Ecclesiasticus, the Book of Esther – or a different redaction of it – was translated into Greek by a
Palestinian Jew. 19 It would, however, be rash to conclude that the majority of the biblical books
was translated in Palestine rather than in Egypt. Whatever may be the value of the Letter of Aristeas
as a source for the story that the Pentateuch had been translated at the time, and by order, of
Ptolemy II, the letter represents current opinion in the second century B.C. about the Alexandrian
origin of [7] this text. Philo supports the opinion of an Alexandrian origin by recording that the
Jews of Alexandria celebrated the translation of the Bible into Greek with a yearly festival on the
island of Pharus in which non-Jews participated (Vita Mosis II, 41). However fond of festivals
Hellenistic peoples were, I wonder whether there is a parallel to this holiday in memory of a
translation. The function20 of the Palestinian Jews in the development of the Septuagint is rather to
be sought in the discussion which developed about its reliability in comparison with the original
Hebrew text. Not everyone – above all not everyone who knew his Hebrew – was prepared, like
Philo, to take the translators as “prophets and priests” (Vita Mosis 2, 40) and to treat their
translation as a document divinely inspired as was the Hebrew text. Philo’s clearest proof for this
inspiration of the Septuagint – that the Chaldeans (that is, Jews) who had learned Greek and the
Greeks who had learned Chaldean (that is, Hebrew), regarded both versions, the Chaldean and the
Greek, as “sisters or rather as one and the same”xi – must be treated with caution21. Justin in his
Dialogue complains to the Jew Tryphon about the criticism of the Septuagint by contemporary
rabbisxii. The Greek scroll of the minor prophets discovered in 1952 in the desert of Judaea has at
least proved that Justin was referring to an existing revision of the text of the Septuagint made by a
Palestinian Jew who disapproved of some of its renderings (D. Barthélemy, Rev. Bibl. 60, 1953, 1829)xiii. There must have been many predecessors of Aquila who painstakingly tried to provide a
literal version of the Bible into Greek against which to control the Septuagint.
The legend which developed around the Septuagint in the second century B.C., and which was
perhaps first formulated by Aristobulus about 160 B.C. and then by Pseudo-Aristeas, recognized the
role of Jerusalem as custodian of the unity of Judaism: both the text of the Law of Moses and the
translators were said to have come from there. On the other hand the Alexandrian authors were
obviously anxious to make it clear that the translation had the approval of the Ptolemies. There are
signs that the Ptolemies followed the example of [8] the Persians in making Egyptian laws
accessible to the ruling foreigners of the day. It is recorded that Darius I ordered his satrap to
engage Egyptian scholars for a compilation of Egyptians laws in Aramaic and Demotic (W.
Spiegelberg, Die sogenannte demotische Chronik, Leipzig 1914, 30-1). In the last few months we
16
P-o 68: with the possibile exception of the Qumran Job, mgdx con segr, msn[Mom].
P-o 68, 93: between <-> about, interl.msn[Mom].
18
P-o 68: Whether oral translation preceded written translation in Greek as in Aramaic, it is impossible to say,
mgsnmsb[Mom].
19
P-o 68: 78 B.C. -> This is at least… Palestinian Jews, del.; P-o 69, 93: corr. def.
20
P-o 68, 93: the part <-> the function, interl.msb[AMM].
21
P-o 68: the Hebrew text. –> Philo’s clearest proof … must be treated with caution, del.
17
96
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
have learned from Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 3285 (vol. 47, 1978) that the so-called Demotic legal
Code of Hermopolis contained in a papyrus of the third century B.C. was translated into Greek. The
papyrus on which the available copy of the Greek version is preserved happens to be of the second
century A.D., but that simply confirms that Roman administration was interested in what it called
“the law of the Egyptians”. References in Greek papyri of the Ptolemaic period to the “law of the
land” leave little doubt that the translation from Demotic into Greek was made fairly early in the
Hellenistic period. A terminus ante quem is in any case provided by the record of the Hermias trial
of 116 B.C. which quotes these laws; the trial itself was started as the result of a petition made in
125 B.C. (Mitteis, Chrest. 31xiv). Those who believe in the intervention of Ptolemy Philadelphus in
the translation of the Septuagint are therefore now entitled to invoke in their support the analogy of
the translation of Demotic laws into Greek. But I remain sceptical for three reasons. First, I find it
difficult to separate the role of Ptolemy II from the rest of the story which is obviously legendary.
Secondly, I fail to see what use the Ptolemaic administration could have made of all the Hebrew
history which is mixed up with Hebrew law in the Pentateuch. Thirdly, the translation of Hebrew
law should be later than the translation of Egyptian law, but so far we have no evidence to show
that Egyptian legal texts translated into Greek existed in the third century B.C.: we know only that
they existed before 125 B.C.22 The period which a priori seems to be more appropriate for a
translation of Egyptian law into Greek is the reign of Ptolemy IV Philopator at the end of the third
century, when the status of the natives changed in Egypt and they were admitted to the army. I must
add that I do not know of any reference to the Pentateuch as a Jewish code of law [9] in any of the
legal papyri so far published. The matter is clearly controversialxv. But I venture to suggest that
Aristobulus and the Letter of Aristeas reported a legend inspired by the fact that Egyptian legal
texts had been officially translated into Greek about 200 B.C.23
IV
What the legend of Pseudo-Aristeas proved24 is that in the second century B.C. there were Jews
in Alexandria who tried to reconcile their devotion to Jerusalem with their loyalty towards the
Ptolemies and, interestingly enough, chose the translation of the Pentateuch as a symbol of that
harmony. It is also worth mentioning that25 Ps.-Aristeas clearly implied that both at Jerusalem and
in Alexandria the persons involved in the business would act in accordance with the best standards
of philological method. As translating was not one of the activities of the librarians in Alexandria,
Ps.-Aristeas could only apply to the translation of the texts the careful method of comparison and
collation characteristic of text editions, the translators arriving at an agreement on each point by
comparing each other’s work (302). According to Ps.-Aristeas the High Priest himself26 made the
essential contribution by lending a most excellent Hebrew manuscript and selecting translators
capable of satisfying all the Alexandrian requirements. In fact in the second century B.C.27 there
were men in Jerusalem anxious to give the Temple the reputation of a repository of reliable Hebrew
texts (as Alexandria was for Greek texts). The second letter which prefaces II Maccabees (late
second century) reports the legend of a library of holy28 texts built up by Nehemiah and adds that
Judas Maccabaeus also assembled books in the Temple. The writer offers to send copies of these
22
P-o 75: we know only that they existed before 125 B.C.; P-o 49: def.
P-o 75: The matter is clearly controversial. But I venture to suggest ... into Greek about 200 B.C. <-> P-o 49 The
matter is clearly controversial, and the choice between opposite theories is for the present a question of honest
preference. I leave it at that.
24
P-o 68, 93: in any case proves <-> proved, interl.msn[Mom].
25
P-o 68: harmony. -> It is also worth mentioning, del.
26
P-o 75: According to Ps.-Aristeas the High Priest himself <-> P-o 49 The High Priest himself.
27
P-o 75: In fact in the second century B.C. <-> P-o 49 What is not often observed is that we have independent
evidence that in fact in the second century B.C.
28
P-o 49: holy <-> tidy, interl.msn[AMM].
23
97
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
books to the Jews of Egypt, should they need them. In other words the Jews of Jerusalem were
giving polite notice to the Jews of Alexandria that they, too, had libraries and were ready to provide
copies of books. It was no inane boast, for we know that they sent a translation of Esther to Egypt.
We cannot be so definite about other texts. But we observe that the Book of Daniel which in its
present [10] form cannot be earlier, or indeed later, than circa 165 B.C. was already known in Egypt
about 150-140 B.C., as the Third Book of Sibylline Oracles shows. We may also ask whether the
Second Book of Maccabees itself was prepared in Jerusalem for the specific purpose of despatch to
Egypt and of recommending the participation of the Egyptian Jews in the yearly celebration of the
festival commemorating the purification of the Temple after its desecration by Antiochus
Epiphanes. This would explains why somebody felt impelled to compile29 this Greek summary of a
historical work in Greek by Jason of Cyrene about the events of the time of Antiochus IV. The
priestly circles which30 sent a translation of the Book of Esther from Jerusalem to Egypt had
perhaps the similar aim of commending the festival of Purim to the Egyptian Jews. Neither the
Book of Esther nor the festival it explains gained easy credit among the Jews. The Book of Esther
is, so far, the only biblical book of which no fragments have been found in the Qumran cavesxvi . For
some reasons Philo does no mention the festival of Purim. And there is the well known story of
Rabbi Meir who, when he went in31 Asia Minor in the early second century A.D. in order to
“intercalate the year”, discovered to his surprise that certain communities had no Hebrew text of
Esther. As he was a professional scribe and knew his Bible by heart he produced a copy about
which no complaint was ever made (Bab. Megillah 18 b; Tosefta Megillah II, 5 p. 223
Zuckermandelxvii; cf. Jer. Megillah 1, 7, 70 d. for another difficulty). If in the synagogue of Dura of
the third century A.D. the paintings gave pride of place to the story of Mordechai and Esther, we
may indulge in the speculation that this was a remote result of the homogenizing influence
exercised by the Palestinian scribes through their distribution of Esther either in the original or in
authenticated translations.32 Not all can be fanciful in the various Tannaitic stories of manuscripts of
the Law preserved in the Temple which were duly collated to establish the correct reading
(Sopherim 6, 4; Abot de-Rabbi Nathan, 46 ed. Schechter p. 129). We are told that the scribes
adopted the reading of two MSS. and discarded the reading given by one MS. only (J. P. Siegel, The
Severus Scroll, Missoula [11] 1975).
Flavius Josephus adds nothing to our knowledge of the texts preserved in the Temple by his
various references to them in connection with biblical episodes (Ant. 3, 38; 4, 303; 5, 61 and cf. Vita
418). Nor do we know from where came the scroll of the Synagogue of Severus in Rome mentioned
by David Kimchi (to Gen. 1, 31): the identification of this scroll with the one taken away33 by Titus
(Jos. Bell. J. 7, 162) and represented in his triumphal arch is only a pleasant fantasy (A. Epstein,
Mon. Gesch. Wiss. Jud. 34, 1885, 337). But the importance of this dual phenomenon – a strong
centralization of the Hebrew text of the Bible in Jerusalem and a steady interchange between Judaea
and the diaspora in matter of translations – is easy to grasp. It meant availability and authentication
of texts. Laymen now had the means to read and study sacred texts, even if they did not know
Hebrew. The scribes, whose existence was recognized by Antiochus III about 200 B.C.xviii, were or
became laymen: if priests and Levites, they owed their authority in textual problems not to their
ritual status, but to their learningxix.
Both the Aramaic and the Greek translations of the Bible were something more than a simple
means of making the contents of the sacred books available to Jews with little or no Hebrew. They
conveyed an interpretation of the Bible; and as Professor J. L. Seeligmann rightly emphasized, any
translation is an actualization of the text, especially if the text is a prophecy (The Septuagint Version
29
P-o 49: compile <-> complete, interl.msn[AMM].
P-o 49: which -> probably later, del.
31
P-o 49: to.
32
P-o 68: to the Egyptian Jews -> Neither the book of Ester nor the festival… either in the original or in authenticated
translations, del.
33
P-o 68: fron Jerusalem, interl.msn[Mom].
30
98
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
of Isaiah, 1948xx). Here, too, there was a potential danger to the unity of Judaism.34 Different
interpretations of the Bible, and different translations, might easily turn into sectarian
interpretations. This is after all what happened when the Christians ceased being Jews. But within
the framework of the Old Faith such a consequence seems to have been avoided. The different
translations obviously satisfied, or left dissatisfied, different needs and different people, but, to the
best of my knowledge, never became a source of lasting religious disagreements between Jews in
the Hellenistic and in the Roman period. One point seems to be worth underlining.35 [12] The
Aramaic translations, being more self-consciously an explanation of the original text, which was
assumed to be easily accessible, could allow themselves greater liberties. For this reason the rabbis
became concerned with the danger inherent in translating certain passages and produced lists of
passages not to be translated (and even not to be read in public in the original.). The lists were
always short: and the oldest (Mishnah, Megillah 4, 10) is the shortest.
There is occasionally an almost playful element in the Targumim. To mention a famous
example, one of the Aramaic translations, the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, transforms the quarrel
between Cain and Abel into a dispute between a Sadducee – Cain – who does not believe in the
importance of good works and in the existence of the world hereafter, and a good Pharisee – Abel –
who believes in both. The end remains the old one: Cain kills his brother (J. Bowker, The Targum
and Rabbinic Literature, 1969, 132). This is not to say that there may not have been extempore
synagogal translations into Greek, as there were into Aramaic; but as far as our evidence goes, texts
of Qumran included, it may be assumed that the one original Greek translation of each of the
various books of the Hebrew text of the Bible gave rise to various revisions and recensions of what
we call Septuagint.36 The Greek translators are anonymous, yet well marked personalities; and
when all is said, what remains surprising is the restraint of their interpretations. No generalization
about their intentions is legitimate. The old notion that they were uniformly hostile to
anthropomorphism was exploded as soon as Professor Harry Orlinsky and others turned to a
detailed analysis of the evidencexxi.37
It is remarkable38 that what was good enough for Ps.-Aristeas in order to prove the value of the
Septuagint is no longer sufficient for Philo. He replaces the philological skill of the translators with
their prophetic gifts and therefore introduces or adapts39 the interesting notion of the translator, qua
interpreter, as a prophet of God and partaker of His mysteriesxxii. There is no doubt a personal
element of Philo in all this, but he cannot have invented [13] the main point that each translator
miraculously produced the same rendering of all the Pentateuch. The attacks to which the
translation had been subjected probably necessitated a more irrational apology than that offered by
Aristeas. We shall perhaps not go wrong in postulating two other factors: the decline of the prestige
of Alexandrian philological methods and the increased detachment of the Jews from the
surrounding Hellenized world. Both factors are in keeping with the new atmosphere produced for
the Jews by the Roman conquest of the East40.
[13a] No doubt the Bible was translated in order that it should be read by any Jew or proselyte
in any language at any time. But more specifically, as we have already implied, the Bible was
translated in order to have it read and explained in public at fixed dates for the benefit of people
who would not have been able to understand a public reading and explanation of the Hebrew text.
34
P-o 69: of the Bible; -> and as Professor J.L. Seeligmann… unity of Judaism, del.
P-o 68, 69: the Roman period. -> One point seems to be worth underlining, del.
36
P-o 75: various revisions and recensions of what we call Septuagint. <-> P-o 49: various recensions.
37
P-o 68, 69: -> The Aramaic translations, being more self consciously an explanation… to a detailed analysis of the
evidence, del.
38
P-o 75: It is remarkable <- P-o 49:Contemporary Septuagint research is rightly turning its attention to the individual
style, the individual bias and the individual competence of each translator – a business complicated by the multiplicity
of revisions to which the texts were submitted in various places throughout the centuries, del.
39
P-o 68, 69: introduces -> or adapts, del.
40
P-o 68: inserzione delle cc. 13 a-d con segr; P-o 93: id, senza segr(per cui cfr. P-o 68; P-o 69: def., ma nota
msn[Mom]: “add some pp. 13a-b-c-d on Synagogue”.
35
99
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
The diffusion of the translations of the Bible into Aramaic and Greek is connected with the custom
of reading and explaining in public certain portions of the Bible at stated intervals (in the first
centuries A.D. not only on the Sabbath and other festivals, but also on Mondays and Thursdays). In
this respect the public reading and interpretation of the Bible is inseparable from the institution of
the Synagogue – the meeting place where the Bible was read.
There is not much else we can safely say about the origins of the Synagogue. There may be some
intangible element of truth in the theory already to be found in the Talmud (Bab. Meg. 29a) and to
my knowledge formulated for the first time in scholarly terms by Carlo Sigonio in his De Republica
Hebraeorum of 1583 – namely that the Synagogue had its origins in the Babylonian exile. But
Ezechiel 11:16 (God’s words) “I will be to them as a little sanctuary in the country where they shall
come” – cannot easily be taken as a reference to a synagogue. Nor does Psalm 74:8 “They have
burnt up all the meeting places” necessarily refer to synagogues, apart from the question of the date
of this Psalm. What is more, when Nehemiah summoned the meeting in Jerusalem to read the Law,
he was doing something unusual. He read the Law, the Torah, as Herodotus, more or less in the
same years, read his Histories in Athens. No biblical text either authentically describing or
purporting to describe the life of the Jews under the Persians has a clear reference to a synagogue
(in Hebrew ha-kesenet or bet ha-keneset, if the reference is specifically to the meeting place).
Houses of prayer with the name of proseuchai begin to be documented in Egypt in the middle of
the third century; apart from their name there is little to tell us what the Jews where doing in them.
The Third Book of [13b] Maccabees, which may belong to the first century B.C. and reports a tall
story relating to Ptolemy IV about 200 B.C., ends with the Jews rejoicing and building a proseuche
at Ptolemais in gratitude to God and apparently also in defence to the sovereign of the land. To
inscribe proseuchai in honour of a “king of flesh and blood” (to repeat the traditional Jewish
expression) was a habit of Egyptian Jews.
Hard facts begin to appear in the first century A.D. when associations called synagogai in Greek
multiply both in Palestine and in the diaspora. These associations either owned or had the use of
buildings the legal physiognomy of which gave rabbinic lawyers much to think about: in Roman
law the associations themselves were probably collegia licita. To pagan eyes they represented the
Jewish counterparts of the thiasoi which were so common around the Mediterranean (Ant. Jud. 14,
215). The clearest definition of a synagogue is in the Greek inscription of Theodotus of Jerusalem
of the first century A.D.: “a place for the reading of the Law and for instruction about the
Commandments” (Corp. Inscr. Iud. 1404): a definition which of course finds support in Matthew
(4:23; 9:35). Since they were free associations with their own elected officials there was no fixed
limit to the number of synagogues in each place. The Jerusalem Talmud speaks of 480 synagogues
in Jerusalem before the destruction of the Temple (Megillah 3,1), which is not a figure meant to be
taken literally, but Acts point to several synagogues. Philo implies the existence of several
synagogues in Alexandria (ad Gaium, 132), one of which is described in glowing terms by the
Tosefta, Sukkot 4,6, after it had been destroyed under Trajan. In Rome inscriptions seem to imply
the co-existence of about twelve synagogues. Jews could therefore easily group themselves
according to the language they spoke an the place from which they came. In Jerusalem there were
synagogues for Greek-speaking Jews; in Caesarea there was one which was famous because even
the Shema’ Israel, the most elementary prayer, was recited in Greek (Talmud Jer. Sotah 7:1, 21b);
in Sepphoris in Galilee, which is credited with twenty synagogues, one was called the Synagogue of
the Babylonians; and in Rome there was a Synagogue of Hebrews, that is, probably of Aramaicspeaking, in contrast to Greek-speaking, Jews. Latin-speaking synagogues are not documented, but
[13c] Umberto Cassuto offered some argument for a tradition of Latin reading of the Bible in Italy.
Travellers would naturally seek a synagogue where they could find Jews speaking the same
language. The Jerusalem inscription of Theodotus which I have already mentioned alludes to a
guest-house adjoining the synagogue “with rooms and supplies of water for those who are in need
when coming from abroad”.
100
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
Whatever uniformity was achieved in the activities of the synagogues was the result of free
acceptance of self imposed rules. The existence of translations of the Bible helped the spread of
synagogues, but in its turn the basic uniformity of activities which characterized the synagogues
limited the consequences inherent in diversities of language. Ordinary Jews learned to know the
whole of the Pentateuch and sections of the Prophet and Hagiographa by frequenting their own
synagogue. A sermon commenting on the text read in synagogue soon became another regular
feature; and some prayers were a permanent part of the service. There is no sign that before A.D.
70, when the Jews were profoundly divided in matters of religious belief, the synagogues were the
place for hostile encounters. Later, the free character of the association, the relative smallness of the
congregations, and the basic simplicity of what was taught made the synagogues the ideal centre of
Jewish life when the Temple was no longer in existence. In the synagogues the Jews were sure to
find the God of their Fathers in their hours of need. Finding God became almost equivalent to
learning the Bible, and learning the Bible meant remaining Jews. This explains why often enough
the synagogue was used as a school or had a school nearby.41
[13d] In studying the Jews one becomes aware that Greek culture, with all its exceptional
capacities for translating into its own terminology the ideas and the institutions of other nations, had
limitations which are sometimes surprising. Here we meet what is perhaps the most interesting
paradox of the encounter between Jews and Greeks. The Temple of Jerusalem was something the
Greeks could categorize in their own terms without much difficulty and without much deformation.
As I have said, already by the end of the fourth century B.C. Hecataeus of Abdera spoke of the
Temple and of its priests with substantial correctness, not to mention sympathy. The Greeks could
understand that the God of the Jews had defended his own sanctuary in Jerusalem against
Antiochius IV, as Apollo had defended Delphi against the Gauls. Even when the Jews were
suspected of worshipping an ass, that is, a Thyphon-like god (a notion which we find explicit for the
first time in Mnaseas in the second century B.C.), the estimate of the Temple as the centre of Jewish
life was not modified. Also Jewish festival and practices – such as the Sabbath, circumcision, and
some purity laws – could easily be included in the pre-existing category of superstition
(deisidaimonia). As superstition they were treated by men like Agatharchides and Strabo, though
Agatharchides did not believe that Jews fast on the Sabbath, as Strabo among many did. But the
study of the Bible in the42 Synagogue did not enter into any obvious category of Greek thought. It
was given little attention. It did not invite observers – even extremely intelligent observers like
Posidonius or Plutarch – to reflections on what really separated Jews from non-Jews. The Temple
was destroyed, but the Synagogue survived. Perhaps ultimately Judaism owes its survival to this
oversight of the Greeks and, consequently, of the Romans, about the singularity of the Synagogue.
V
[13]Whether in Hebrew or in Aramaic or in Greek, Jewish children had to learn their three R’s.
Extensive literacy has already to be assumed for the Persian period, as the Aramaic papyri
suggest. With the Ptolemies the Jews found themselves in one of the most paper-conscious societies
the world had ever seen before the eighteenth century. As we Jews know by traditional experience,
if the Jew has to compete within the frame of a non-Jewish society and wants, or is required, to
preserve his traditional patrimony, he will be found to be deficient on one of the two sides or more
probably on both, unless he is prepared and able to put in an extra effort and to work more than
those who are safely inside one culture. In the Hellenistic age the problem became probably more
acute in Palestine than elsewhere because Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek co-existed there more
naturally than elsewhere. But if you were monolingual in Aramaic or in Greek, you would require
xxiii
41
P-o 93: But it is not my intention today to go into the subject of schools and general education with which I shall
hope to start my lectures next year.
42
P-o 93: study of the Bible in the, interl.ds.
101
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
the same patrimony of knowledge as your Gentile neighbours who spoke the same language. And
if, more specifically, you were a Greek speaker, you had an enormous patrimony to assimilate in
order to be accepted as educated by educated Greek-speaking Gentiles; furthermore, you had to
make sense of whatever you knew of your Jewish traditions when they were presented to you in
Greek.
We are deplorably ignorant – or, to put it more cautiously, I am deplorably ignorant – about how
these problems were solved in practice in the last three centuries B.C. We are almost entirely
dependent on inferences from later periods, [14] especially from the post-Mishnaic period when
rabbis liked to reflect and to tell anecdotes about education. This is evidence to be treated with great
caution, not only because it reflects preoccupations of the age in which it was collected, even if it
refers to prior periods, but because Greek education too kept changing through the centuries. In the
third century B.C. the Jewish intellectual, such as he is depicted in Ecclesiastes and in
Ecclesiasticus, still had much of the traditional wise man who was good at riddles and proverbs.
Five centuries later he was pre-eminently either a lawyer or a preacher. In the intervening period
there are seers such as Daniel and the authors of Enoch; historians in a quasi-traditional manner,
like the author of the Hebrew First Book of Maccabees, or in a quasi-Greek manner like Josephus;
and philosophers like the anonymous author of the Wisdom of Salomon and Philo. Each of them
presupposes a training which we cannot even imagine. There remains the general fact that, like
contemporary Greek education, Jewish education must have been based on a distinction between
elementary education and higher education. At the level of learning how to write and read and how
to understand classical texts there was probably no great difference between Jews and Gentiles,
whether the former received their primary training in Aramaic or in Greek. The existence of a
formalized elementary education, obvious a priori, is later confirmed by Talmudic terminology and
by such nice stories as that of Genesis Rabbah (63, 9) in which Esau and Jacob went together to an
elementary school, a bet hasefer, until they were thirteen, and then parted company – Esau to go to
the house of idols and Jacob of course to an institution of advanced learning, the bet hamidrash.
Children soon started, in one form or another, to read the Bible. The Bible represented, in terms of
schooling, a selection of various literary genres which in scope and variety was not inferior to or
incommensurable with the selection of Greek classic studied by Greek boys. Two points, however,
must be kept in mind. There was a link between school and synagogue, but this link is not clearly
perceptible in the Hellenistic age. We are therefore unable to appreciate the real implications of an
effort to [15] make education available to everyone in Palestinian villages which is reported to have
been set on foot before A.D. 70, though the exact date and the details are uncertain (Bab. Baba
Bathra 21 a). Secondly, I do not know whether physical training was a part of Jewish education in
this period. I know only of an isolated – and in any case later – rabbinic rule that a father is
supposed to teach his son to swim (Bab. Kiddushin 29 a). The Greek gymnasium was, in certain
periods, the symbol of what a young Jew should avoid in order to remain a Jew. This is not to say
that there was not among the Jews keen interest in athletic games – or even widespread desire to be
admitted to the gymnasium. We know that in Alexandria admission of the Jews to the gymnasium
was a serious issue under the Emperor Claudiusxxiv . It was an issue arising from the recurrent desire
of the Jews to take a full part in the life of their neighbours without being compelled to renounce
their own way of living.
I leave aside here the faint traces we must recognize of a three-tier system of education in the
Hellenistic period, because I am unable to give a precise content to a saying of the Fathers variously
attributed to Samuel the Small (first century A.D.) or to Jehudah ben Tema (date uncertain): “at five
years for the Mikrah (the Scripture), at ten years for the Mishnah, at thirteen years for the
fullfilment of the commandments, at fifteen for the study of the Talmud” (5, 21). What Mishnah
102
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
and Talmud may mean in this context is unclear. 43 But it is worth recalling that the same Sayings
of the Fathers allow astronomy and geometry as “hors-d’oeuvre” to Wisdom (3, 19).
Where Greek and Hebrew education really began to be incommensurable was at the upper or
highest level, of which the first mention seems to be in the allusion to the yeshivah in Ecclesiasticus
50, 29, if this is the correct reading44. The incommensurability applies in different manner to both
the Palestinian and the Egyptian varieties of Jewish education, as far as I can visualize them. The
Gentile Greeks went for eloquence, philosophy or more rarely a combination of mathematics and
philosophy. Law became a subject for study by itself in Rome, not in Greek cities. At the same level
the Jews were [16] increasingly concerned with the relation between written law and oral law and
with the exact formulation of the latter. We need not discuss here to what extent the notion of a
double law – biblical and oral – was peculiar to the sect of the Pharisees, nor how widespread the
sect of the Pharisees was either in the first century B.C. or in the first century A.D. xxv
Supplementation of the written texts by oral tradition and reinterpretation of the transmitted texts
according to recognized rules of reasoning were preoccupations which cannot be identified with
Pharisaism or geographically limited to Palestine. They represented the dominant issues in Jewish
intellectual life as we know it in the Greek period. Clearly the implications of the study of the Law
looked different in Jerusalem and in Alexandria. In Jerusalem, Jewish Law was the law of the land,
the differences between sects in their evaluation of it were a constant challenge, and though it might
have been desirable it was not necessary to make out a case for Jewish law which would be
acceptable to people (Jews or non-Jews) with a Greek education. In Alexandria, Philo who could
claim this Greek education, or anybody like him, had to present a case for Jewish law which
transcended its practical use. Philo had to satisfy himself – even before satisfying his Jewish or
Gentile Hellenized neighbours – that the law made sense45. Little is gained in opposing Hillel, about
whom we know so little, to Philo, about whom we know so much. Both strove to interpret a
precisely formulated law which they presupposed to be divinely inspired and unquestionably right.
No Hellene ever worried about a comparable problem or faced such a task.
Greek philosophical and rhetorical patterns are certainly not lacking in Palestinian rabbinic texts,
and some of them at least may be dated before or not much later than the beginning of the Christian
era. The notion of the chain of transmitters, of diadoche, is to be found both in Jewish rabbinic
schools and in Greek philosophic schools. The Sayings of the Fathers provide obvious parallels for
Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers. More specifically Judah Goldin has shown that the
celebrated discussion on the [17] “good way for man” in the Sayings of the Fathers 2, 9 is similar in
form to the summary of Stoic doctrines in Diogenes Laertius 7, 92 (“A Philosophical Session in a
Tannaite Academy”, Traditio 21, 1965, 1-21). Henry Fischel has successfully extended the research
to texts which are probably laterxxvi . He has been able to produce some striking Epicurean parallels
to rabbinic texts, though I would not go so far as to believe that the passage of the Babylonian
Talmud about the four sages who entered Paradise (Bab. Hagigah 14 b) is based on a
misunderstood account of Epicurean experiences by the Four Rabbis. On the other hand it is an old
commonplace that there is something Greek in the seven rulesxxvii , the so-called middot, which
Hillel is supposed to have introduced, or given authority to, for the interpretation of Scripture in
legal termsxxviii . The rules had success and according to the traditional interpretation of the evidence,
into which I need not enter, other rules were added by later rabbis. Any one of us senses that there
must be some relation between these rules and certain categories of Greco-Roman rhetoric. The rule
of inference a minori ad maius appears as the first rule of Hillel as kal va-homer.
43
P-o 49: Even R. Meir and R. Judah disagreed about the meaning of Mishnah (Bab. Kiddushin 49 b), one took it to be
Halachoth, the other Midrash.
44
P-o 75: 50, 29, if this is the correct reading; P-o 49: def.
45
P-o 75: In Alexandria, Philo ... that the law made sense. <-> P-o 49: In Alexandria, Philo, who had this Greek
education, or anybody like him, had to present a case for Jewish law according to Greek philosophic terminology in
order to satisfy himself – even before satisfying his Jewish or Gentile Hellenized neighbours.
103
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
It would immediately appear absurd to submit Philo to the same type of search.46 The Greek
impact on him is massive. He had a clear notion of what the Greek encyclopaedia (general
education) stood for and presented it as subordinate to philosophy (De congr. erud. 79). He pictured
his ideal Jew, Moses, as learning mathematics and symbolism from the Egyptians, language and
astronomy from the Assyrians and the rest of the encyclopaedia from the Greeks: a truly
international education (Vita Mosis I, 23-24). He himself, Philo, like any Greek philosopher, quoted
Greek poets and historians; in fact Epicurus was more restrained than Philo in such a display. Many
of his quotations are probably second-hand from florilegia, but this was the custom of the age. His
knowledge of Plato is undoubtedly first-hand and not superficial. And he tells us that he was present
at a performance of Euripides (Quod omnis 141).
We must return47 to our starting point that neither the pre-tannaitic Palestinian sages nor Philo
and his like were in any sense reinterpreting [18] Judaism in Greek terms. The case of Hillel’s rules
is exemplary. In Greek rhetoric there is no system comparable to Hillel’s system. Personally I doubt
whether, even if each rule is taken individually, these seven rules have exact parallels in GrecoLatin texts. Great scholars like Saul Lieberman (Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 1950, 46-82) and
David Daube (“Rabbinic Method of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric”, H.U.C.A. 22, 1949,
239-264; cf. J.R.S. 38, 1948, 115-117), who have tried to derive the individual rules from Greek
models, have not quite succeeded. For the second rule of the Gezerah Shawah (“equal cut”),
analogy of words in two laws, only vague parallels have so far been adduced. But the really serious
question is whether rhetorical rules were ever used by Hellenistic and Roman jurists to interpret the
law. One has the impression that Hillel, or somebody else for him, produced a new approach out of
not very perfect information about Hellenistic hermeneutic.48
In the same way, but for different reasons, it is useless to ask how Greek Philo’s approach was to
Jewish Scriptures. He adopted Greek modes of allegory. Indeed it is becoming increasingly
probable, since the pioneer essay by Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “The Ancient Jewish Allegorists in
Talmud and Midrash” (J.Q.R., N.S. 1, 1910-11, 291; 503), that some of these modes are reflected
also in the Midrashic interpretation of the Bible. But Philo’s goal remained un-Greek: the
understanding of the word of God as transmitted to the Jews in order to fulfil the covenant between
God and Israel. As Philo says in a passage of the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain: “the fountain of the
devout contemplation of the only wise being, on which Israel’s rank is based, is the habit of service
to God” (120, transl. F. H. Colson). Philo’s ideal education was no criticism of, or alternative to, the
Palestinian and Mesopotamian type of Jewish instruction. Philo and the Sages agreed on essentials.
Their common understanding was not provided by Greek forms of thinking. It was prompted by the
very un-Greek conviction that education was the road to God because God had a special covenant
with Israel.
[19] This conception of education automatically opened up two problems: the possibility of
making it available to all Jews and the legitimacy of making it available to non-Jews. To us the
second question may seem to be more serious, but in fact the first question proved to be far more
intractable. For Philo, as for his contemporaries in Palestine who were accused of compassing sea
and land to make one proselyte (Matt. 23,15), the Torah was meant for anyone who wanted it.
Partial or total conversion to Judaism was a fairly common event. How proselytism could be made
to agree with the election of Israel had always been a subject for reflection, but in practice during
the Hellenistic period Jewish education was available to the outsiders who wanted it. When rabbis
became recognizable personalities in the first century B.C., we meet figures of rabbis, such as
Shemaia and Abtalion, the teachers of Hillel, who were said rightly or wrongly to have been
proselytes or sons of proselytes. Good stories circulated about impatient proselytes and patient
46
P-o 75: It would immediately ... the same type of search <-> P-o 49: It is characteristic that it would immediately
appear absurd to submit Philo to the same type of search.
47
P-o 75: We must return <-> P-o 49: Yet when all this is recognized, we must return.
48
P-o 75: about Hellenistic hermeneutic. -> P-o 49: The Zeitgeist, as we all know from bitter experiences as
researchers, is interesting to discover, but elusive to analyse, del.
104
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
rabbis – and vice versa – of the same periodxxix : they are significant, even if not authentic. There
were precedents for the tradition that Rabbi Meir, the pupil of Akiba, was a proselyte, even a
descendant of the Emperor Nero, who in the East had a better reputation than in the West. It was an
authentic proselyte, Aquila, who provided a new translation of the Bible into Greek when the
attraction of the Septuagint began definitely to fade at the end of the first century A.D.
VI
The problem of the education of proselytes had the advantage of being capable of solution case
by case. But economic barriers and intellectual limitations remained operative against the diffusion
of higher education to all classes. The link between school and synagogue was probably just as
serious an obstacle to completing one’s education as the lack of educational facilities, of leisure and
of intellectual ability. Not everyone was willing to study the Torah day and night or to encourage
his own son to do so. Jewish education [20] presupposed a specific religious state of mind which
not everyone can be supposed to share. Superficially, the uneducated among the Jews, the amhaarez, is similar to the agrikos or rusticus of Greco-Roman civilization; the name am-haarez,
people of the soil, may or may not point to the peasants, as do the names agroikos and rusticus. But
the name – whatever its original meaning – was soon overlaid with religious connotations. It
indicated a man who did not care for ritual purity and scrupulous payment of tithes. It also implied a
sinful resistance to proper education: it marked the man who does not care to have a teacher. With
the increasing belief in the next life, his position became dubious both in this world and in the world
to come (Abot de-Rabbi Natan 41; Mishnah, Demai 2, 1; Bab. Sotah 22 a etc.). Our evidence does
not allow us to say exactly how these Tannaitic connotations go back to the Hellenistic age: they
must in any case have their roots there. Purity regulations were legalized by Antiochus III (Jos. Ant.
12, 145) and described in the Letter of Aristeas as a natural feature of Jerusalem (106): in the
second century B.C. the am-haarez had already plenty of opportunities for offending his neighbour.
It was Hellenistic economy at large49 that made it possible for certain free men and their slaves to
specialize in reading, teaching, librarianship, commentary on texts, erudition and elaboration of
philosophical and ethical systems. The Romans added to these professions a semi-professional class
of lawyers – too late certainly to influence the beginning of the rabbinate, but not too late to present
a pretty problem to any scholar who is prepared to ponder the simple fact that the compilation of the
Mishnah about A.D. 200 coincided with the classical jurisprudence of Papinian, Ulpian and Paul.
Even the rabbis who lived on their manual work – and we know a good number of them under the
Romans – must have had some spare time and spare money for buying (or copying) and studying
books and for memorizing oral tradition. 50
In other words, the social conditions which made it possible for the Jews both to use and to [21]
support their schoolmasters, academicians and codifiers are those of the Hellenistic world at large.
After all, the Jews lived the normal life of ordinary subjects of the Hellenistic kings (and for a
while, later on, of the Roman emperors). There was no ghetto, no restriction or specialization of
professions to separate them from Gentiles. The surplus on which the Jewish schools, academies
and libraries were built was part of the general surplus produced by the Hellenistic economy or
economies.
What is peculiar to the Jews is the convergence of the efforts to keep a faith alive and unified in
the face of a civilization, such as the Hellenistic one, which was appreciated and therefore was a
constant temptation. The more traditional temptations of the Canaanite Baalim, against which the
prophets of the First Temple had had to fight, had disappeared for good. In the opinion of the
majority of the Jews, the prophets themselves had disappeared together with those temptations. The
49
50
P-o 68: the distribution of power and resources in Hellenistic society <-> Hellenistic economy at large.
P-o 75: Even the rabbis ... memorizing oral tradition; P-o 49: def.
105
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
two events can be placed in the fourth century B.C. About 400 B.C. the Jews of Elephantina51 in
Egypt still combined the cult of Yahu (another name for Yahweh) with that of Ishumbethel and
Anathbethel. It would be surprising if residues of polytheism had not survived in Judaea for a while
after the restoration. If there were still polytheists among the Palestinian Jews, they must have
imitated their Egyptian brethren.52 The evidence such as it is does not seem to indicate that except
for the period of Antiochus IV the tendency to combine – or alternate – the cult of Yahweh with the
cult of other gods was a problem in Hellenistic Palestine. I cannot find facts in favour of the theory
so vigorously presented by Morton Smith in his epoch-making Palestinian Parties and Politics that
shaped the Old Testament (1971) that the Hellenizers in Jerusalem of the Maccabean era simply
continued the traditional struggle of the syncretistic worshippers of Yahweh against the followers of
the “Yahweh alone” party. It is very doubtful whether any of the new devotees of Zeus Olympios
who filled the new gymnasium of Jerusalem felt any nostalgia for the ancestral Baalim.
[22] The attempt of Antiochus IV to assert the prestige of Zeus Olympios and of a Greek way of
life in Jerusalem makes sense if there were Jews who appreciated the surrounding Greek civilization
and its religious and political attitudes. It does not make sense as a return to Semitic polytheism.
The Greek gods53 represented after all a passport to free circulation in the Hellenistic territories; and
the Jews experienced every day, however favourable general conditions for emigration might be,
that there were special difficulties for them in travelling or settling among Gentiles.54 Neither the
old Canaanite polytheism nor incidentally the new Iranian demonology making its appearance in
the Book of Tobit was the real problem. The course of events under the Hasmonaeans confirmed
that the answer to the question put by Hellenistic civilization was not to be found in the Temple – at
least not in the Temple alone. It had to be found in an education increasingly involving the laity as
both teachers and pupils. Greek education had to be counteracted by Jewish education.55 It was not
an education to encourage creativeness; nor was contemporary Gentile education a creative one, for
that matter. The very notion of intellectual creativeness cannot be rendered exactly in either ancient
Greek or ancient Hebrew. In later rabbinic theory and practice the emphasis on memorizing is
notorious and typified by the saying of that most humane of the rabbis, R. Meir, that “he who forget
a single word loses his soul” (Abot 4, 12) – though it must be added that the rabbis knew how to
distinguish a sage from “a basket full of books” (B. Meg. 28 b).
If it did not encourage originality, this education did not preclude it. The astonishing variety of
literary products, whether in Hebrew or Greek, which characterizes Jewish literature between 200
B.C. and A.D. 100, is the demonstration. It is worth taking a closer look at one of these books,
because the anonymous writer seems to have been bilingual and to have had his roots in Palestine.
The date of the author of the Wisdom of Salomon is not too certain. He is later than Ecclesiastes and
probably earlier than St. Paul who may or may not have read him. He certainly wrote before the
[23] destruction of the Temple. A date in the first century B.C. seems to be right, though it would be
difficult to prove. Jerome admired him as a notable stylist in the Greek language and did not find
anything Hebrew in him: “Liber qui Sapientia Salomonis inscribitur apud Hebraeos nusquam est,
quin et ipse stylus Graecam eloquentiam redolet”xxx . One does not like to have to disagree with St.
Jerome in the matter of style. But the Hebraisms of the text are evident, and there is “parallelismus
membrorum”, the mark of Hebrew poetic style. Hebraisms are more profuse in the first five
chapters, remain conspicuous in the next five chapters and only become a secondary phenomenon
in the last nine chapters. It has therefore been suggested that the first five chapters or possibly the
51
P-o 49, 68, 93: Elephantina; P-o 75, 69: Elephantine.
P-o 68: Yahwistic monotheism seemed, however, to be the rule both for Palestinian and Egyptian Jews in the third
century B.C. <-> If there were… Egyptian brethren, interl.msn[Mom].
53
P-o 68: There were intrinsic attractions in the Gods of Homer and Plato, and in daily life the Greek gods,
interl.msn[Mom].
54
P-o 75: The more traditional temptation of the Canaanite Baalim ... travelling or setting among Gentiles. = P-o 91,
92 [Jews inside], 21 bis.
55
P-o 75: Greek education had to be counteracted by Jewish education; P-o 49: def.
52
106
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
first ten chapters were originally written in Hebrew. A strict proof has never been provided. But a
choice presents itself: either a writer translated into Greek some Hebrew chapters and added a few
chapters of his own or a writer moving freely from Hebrew to Greek was capable of stylistic
variations in Greek according to what he had to say. I prefer the second hypothesis. In the first
chapters the author attacked sceptics like Ecclesiastes and therefore might easily be tempted to use
a Hebrew style to counteract arguments expressed in Hebrew. In the next seven chapter he was
concerned with the good old Wisdom of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiasticus and therefore still had
scope for abundant Hebraisms; but he was no longer replying to specific Hebrew speakers. In the
last chapters he moves to an attack against idolatry – especially Egyptian idolatry; a more sober
Greek style might appear preferable. Whether this analysis is correct or not, it seems to me certain
that we have here an author who is at home both in Hebrew and in Greek. It is consequently
difficult to say where he found the notion of immortality of the soul, for which his text is taken to
provide the first clear-cut available evidence in Jewish thought. The difficulty partly arises from the
fact that though the notion is certainly there, it is not so unambiguous as is often assumed56. We
may stretch 3, 4 to mean that the souls of the righteous can expect immortality, but what about the
unrighteous? The [24] writer is equally open to more than one interpretation when he states that
“God created man for immortality ... it was the devil’s spirit (envy) that brought death into the
world” (2, 23-24). What seems to be original in him is the association of the immortality of the soul
with Wisdom. “Immortality (he says) is in kinship with Wisdom” (8, 17). He finds in divine
retribution after death the answer to the doubts about divine justice expressed by Ecclesiastes.
Essenes and Pharisees would have understood, and probably shared, his notion of immortality. As
the attack against Egyptian gods is perhaps too strong for a man who wrote in Egypt (though Philo
has some harsh words on that) 57, I should not to be surprised to be told that the author of Wisdom
was a Palestinian Jew who discussed matters with Hillel. I should be more surprised if his text were
shown to have been intelligible and, if intelligible, interesting to a Gentile who had never read
Ecclesiastes and did not know Jewish history.
This leads us to the third, and final, section of this part of our enquiry: given the linguistic and
educational equipment, what were in fact the intellectual relations of the Jews with their Greek or
Hellenized neighbours?
i
Il riferimento è al libro di Daniele, in cui i vv. 1,1-2,4a sono scritti in ebraico, i vv. 2,4bb – 7,28 in aramaico e i
capp. 8-12 nuovamente in ebraico (per altri passi dell’AT scritti in aramaico cfr. inoltre Esdra 4,8-6,18; 7,12-26; Ger.
10,10-11; Gen. 31,47).
ii
L’idea che Ctesia avesse appreso il persiano durante i suoi anni di permanenza a corte è avanzata già da Plutarco
(Artax. 13.4-7 = FrGH 688 F23) che suggerisce come Ctesia facesse da traduttore tra il Re e i Greci. Per una recente
analisi della questione e delle fonti ad essa relative, cfr. LLEWELLYN-JONES – ROBSON 2010, 55-65.
iii
Plut., Themist., 29.5 Ziegler.
iv
Cfr. WOLFSON 1947 I 88-90 e BELKIN 1940, 29-48, per l’uso del testo ebraico della Bibbia da parte di Filone. Si
rimanda a SCHÜRER 1998, III.2, 1140-41, per una rassegna delle prospettive della critica sulla questione, a partire dalle
Sacrae exercitationes di J.B. Carpzovius (1750) fino al rifiuto di HEINEMANN 1932, 524 ss., e NIKIPROWETZKY 1977,
50-81.
v
Sotah 49b riporta l’aneddoto per cui, in occasione delle guerre civili tra Ircano II e Aristobulo II (63 a.C. ca.), un
anziano uomo di cultura greca sarebbe stato responsabile dell’interruzione dei sacrifici del Tempio, attirando così una
maledizione su di sé e su chiunque insegnasse il greco al proprio figlio.
vi
Per la lettura "Quietus" cfr. e.g. SMALLWOOD 1976, 424 s. e n. 143; contra, e.g., NEUSNER 1989, che a p. 76 (tr.
it.) legge "Tito".
vii
LIFSHITZ 1962.
viii
I siriacisti moderni concordano in realtà nel ritenere la Peshitta dell’Antico Testamento una diretta traduzione
dall’ebraico, realizzata verosimilmente (in considerazione dei rapporti tra la Vorlage ebraica utilizzata e il testo
masoretico) nella seconda metà del II sec.d.C.: cfr. BROCK 1997, 13; ID. 2006, 3-4 (si ringrazia il prof. Pier Giorgio
Borbone per i riferimenti bibliografici). È possibile rilevare tuttavia all’interno di certi libri, in particolare Pentateuco e
Cronache, tratti isolati caratteristici dei Targum che sembrerebbero attestare una certa conoscenza delle traduzioni
56
57
P-o 75: it is not so unambiguous as is often assumed <-> P-o 49: it is not unambiguous.
P-o 75: (though Philo has some harsh words on that); P-o49: def.
107
Grinfield Lectures 1979 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
IV. The Defence against Hellenization
esegetiche giudaiche. È nel filone di studi relativo all’analisi dei rapporti tra Peshitta e retroterra targumico che
verosimilmente si colloca la fonte di Momigliano, il quale sembrerebbe rifarsi qui per la sua affermazione (la Peshitta
come versione di un testo aramaico palestinese di I sec.) alla cosiddetta ipotesi “Kahle-Baumstark”, vale a dire alla
teoria, sostenuta da BAUMSTARK 1927 e recuperata poi da P. KAHLE 1930 nella prefazione alla sua edizione dei
frammenti targumici della Genizah del Cairo, per cui la concordanza di vari punti della Peshitta con il testo dei
frammenti permetterebbe di considerarla, piuttosto che una traduzione diretta dall’ebraico, il frutto della tradizione
targumica palestinese. L’ipotesi, non priva di conseguenze importanti (in quanto parte di tale tradizione, la Peshitta
sarebbe stata di origine ebraica, nata non nell’Adiabene ma qui solo rielaborata a partire da un targum aramaicooccidentale appositamente importato dalla Palestina) risulta abbandonata però già nell’anno successivo all’edizione in
BAUMSTARK 1931, che nega l’individuabilità di particolari relazioni tra Peshitta e frammenti, e da SPERBER 1935. Per
gli ulteriori sviluppi nella riflessione relativa ai rapporti tra Peshitta e Targumim, si rimanda a DIRKSEN 1993, 37-52,
64-74.
ix
DÍEZ MACHO 1969 - 1979.
x
Ester 10, 31.
xi
Phil. Vita Mosis II 40.
xii
Iustin., Dial. Triph., 71-73.
xiii
BARTHÉLEMY 1953.
xiv
MITTEIS –WILCKEN 1912.
xv
Per la confutazione momiglianea alla difesa di E. Bickerman della tradizione su Tolomeo II promotore della
traduzione della LXX, cfr. Alien Wisdom, 95.
xvi
Sull’assenza del libro di Ester a Qumran e sulle sue cause si rimanda a C. MOORE 1971, xxi.
xvii
ZUCKERMANDEL 1937.
xviii
Ios. Ant. 12.142 Marcus.
xix
Sull'origine "professionale" della formazione dei Leviti come gruppo sociale, cfr. WEBER 1952 , 258 ss.
xx
SEELIGMANN 1948.
xxi
Su antropomorfismo e Septuaginta, cfr. part. ORLINSKY 1944; ID. 1956; ID. 1959-61,. Per una recente valutazione
dei contributi di Orlinsky in quest'ambito si rimanda a HAUSER- WATSON 2003, 95 ss.
xxii
Phil. Vita Mosis II 40.
xxiii
L’espressione, in uso nelle aree di cultura anglosassone, indica per mezzo delle iniziali fonetiche le tre abilità di
base insegnate nella scuola tradizionale: reading, (w)riting,‘rythmetic.
xxiv
P. London 1912 (Lettera dell’imperatore Claudio agli Alessandrini), Select Papyri II, edd. A.S. Hunt & G.C.
Edgar, 1934, pp. 75-89 = CPJ I 151. Nel testo, pubblicato dal nuovo prefetto L. Aemilius Rectus nel novembre del 42
d.C., l’imperatore permette agli Ebrei di conservare la libertà religiosa garantita da Augusto, vietando al contempo
estensioni dei diritti civili tra cui la possibilità di avere accesso alle attività atletiche del ginnasio.
xxv
Cfr. GL 1982 II (The Jewish Sects), part. alle cc. 7-8, 11, 14-16.
xxvi
Cfr. FISCHEL 1968 e part. FISCHEL 1973 (p. 4 e 106, nn. 47-48, per le acquisizioni sul tema anteriori alla sua
ricerca; pp. 51-89 per l’indagine sul Midrash di Simeon ben Zoma in Talmud Bab. Berakhot 58a e Talmud Jer.
Berakhot 13c, IX.2).
xxvii
DAUBE 1949.
xxviii
Tosefta, Sanhedrin 7,11; Abot de-Rabbi Nathan, rec. A, 37 (ed. Schechter, p 110).
xxix
Vd. Bab. Shabbat 31a per la più famosa vicenda di conversione di un impaziente proselito, che illustra bene i
discordi atteggiamenti dei rabbi Shammai e Hillel. Per la bibliografia relativa, cfr. SEGAL 2014 (part. alle pp. 591 ss.)
xxx
Hieron. Praef. in libros Salom. PL xxviii.1242 (cfr. anche Isid. Hispal. Etymol. vi 2.30).
108
Chicago Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Two Types of Universal History. The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber
CL 1979 I
Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber
Sedi e date:
CL 1979 (12 aprile, cfr. D-a 1)
Documenti:
a) CL 1979 I
P-o 115, P-o 116 mss.
P-o 95 top c. ds. di P-o 116, poi revisionata per pubblicazione.
P-o 94, P-o 117 (a1-3): c.c. di P-o 95.
*P-o 1 xerox di P-o 95, base per la nuova versione di P-o 128.
P-o 128 nuova versione per «JMH» e per Pippidi Festschrift [Bibl.700] top c.
P-o 96 c.c. di P-o 128.
P-o 189 xerox, cfr. P-o 128, P-o 96.
1. Una “premessa di metodo”: Freeman, Weber e l’universalismo.
Two Types è una lezione eccentrica e, in quanto tale, destinata a essere presto separata dal suo
contesto di origine. Proposta come CL 1979 I in apertura del secondo ciclo momiglianeo sul
giudaismo ellenistico, Daniel and the Origins of the Universal History, il suo valore di introduzione
al metodo di indagine (la storia universale rimane un’espressione essenziale dell’eredità greca ed
ebraica, ma se ne possono mostrare sviluppi e tendenze in età contemporanea) rappresenta l’anello
di congiunzione tra l’analisi del sistema weberiano di interpretazione della storia attraverso la
religione, quello di E.A. Freeman – storico comparatista che crea un ibrido razzista tra la
successione delle istituzioni politiche e il ruolo della razza germanica – e le prime manifestazioni
del genere, dai prodromi poetici della Grecia arcaica fino agli esiti tardi e cristiani di Eusebio e
Agostino. Posto questo elemento di contatto, è la distanza dal corpo tematico del ciclo di lectures a
determinarne la sua finale destinazione editoriale specifica, già all’indomani della presentazione al
Warburg: il Gauss Seminar di Princeton sarà infatti aperto nel novembre del 1979 direttamente dalla
seconda lezione del ciclo originario, Universal History in Greece and Rome.
La scelta editoriale è quella di non riproporre il testo della lecture, scritto da Momigliano per la
Festschrift D.M. Pippidi con il nome Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E.A. Freeman
and Max Weber (= Bibl. 700), pubblicato in The Journal od Modern History (1986), 235-45 e
ristampato successivamente in “Studii Clasice” 24 (1986), 7-17, e in Ottavo Contributo, 121-134.
La rassegna dei documenti in Archivio attesta infatti l’assenza di interventi successivi all’edizione
del testo: la serie P-o conserva due documenti mss. (P-o 115, 116) di cui il secondo rappresenta una
versione rivista e corretta rispetto al primo; la top c. basata su P-o 116, P-o 95, un fascicolo di 16
cc. dss. che offre il testo letto come CL 1979 I e quindi in stato pre-editoriale1, e le sue due c.c. P-o
94 e P-o 117. Una copia xerox di P-o 95, *P-o 1, risulta evidente base per la nuova e definitiva
versione del testo (= Bibl. 700), P-o 128: top c. di cui sono conservate una c.c., P-o 962, e una copia
xerox, P-o 189.
2. Argomento della lecture
La storiografia universale di XIX secolo introduce per la prima volta l’idea che l’umanità sia
ripartibile in gruppi coesistenti dalle caratteristiche permanenti: in questa riflessione rappresentano
due tappe significative le riflessioni di Freeman e Weber. Le opere storiche del primo (una Storia
del Governo Federale, sei volumi sui Normanni, quattro sulla Sicilia) risultano percorse da una
visione dello sviluppo dell’umanità fortemente razzista, improntata sulla fiducia nell’imperialismo
germanico. Il filo conduttore della storia è individuato infatti nelle istituzioni delle nazioni ariane, in
1
IL documento presenta l’annotazione: “Warburg seminar 1979, CL 1979 (AMM); Copy revised 5 Sept 1982 to be sent
to Journal of Modern History of Chicago (AM)”, c. 1.
2
“New version typed by Miss D. 10.9.82 for McNeill issue of Jl. Of Mod. Hist.; AMM corrected 1.9.82”, c. 2.
109
Chicago Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Two Types of Universal History. The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber
particolare di quelle greca, romana e teutone; guardando al futuro, la riflessione sulle costituzioni
federali conduce Freeman a individuare la soluzione dei problemi politici europei nell’estensione
della Prussia nel Mediterraneo e nella conseguente restaurazione del Sacro Romano Impero. Il
pensiero di Freeman appare quindi un buon esempio della situazione in cui gli storici universali si
trovano quando accettano i conflitti di potere come il tratto più importante della storia e li
considerano la conseguenza della coesistenza di gruppi razziali incompatibili.
La prospettiva storica di Weber non appare meno universalistica di quella di Freeman, ma si
sottrae al ricorso di categorie storiografiche all’epoca di moda (tra cui quella di nazione o stato)
considerando la nozione di razza irrilevante per il sociologo. L’interesse di Weber, che riconosce
solo l’individuo come agente, è piuttosto rivolto ai metodi di legittimazione dell’autorità: la sua
ostilità alla tradizione borghese e socialista lo porta a dare alla religione la massima importanza
come principio di classificazione delle realtà sociali. Fondamentale in questa prospettiva risulta la
ricostruzione del percorso che va dalla credenza all’istituzione: per il Weber maturo è per mezzo
degli intellettuali che i gruppi religiosi apprendono a praticare attività economiche e politiche
compatibili con le loro convinzioni religiose, in una scala di successo valutata con criteri che
classificano la differente approssimazione delle religioni alla razionalità necessaria per lo sviluppo
del capitalismo. L’indagine sul giudaismo, condotta con uso pionieristico del Talmud come
documento di storia sociale, apre tuttavia una breccia nella sua valutazione del sistema capitalista
come il più razionale e funzionale: la tesi weberiana per cui gli Ebrei sopravvissero alla perdita di
un centro nazionale grazie a un’interpretazione rabbinica dei libri profetici che enfatizza l’etica
dell’umiltà e della dignità di una vita condotta “a margine”, lo porta a dover fronteggiare la
constatazione per cui gli Ebrei, pur scavalcando le substrutture dell’autorità politica, avessero
tuttavia prodotto una società integrata e razionale, benché non capitalista.
110
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
GL 1980 I Universal History in Greece and Rome
Sedi e date:
CL 1979 (19 aprile, cfr. D-a 1)
GS 1979 (8 novembre, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 420)
GL 1980 (23 gennaio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 422)
Documenti
a) CL 1979 II
P-o 97 top c.
P-o 119, P-o 122, P-o 174: c.c. di P-o 97.
b) GS 1979 I
P-o 122 (a-b): (a) c.c. di P-o 97 + (b) aggiunte ms. per GS 1979 I
P-o 98, P-o 118: xerox di P-o 122.
P-o 99 (b) nuova versione ds. per GS basata su P-o 122 (a-b).
P-o 100 (b), P-o 173 (a), P-o 121 (b): c.c. di P-o 99 (b).
c) GL 1980 I
P-o 99 (a): nuova introduzione e aggiunte per GL 1980 I
P-o 100 (a), P-o 121 (a), P-o 173 (b), P-o 175 c.c. di P-o 99 (a).
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
Presentato per la prima volta a Chicago nell’aprile-maggio 1979 con un’articolazione in 5
lectures, il ciclo Daniel and the Origins of Universal History viene riproposto nel novembre dello
stesso anno a Princeton (Gauss Seminar) ridotto a sole tre conferenze; è con quest’ultima struttura,
all’interno della quale Universal History assume posizione incipitaria, che Momigliano ripresenterà
il ciclo a Oxford agli inizi dell’anno successivo1.
Tra le carte conservate nella serie P-o dell’AAM testimoniano la versione per Chicago P-o 97,
top c., e le sue tre c.c. P-o 119, 122 e 174. Una quarta c.c. corredata da inserti mss. (cc. 10 bis e 15
bis), P-o 122, offre invece la prima stesura GS. Una nuova versione ds., destinata allo stesso ciclo e
basata su una rielaborazione di P-o 122 (a-b), è invece ricostruibile dal sottogruppo di documenti
formato da P-o 99 e dalle sue sue c.c., che con l’inserto di una nuova introduzione (cc. 1-3) e
aggiunte varie (cc. 13-15, 15bis) risulta al tempo stesso testimone del testo Grinfield.
Il documento preso come base per l’edizione della lecture è P-o 100, una c.c. di P-o 99. Come la
sua top c. si compone di 24 carte dalla numerazione discontinua2, frutto di riutilizzazione di
materiali precedenti e riscritture. Entrambi i fascicoli recano le stesse, rade correzioni (per lo più
semplici refusi) di mano di AMM. Piccoli ripensamenti lasciano pensare che siano state riportate da
P-o 100 su P-o 99 piuttosto che viceversa; P-o 100 è inoltre corredato di titolo e indicazioni su data
e storia della costruzione del testo (per cui cfr. c.1, nota ad loc.) che inducono a preferirne la stesura
anche rispetto a P-o 121, fascicolo che reca aggiunte mss. di Momigliano e la nota autografa
“Reading copy to be kept present to future revision, Nov. 1979” (c.1), ma che parrebbe testimoniare
una fase preparatoria anteriore perché diversi degli interventi che riporta (tra cui brevi proposte di
taglio, annotate a margine3) risultano tralasciati nel corso della revisione finale di P-o 100.
Si è considerato nell’edizione del testo anche P-o 173, catalogato da GRANATA 2006 come ds.
del ciclo di Princeton (settembre 1979): colpisce nel testo la mancata aggiunta della parte
introduttiva (cc. 1-3[bis]) funzionale a compensare l’eliminazione della prima Chicago lecture ed
1
La sequenza CL (I. Two Types of Universal History: Universal History between Politics and Sociology: the Cases of
E.A: Freeman and M. Weber; II. Universal History in Greece and Rome ; III. Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic.
IV. The Greeks outside and the Jews inside the Persian Empire. V. The Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian
Historiography) viene ridotta di due lezioni tramite l’eliminazione della prima, ‘eccentrica’ lecture (per cui cfr. supra,
pp. 109-10) e della quarta, accorpamento sintetico delle due lectures omonime già presentate ad Oxford come GL 1979
II (The Greeks outside) e GL 1979 III (The Jews inside).
2
Cc. 1-3 (a1); 1-9 (b1); 9 bis (a2); 10-12 (b2); 13-15bis (a3); 16-19 (b3).
3
Cfr. ad es. l’eliminazione dell’excursus informativo su Diodoro (c.17) o di quello su Nicola Damasceno (c. 18).
111
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
effettivamente presente negli altri dss. GS; i fogli 12-15 bis mostrano inoltre alcune differenze,
debitamente riportate in apparato, rispetto agli altri documenti (una diversa formulazione del
rapporto fra Polibio e Erodoto da un lato, Ctesia ed Eforo dall’altro, cc. 12-14; una trattazione più
sintetica su Nepote e Attico, c. 15).
L’esame della top c. CL 1979 P-o 97 induce invece a non prenderne in considerazione le
varianti, trattandosi di stesura più breve e anteriore, le cui correzioni significative risultano già
accolte dal gruppo di dss. di cui sopra. Diversamente da questi P-o 97 presenta, oltre alla prevista
assenza di introduzione, una formulazione più breve e meno approfondita degli ultimi due capitoli.
Universal History in Greece and Rome ha infine già conosciuto, benché non nella forma qui
presentata, una sua destinazione editoriale autonoma, venendo pubblicato in maniera ridotta come
prima parte di un saggio nel quale confluiscono anche sezioni della seconda Grinfield lecture,
Daniel and the World Empires: un testo di sintesi, già presentato come Creighton Lecture
(University of London, 2.2.1981) e successivamente pubblicato con il titolo The Origins of
Universal History (= The Origins), per le cui modalità di realizzazione e confronto con le lectures
presentate a Oxford cfr. infra, par. 3.
2. Argomento della lecture
Il tentativo di leggere una successione negli eventi dell’umanità ha inizio in Grecia prima ancora
della nascita della storiografia: al concetto folkloristico di perduta età felice subentra nelle Opere e
Giorni di Esiodo l’inserzione di uno schema di successione metallica delle razze che conduce dai
primordi al presente. Certo preesistente a Esiodo stesso e non privo di aporie, tale schema è
destinato a godere di grande fortuna e di una traduzione, nel passaggio alla cultura romana, del
concetto di genos chryseion inteso come tipologia umana in quello di saeculum aureum, tempo
aureo ciclicamente ripetibile, recuperato dalla propaganda come attributo del potere imperiale.
Un secondo schema di distinzione tra le età dell’uomo (schema biologico) risulta invece più
efficace nella descrizione della vita delle singole nazioni che di quella del’umanità intera: nella
storiografia imperiale la nozione di vecchiaia di Roma si alimenta infatti del contrasto con la
giovinezza dei barbari, mentre un generale concetto di senectus mundi troverà terreno fertile solo tra
gli autori cristiani, finendo però per essere trasfigurato sul piano metastorico (la vecchiaia della città
dell’uomo è giovinezza in quella di Dio). Un terzo schema, quello tecnologico (processo di
acquisizione delle arti, indagine sulle condizioni favorevoli per lo sviluppo della civiltà), rimane di
minor fortuna rispetto agli altri, finendo per essere relegato a supporto di teorie filosofiche.
La svolta nella direzione di una vera e propria storiografia universale si deve però all’attività di
Polibio, il primo storico politico che rivendichi l’appartenenza al genere. Polibio considera la storia
universale diretta conseguenza di uno sviluppo storico: è l’instaurazione dell’impero mondiale di
Roma a offrire universalità di prospettiva. Nessuno dei precenti imperi parziali poteva infatti
garantire le condizioni per la scrittura di quella storia universale che sono i Romani stessi a creare,
conquistando il mondo o influenzandolo in senso lato. Le conclusioni polibiane aprono la strada a
una nuova scuola storiografica (Posidonio di Apamea, Strabone di Amasia) che accoglie, con
maggiore o minore adesione, la sua eredità. Non accettano invece i limiti cronologici fissati da
Polibio, risalendo fino all’antichità remota, Cornelio Nepote, Tito Pomponio Attico, Diodoro,
Trogo Pompeo, Nicola di Damasco. Dai frammenti emerge, come tratto comune di questi storici, lo
spazio concesso ai meriti delle civilizzazioni greche e orientali, di cui si enfatizza l’influenza
esercitata sulla cultura latina delle origini, e la schiettezza di prospettive nel valutare le
responsabilità romane. L’idea della successione di imperi è destinata infine a tornare anche negli
storici di età augustea o successiva (Dionigi di Alicarnasso, Appiano), benché al di fuori di un
contesto di storia universale, e a essere recepita dagli stessi Ebrei, che colgono un’imprevista
funzionalità nell’enfasi che lo schema pone sulla transitorietà del potere umano.
112
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
3. Note di contenuto: le finalità della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi
Sono essenzialmente due i saggi momiglianei editi a breve distanza di tempo da Universal
History e ad essa ricollegabili sia sul piano contenutistico che formale4: in misura forse minore,
certo limitata a specifici nuclei tematici, Two Types of Universal History: the Cases of E.A.
Freeman and Max Weber (= Two Types), che prima ancora di essere edita all’interno della
Festschrift Pippidi precedeva nel ciclo di Chicago Universal History, fornendole premesse e un
inquadramento di metodo (per cui cfr. supra, pp. 109-10); e poi soprattutto The Origins of
Universal History (=The Origins), testo di sintesi tra una versione rivista e riassunta di Universal
History e parti dalla GL1980 II, Daniel and the World Empires.
Che il processo di sintesi proposto in The Origins sia anche un processo di riformulazione si
apprezza fin dall’introduzione. L’incipit Grinfield è dedicato a una spiegazione dei tratti di
selettività e finalità ordinatrice della storia universale e dell’ampia applicabilità della nozione, da
Esiodo fino a Marx (cc. 1-3bis): un inquadramento, il cui valore generale è confermato dalla
ricorrenza verbatim in apertura di Two Types, per cui la distinzione proposta tra la prospettiva della
storiografia universale greca (successione degli imperi come “scheletro della storia”) e quella
ebraica, che contrappone a tale schema la religione come “fattore di durata e perfezione”, permette
di costruire un parallelo ideale (evocato da Momigliano stesso in Two Types, p. 123) tra Freeman e
Polibio da un lato, Weber e Daniele dall’altro 5 . Nella Creighton lecture si propone invece
preliminarmente un’articolazione del testo in una parte dedicata ai tre schemi della storiografia
universale (metallico, biologico, tecnologico), dallo sviluppo prettamente letterario e filosofico, e in
una seconda incentrata sull’unico schema che abbia goduto di rilievo propriamente storico, la
successione di imperi. Se l’escamotage ha il pregio includere Daniele fin dalle premesse, il suo
inserimento al termine di una rassegna paratattica di modelli lo priva però di quel ruolo nodale
conferitogli dall’articolazione del ciclo Grinfield, dove non assolve una funzione di complemento e
conclusione, ma piuttosto di svolta decisiva in direzione del peculiare sviluppo del genere della
storia universale nel contesto giudaico, in cui la connessione tra imperi terreni e futuro regno celeste
getta le basi per una traduzione della storia in apocalittica destinata a essere ereditata dagli scrittori
cristiani. Si assiste dunque in The Origins a un processo, non raro nell’opera di Momigliano, di
delimitazione tematica e, in un certo senso, di spostamento del focus. Se la Grinfield si apre nel
segno dei massimi sistemi della storiografia mondiale per arrivare poi a concentrare la ricerca in
direzione di una specificità ebraica, la Creighton omette le premesse generali, limitandosi a
proporre l’analisi dello sviluppo di uno schema storiografico che va dalla Grecia a Daniele.
Anche altri tagli e mutamenti si apprezzano nella risistemazione del materiale Grinfield in vista
della ridotta estensione espositiva Creighton. Se il resto del cap. I coincide sostanzialmente nelle
due versioni, eccezion fatta per piccole divergenze complessivamente riconducibili alla volontà di
eliminare elementi non necessari (ad es. la menzione di Housman a sostegno di una lezione in
Giovenale), si constata comunque una più concreta riformulazione del parallelo antitetico fra
Esiodo e Claudiano (p. 80, c. 4). Poche variazioni riguardano anche il cap. II (schema biologico),
reso nella Creighton completamente romano mediante uno spostamento della trattazione su
Dicearco, e il cap. III, incentrato sullo schema tecnologico. Qui viene chiarito l’ambito d’interesse
di tale storia ‘culturale’, relegata al circolo dei filologi e degli antiquari (p. 83); nella Grinfield la
scarsa fortuna dello schema era stata invece più genericamente ricondotta alla sua estraneità
dall’ambito politico-militare (c. 9). Altre piccole aggiunte al testo edito sembrano rispondere
4
Un ampliamento del raggio di indagine ai saggi momiglianei che precedono la lecture e che ne sono, in qualche
misura, presupposti, non può non tener conto anche di un terzo titolo, Alien Wisdom. L’analisi condotta nel II capitolo
(pp. 22-49) sull’operazione culturale e scientifica perseguita da Polibio in relazione al genere storiografico, e sulla
ricostruibilità della sua ricezione grazie ai frammenti di Posidionio di Apamea, getta le basi in Universal History per
una riproposizione sintetica del tema della storiografia ellenistica a Roma con sguardo rivolto all’oriente giudaico.
5
Il duplice parallelismo così delineato non è però rigido, ma si presta a rielaborazioni. Cfr. in proposito GL 1980 II
(Daniel), c. 11 n. 41: qui Momigliano stabilisce una linea di continuità tra Daniele e E.A. Freeman “who, as we
recognize, was still thinking in terms of the Holy Roman Empire in the Sixties of the nineteenth century”.
113
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
piuttosto alla volontà di allargare la prospettiva: la breve menzione incipitaria dell’antichità di
Genesi 4 come testimonianza della ricorrenza delle figure di eroi culturali, e la ricerca di una
priorità nella civilizzazione sui Greci da parte di scrittori orientali come Filone di Biblos (p. 84).
È soprattutto il IV capitolo, risultante dalla fusione di due distinti capitoli GL, a presentare però
rimaneggiamenti di rilievo. Se la prima parte, incentrata sulle prospettive polibiane (cc. 10-11, pp.
85-87), appare sostanzialmente identica nelle due versioni, quella successiva viene dedicata nella
Creighton a considerazioni preliminari alla trattazione del libro di Daniele: il ruolo dell’Egitto e di
Babilonia nella successione degli imperi, la declinazione profetica che lo schema assume ad Est (e
che sarà poi recuperata in CL 1981 II nell’ambito di una più estesa analisi sulla resistenza
dell’Oriente all’invasione greco-macedone) e, in chiusura, una sintesi dei temi trattati nel cap. V
Grinfield (l’allargamento di prospettiva nei “continuatori di Polibio” Posidonio e Strabone di
Amasia e il significato di “resistenza anti-romana” che la storia universale assume negli storici
provinciali del I a.C. – Diodoro, Trogo, Nicola e Timagene).
È a questo punto che si inserisce nell’edito il discorso su Daniele e che le riprese Creighton da
Universal History hanno termine. Sui rapporti tra il V capitolo di The Origins e la GL 1980 II
Daniel and the World Empires, cfr. infra, p. 131.
114
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
I
Universal History in Greece and Rome* 6
Introduction
I would be making the understatement of the century if I were to say that universal history has
never been a clear notion. Taken literally, the idea of universal history verges on absurdity. Who
can tell everything that has happened? And who would like to listen if he were told? But both in the
Greek and in the Hebrew tradition of history-writing the urge to tell the whole story from beginning
to end has been apparent, and universal history has become one of the most problematic
components of our twofold Jewish and Greek heritage. Among the texts which have reached us
directly it is a Greek text – Hesiod’s Works and Days – that gives us the oldest scheme of a
succession of ages; but the Jews of the Hellenistic age outbid the Greeks by taking the story beyond
the present into the future and gliding from history into apocalypse. The mixture of the Historic and
the Messianic has seldom been absent in the account of universal history produced by ecclesiastical
and secular historians from the Revelation of St. John to Arnold Toynbee’s Study of History; and
there is no sign that the universal history industry is flagging.
As universal history cannot be total, in the sense of including the totality of past events, we may
start from the assumption that all it can do is to isolate types of events and to attribute a meaning to
the replacement of one type by another type. A golden age may be followed by a silver age, the
Assyrian empire by the Persian empire. Polytheism may be succeeded by monotheism, slavery by
feudalism, sailing-ships by steamers. The universal historian isolates and defines certain categories
of events and tries to make their appearance or disappearance meaningful. By giving more
importance and therefore more attention to certain types of events than to others he provides his
own universal history with a characteristic line of development. He may recognize progress or
circular return or complete disorder – for this, too, can have its meaning.
[2[bis]] So far, I believe, our definition of universal history may apply equally to Hesiod and to
Daniel, to Bossuet, Marx and Toynbee7. But what I am specifically trying to do in these lectures is
to clarify for myself – and, if I am lucky, for my audience – one aspect of the development of the
idea of universal history which presented problems to me when I went back to the Book of Daniel
after a great deal of reading of Greek historians.
Chapters 2 and 7 of Daniel, as we all remember, develop the notion of four successive world
empires –8 Babylon, Media, Persia and Macedon – which are going to be replaced by an everlasting
kingdom of the true God. This scheme of the succession of empires is generally considered to be of
Oriental origin. A scholar whom I greatly admire, David Flusser, has gone as far as to postulate a
lost commentary of a lost book of the Avesta as the source of Daniel (Israel Oriental Studies 2,
1972, 148-175i). The succession of empires as a scheme for universal history is, however, a well
documented notion in Greek historiography at least from the fourth century B.C. (if not from
Herodotus) onwards. It was familiar to Hellenistic historians like Polybius who wrote more or less
at the time when the Book of Daniel was put together in its present form, about 164 B.C.
*
Documento preso come base per l’edizione: P-o 100, c.c. di P-o 99 (nuova versione ds. GS 1979 integrata dalle
aggiunte GL 1980). Si riportano all’occorrenza anche le varianti presenti in P-o 121 e 173, ulteriori c.c. di P-o 99, e
eventuali lezioni significative presenti in P-o 122 (c.c. di P-o 97, top c. CL 1979 con aggiunte GS) e nella sua xerocopia
P-o 98.
6
P-o 100: Grinfield I (23.1.80) - Universal History (in Greece and Rome) tsf(g-c)msb[AMM]; New introduction to
Princeton lectures (Nov. 79) / 1.10.79 / (new p. 15bis typed 17.11.79; 2 c.c. sent to Chicago) / (new pp. 13-15, 13.1.80),
mgdxmsb[AMM].
7
I would be making the understatement of the century… to Bossuet, Marx and Toynbee: cfr. Two Types, 121.
8
P-o 121: probably, interl.msn[Mom]
115
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
The question which I asked myself is whether the Book of Daniel owed its scheme of the
succession of the empires to Greek sources – which we know to have existed – rather than to
Persian sources, the existence of which we should have to postulate for the benefit of Daniel. This
first question in its turn produced another question. If Daniel, ex hypothesi, derived the notion of the
succession of empires from Greek historical thought how did he come to combine it with a religious
or rather apocalyptic vision of history which was entirely alien to Greek historians? Seen in this
perspective, the originality of Daniel would appear to have consisted in the notion that ultimate
survival depends on a religious choice: true religion is the foundation of an everlasting kingdom.
Two types of universal history therefore presented themselves to me as [3[bis]] worth exploring:
the Greek one which treated the mere succession of empires as the pattern of events, and the Jewish
one which, perhaps on the basis of the Greek theory of empires, saw religion as the determining
factor of duration and perfection. In these precise terms, the two rival schemes are of course
characteristic of the ancient world, where that of Daniel became even more authoritative among
early Christians than among Jews. Neither scheme could quite remain what it was once St.
Augustine had outlined a very different model of universal history founded on a conflict between
the terrestrial and the heavenly city which would last as long as the world would last. The point of
St. Augustine’s criticism was that there was no hope of a celestial city, no hope of a millennium, in
this world.
Yet, Augustine notwithstanding, the vitality and resilience of the ancient historiographical
categories is confirmed also in this case. There is no need to emphasize that the political scheme of
the succession of empires survived the criticism of St. Augustine and much else besides: it remained
an accepted principle for organizing historical events and a stimulus to the imagination until
yesterday, if not until today. On the other hand, the religious evaluation of political organizations is
at the root of much of the ecclesiastical and philosophic historiography since the Reformation. We
even come across authoritative attempts to reconcile the two positions of ancient universal history.
The searching analysis to which Professor Leonard Krieger has of late submitted Ranke’s historical
thought shows that Ranke arrived at his confidence in the viability of a world history by recognizing
two dimensions of itii. One dimension of universal history was the extension of political power, the
other the depth of the spiritual and, more specifically, religious movements permeating the political
structures. This is Polybius combined with Daniel – or, if not Daniel, Eusebius.9
I10
Anyone inclined to dismiss universal history as a superfluous genre of historiography may
usefully reflect on the simple fact that attempts to impose a pattern on the events of mankind began
in Greece long before anything like history (as understood both by the Greeks themselves and by
us) came into existence. The traditional father of Greek historiography, Hecataeus, lived at the end
of the sixth century B.C.; the two men who shaped Greek historiography in the way we know it,
Herodotus and Thucydides, operated in the second half of the fifth century B.C. But Hesiod
presented a scheme of universal history at a date which can hardly be later than the end of the
eighth century B.C. It is also virtually certain that Hesiod had at his disposal a pre-existing model
for his cogitations on the development of mankind through a succession of various races, the golden
race, the silver race, etc. What is more, even after the invention of critical historiography in the fifth
century B.C. (as exemplified by Herodotus and Thucydides), schemes to embrace the whole
development of mankind were often proposed by non-historians with little reference to what
historians were doing or observing.
9
P-o 97, 122, 98, 193: Introduction def.
P-o 100: num.I msb[AMM]; Retyped version (for Princeton, Nov. 79), tsf, mgdxmsb[AMM]; Universal History in
Greece and Rome, ds(c). La numerazione delle cc. riprende con sequenza autonoma (P-o 99, 100, 121).
10
116
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
This, of course, is not the whole truth. Polybius considered himself a universal historian,
presupposed the existence of other historians who claimed to be like himself universal historians
and, though he denied the validity of their claim, singled out as his predecessor Ephorus of Cume11,
a fourth-century historian who, as far as we know, had never wished to be considered a universal
historian. Later on, in the century of Caesar and Augustus, universal history appeared to have a
special appeal for historians: Diodorus, Trogus Pompeius12 and Nicolaus of Damascus belong here.
We shall, however, soon see that what historians called universal history (or, to use Polybius’
expression, ta katholou graphein, “to write general history”, 5, 3313) was merely one of the [2] less
bold varieties of the genre of “universal history”.14 Contrary to the prevailing opinion that most of
the time universal history played only a small part in Greek culture, there was a continuous and
considerable production of pattern intended to give, if not a meaning, at least some order to the
story of mankind. But these had their origins in what we can loosely call the mythical or the
philosophical imagination of the Greeks rather then in the empirical collection and critical
interpretation of past events called historia. The first thing to learn from the Greeks is that schemes
of universal history can be invented before historical research makes its appearance in a given
culture and that they can be multiplied after historical research has established itself without
necessarily taking into account what professional historians have to say.
For centuries the Greeks played with two basically distinct, but interconnected schemes of the
evolution of mankind which can hardly be described as being rooted in the observation of human
events. One was the succession, already mentioned, of the different races, named according to
metals (gold, silver, bronze, iron); the other was the biological scheme according to which not only
individuals, but nations and even mankind as a whole go through the stages of childhood, youth,
maturity and old age. The concept of a happy period in the distant past – in which men lived and
died painlessly and even joyfully – is, as we all know or suspect, a rather common feature of
folklore. What is far more refined and therefore far less common is the elaboration of a scheme
presenting various stages in the transition from the happy primitive age to the present.
Hesiod’s scheme is distinguished by two further complications. For motives which at least in the
case of the golden race are entirely mysterious and in the cases of the successive races (silver,
bronze, heroic, iron) by no means self-evident, the gods, to say the least, allow the elimination of
the existing race and its replacement by another which (with one exception) they like less than the
one they have just suppressed. The one exception – the race of heroes inserted between the bronze
and the iron age – is anomalous in so far as it does [3] not receive its name from a metal and
interrupts for a while the decline characterizing the process as a whole. Long ago it was seen that
the insertion of the race of heroes in the scheme of the four races named according to metals was
secondary and necessitated by the importance attributed to heroes in Greek traditioniii. A previous
scheme of four ages had to be accommodated to the keen interest the Greeks took in their heroic
past – that is, the period in which Heracles had performed his labours, and the Greeks had gone
overseas to conquer Troy or had fought great battles for the rule of Thebes. Whether it was in fact
Hesiod who performed this adaptation of the scheme of the four ages to specific Greek
requirements we cannot say. But Hesiod remains the strongest candidate because, as we shall see,
the scheme of the four races characterized by the four metals was very probably imported from the
East, and Hesiod or rather his father came from the East to wretched Ascra, bad in winter, sultry in
summer and good at no timeiv. The image of the young poet Hesiod with his bags full of oriental
wisdom making himself utterly unpopular among his less sophisticated fellow-citizens of Ascra is
not without attraction. At moments one has the impression that he did not really grasp all the
implications of the myth he was introducing or popularising among Greeks. The races of gold and
11
12
13
14
P-o 121: Cume <-> P-o 173 Cumae .
P-o 121: Strabo, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 121: cf. Diodorus “common histories”, 1, 1, 1), mginf con segr, msb[Mom].
P-o 122: Incidentally, Herodotus calls universal history “κοιναὶ ἱστορίαι” (1,1,1), mgdxmsn[Mom].
117
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
of bronze, and the heroic race, each15 seem to be limited to one generation – which would mean that
the gods from the start did not endow them with the faculty of reproduction. Only the race of silver
is explicitly given children, but it is also the only race about which it is explicitly stated that it was
destroyed by the gods themselves. Hesiod has no remarks on this16.
All the later writers in Greek or Latin about the four races, outside Judaism or Christianity,
depended directly or indirectly on Hesiod. Plato used the myth freely, especially in the Republic (3,
415 a-c), to support the hierarchical structure of his state. Hellenistic poets like Aratus (third
century B.C.) and Ovid refurbished the Hesiodic myth to express a nostalgia for the golden race
which Hesiod, far more sensitive to the pains of the iron race than to the attractions of previous
times, had really never felt. The [4] races could be reduced in number – or increased. It will be
remembered that according to a MS. reading defended by Housman Juvenal in Satura XIII, 28,
speaks of the ninth race without having a metal name for it: he defines the ninth as worse than the
iron age. “Nona aetas agitur peioraque saecula ferri temporibus”. He probably mixes up the scheme
of the four ages with that of the ten generations which we shall encounter in my last lecturev. It must
here be observed that the transition from Greek to Latin produced by itself a momentous difference.
The saeculum aureum or saeculum felicissimum of the Latins is not identical with the genos
chryseion, “the golden race”, which it purports to translate. The Greeks underlined the type of men,
the Romans put the character of the age to the fore. The difference made it easier for the Romans to
exploit the myth for political propaganda. A good emperor could more easily be expected to change
the character of his age than the race of his subjects. The return of the Golden Age was a more
plausible theme for propaganda in poetry or inscriptions or coins than the return of the Golden
Race. Altogether the Romans felt free to develop the implications of a cyclical return to the Golden
Age which the Greek versions had never underlined.
In considering the evils of the iron race Hesiod had been unable to repress the ‘cri de coeur’:
“Would that I were not among the men of the fifth generation, but either had died before or been
born afterwards”vi. Yet it is very doubtful whether he implied circularity in the scheme of the ages
and a possible return from iron to gold. Roman political propaganda on the contrary had to
presuppose, or at least to imply, circularity in the scheme of the ages in order to make plausible the
image of an emperor taking his empire back from the iron age to the Golden Age. Quite ominously,
in A.D. 400 the poet Claudian depicted not a Roman emperor, but the German general Stilicho as
the man bringing the Golden Age back to Rome. The scene in the second book of the Laudes
Stilichonis (424 ff.) with the sun going to the cave of Eternity (“spelunca immensi aevi”) to recover
the Golden Age for the consulate of Stilicho deserves to be placed against Hesiod’s lines in Works
and Days: if Hesiod ushered in, Claudian ushered out classical civilization.
[5] In any case, whether in the Roman or in the Greek form, there was very little historical
observation and experience behind the17 scheme. Whether we take Hesiod or Aratus or Ovid – or
the philosophers and moralists who played with this story – they did not really talk about any
remembered or recorded past. The designation of the bronze age may have preserved some
recollection of the time in which iron was not yet in use: it did not, however, define a technology.
The collective image of the heroic age very probably preserved some obscure memory of the
Mycenaean age – but not more than what one could find in the epic poems or in some tragedy. The
schematization did not add to knowledge; and in any case there was no folk memory behind the
notions of Gold and Silver Ages. For all practical purposes, the iron age was the only age which
belonged to the historical field: the four previous ages were ideal alternative forms of human life
recaptured by myth and impervious to history. The scheme of the metal ages, as reported by non-
15
16
17
P-o 121: and the heroic race, each, fra parentesi quadre, con x nel mgsn., msb.
P-o 121: nor have I, mgdxmsb[Mom].
P-o 121: this <-> the, interl.msn[Mom].
118
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
Jewish and non-Christian writers, was part of classical mythology rather than of classical
historiography.18
II
Different considerations are suggested by the biological scheme, but again we shall find that in
pre-Christian writers it was only marginal to history and hardly affected the writing of universal
history. The biological scheme, in distinguishing between childhood, youth, maturity and old age
(with further optional refinements) proved to have greater historiographical possibilities when
applied to single nations rather than when applied to the whole of mankind. Confused ideas that
certain nations are younger than others floated about in Greek ethnography. Since Herodotus it had
been generally admitted that the Egyptians were a much older nation than the Greeks, and
Herodotus knew, too, that as a nation the Scythians were about a thousand years old (4, 7). The
notions of “a life of Greece” and of “a life of the Roman people” became current after Alexander.
Dicaearchus, who gave authority to the notion of the life of Greece, apparently combined the
biological scheme with that of the decline from a golden to an iron age though he also had some [6]
idea of technological stages such as nomadism and agriculturevii . Varro, too, presupposed that
Roman life had been at its best in the beginning. Lactantius in his Institutiones (7, 15, 14) states that
Seneca – whether the rhetorician or the philosopher is debatable – constructed a scheme of Roman
history from Romulus to Augustus based on this metaphor. We do not know how Seneca elaborated
this scheme, but under the Emperor Hadrian Annaeus Florus composed his elegant summary of
Roman history according to the same guiding idea. Since it is preserved (it proved to be immensely
successful) it gives us the best idea we can form of this type of biological history. Florus attributes
to Rome a childhood of 250 years under the kings, an adolescence of comparable length, and then a
maturity of 200 years which ends with Augustus. The next hundred years under the emperors are
old age; but Florus sees signs of rejuvenation under the Emperors Trajan and Hadrian under whom
he happens to live. Interestingly enough, he does not go beyond Augustus in his actual narration. As
the Roman Empire was often identified with the whole of the world, one might expect an easy
transition from the notion of an ageing Rome to the notion of an ageing human race. But I have no
evidence that any pagan historian took the step of presenting world history in terms of the ageing of
an individual. And on reflection I am not surprised that the step was not taken. The notion of an
ageing Rome derived much of its historiographical strength from the realistic impression that
beyond the borders of the Empire – or even inside them – there were nations ready to take
advantage of the weakness of Rome. Tacitus would not have written the Germania without the
uneasy feeling that the barbarians were ready to prey on the ageing Rome. Even more explicitly, in
the late fourth century, Ammianus Marcellinus connects the old age of Rome with the increasing
frivolity and vulgarity of its ruling class, which in its turn provokes the enemies of the Empire to
increasing audacityviii. It did not make sense for a historian rooted in the political tradition of Rome
to identify the old age of Rome with the old age of the world: the danger, as he saw it, was in the
contrast between the lethargy of Rome and the energy [7] of her youthful enemies.
This may explain why, as far as I know, a clear formulation of the senectus mundi – of the old
age of the world – is to be found only in Christian writers and goes not become an operative
historiographical notion until St. Augustine. 19 A clear adaptation of the biological scheme to
Christian notions of history is already to be found in Tertullian’s De Verginibus Velandis (1, 7): the
world reaches its infancy with the Mosaic law; its youth with the Gospel and its maturity with the
Paraclete. But this is said in a perfunctory way. It takes a St. Augustine to face the senectus mundi
18
P-o 121: Analogous considerations may be applied to these philosophic myths which operate with notions of
cataclysms (Plato’s Timaeus). They are meant to explain something of human nature, not something of a remembered
past, mgsnmsb[Mom].
19
P-o 121: until St. Augustine -> Lucretius (5,[vacat]) has something vague, msb[Mom], del.
119
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
in the precise clinical manifestation of the sack of Rome and to conclude that what appears to be old
age in the City of Man may be youth in the Heavenly City: “Do not try20 to stick to this old World;
do not refuse to find your youth in Christ who tells you the World is transient, the World is ageing,
the World declines, the World is breathless in its old age. Do not fear: your youth will be renewed
as that of the Eagle” (Serms. 81)ix. We shall come back to St. Augustine, but it is by now evident
that outside such audacious metahistorical applications there was little scope for the biological
scheme in universal history. We must conclude that in classical pagan historiography the
application of the biological scheme to the history of mankind was scarcely more successful than
the application of the scheme of the metallic ages.
III
There remains to be considered a scheme which, though born outside historical research, like the
previous two schemes, was soon felt to be open to empirical verification. Gods or culture-heroes
who reveal technological secrets to helpless mankind are of course to be found everywhere. What
seems to characterize the Greeks is that they did not remain content with their culture-heroes,
impressive as they may have been. Already in Aeschylus’ Prometheus (the question whether
Aeschylus is the real author of the Prometheus is here irrelevant), the culture-hero symbolizes
mankind in its efforts to [8] reach knowledge. Sophocles in the Antigone can dispense with the
culture-hero and make man himself the source of all the ambiguous achievements which
intelligence brings about. Even when mythical forms are retained (as in the new version of the
Prometheus story told by Protagoras in Platox), the problem of how man acquired the arts becomes
the focus for reflection. Individual men or individual cities were sometimes singled out for praise.
The praise of Athens as a civilising city goes back at least to Isocrates. The Epicureans would
naturally emphasize the enlightened traditions of the city to which Epicurus, after all, belonged. We
therefore find the praise of Athens in Lucretius’ Book VI. But as a rule the effort to encompass the
discovery of the arts went beyond individual names of gods, men and cities and tried to envisage the
conditions which favoured discoveries in general. Climatic conditions, fear of animals, development
of language, discovery of metals and of forms of cultivation, organization of social life, cumulative
influence of observation in various fields, etc., are factors considered in the two most important
discussions we have of the technical progress of mankind: Diodorus, Bibliotheca, Book I and
Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, Book V. We may add Vitruvius, De Architectura, Book II and
Manilius, Astronomicon, Book I in the following century. But partly as a result of the classicistic
selection operated by late Greeks and Romans we have not much of their predecessors – the
Sophists of the fifth century B.C. and the specialized students of discoveries of the late fourth
century B.C.21 and of the early Hellenistic period. We are informed about a refined and subtle study
on sacrificial customs composed by Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus only because Porphyrius
happened to be very interested in it in the third century A.D.xi We expect Posidonius to have said
something very influential on the subject of the discoveries of the arts in the generation before
Lucretius and Diodorus. But sources being what they are, our main information about Posidonius’
opinions on cultural history depend on Seneca’s Letter 90. There Seneca agrees with Posidonius
that the philosophers were the natural leaders of mankind during the golden age, but he does not
accept Posidonius’ further conjecture that the philosophers discovered the arts [9] and techniques
which myth had considered to be Prometheus’ province. This is very little, and therefore scholars
have been able to state or deny with equal assurance that Posidonius is the source behind Diodorus’
chapters in Book I about the evolution of mankind.
The ravages of time, that is, the loss of so many original sources (like Posidonius himself), give
perhaps an unjust impression of the poverty of the results obtained by the ancients in this field. We
20
21
P-o 121: (he says in Sermon 81), mgdxmsb[Mom].
P-o 121: such as Ephorus, mgsnmsb[Mom].
120
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
would be wiser if we had more of Posidonius, or more of Theophrastus, or even more of Critias and
Protagoras on this subject. The problems were recognized, and it is remarkable that such a variety
of approaches – from fear of animals to climate and language – presented itself to the Greeks and
remained present to the Romans. But even if we were much better informed, we would hardly find
cultural developments as one of the central themes of Greek historical research: more specifically,
we would not find universal history built on schemes of cultural development. We are brought back
to the hard fact that before Christianity Greek and Latin historians saw political and military events
as the natural subject of their researches. If universal history was to have a place in historical
research, it had to have military and political events as its subject. Cultural history was important
for philosophers and for those érudits who derived inspiration from philosophers in their choice of
subjects for research, but it never reached the point of offering an independent contribution to the
betterment of men – which is what political and military history claimed to do. Whereas it was
generally admitted that by studying political history one could avoid past mistakes and improve
future performances, cultural history at best provided confirmation of some philosophical theory. It
was not meant to help the future development of culture and remained at the level of curiosity and
exemplification.
[9bis] One point is implicit in the previous considerations and must now be made explicit. If
neither the succession of races, nor the succession of ages nor technical progress provided a viable
scheme for universal history there was even less place for genealogical speculations in that
direction. The Greeks cared of course about genealogies and used them to explain many facts –
from the internal divisions of the Greek nation to the friendships and enmities between Greeks and
non-Greeks. Genealogies supported the aristocracies and their rights to specific priesthoods. They
helped to measure time. One of the oldest branches of what we called historiography collected and
ordered genealogies. But in Greece genealogy was never a principle of organization of historical
narration except for the heroic age. There was no genealogical history of Greece or of individual
Greek states: even less can we expect a genealogically structured universal history.
To find universal history in full dress we must therefore go back to Polybius, the political
historian who claimed to be a universal historianxii. He is the first preserved author to make this
claim, though, as I have said, not the first to have made it.
IV
[10] Polybius saw himself as a universal historian because he saw himself as seriously involved
in a chain of political and military events which truly appeared to affect the whole world. According
to Polybius the Romans created universal history by conquering the world or at least by affecting
directly or indirectly the future of the whole world. This meant that Polybius could not envisage
universal history as the recognition of patterns of behaviour common to all men qua men. To him
universal history came into being at a certain date, say, the second Punic War, about 220 B.C.,
because of a new historical development. The idea of universal history from the origins of mankind
would have been unintelligible to Polybius. He was, however, prepared to admit that in the more
remote past certain historical situations had already brought mankind near to political unity and that
some historians had understood this predicament and therefore examined the facts with something
like the self-consciousness of the universal historian. In what we have of Polybius’ work (and we
must remember that we have perhaps about one third of it) there is enough to correlate his views
about past approximations to universal history and his judgements about past (authentic or spurious)
universal historians.
The situations which Polybius believes to be comparable with Rome’s conquests are the
processes of formation of previous empires. Persia, Sparta and Macedon are his explicit terms of
reference. Characteristically he leaves Athens out, for he did not like Athenian democracy. He
speaks of Rome and Carthage as the two powers which disputed the rule of the world (τῆς τῶν ὅλων
ἀρχῆς) before Rome won. Since the succession of empires is the central point of Polybius’ historical
121
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
vision, it is useful to remind ourselves of his precise words22: “The paradoxicality and greatness of
the spectacle with which I propose to deal will become most clear if we single out and compare
with the Roman hegemony the most famous of the previous empires – the ones which have
provided historians with their chief theme. Those worthy of being thus set aside and compared are
the following: the Persians ... the Spartans ... the Macedonians ... [11] But the Romans have
subjected to their rule not portions, but nearly the whole of the world” (1, 2). This was not only an
intellectual perception, but an emotional finding. Falls of empires are to Polybius occasions on
which a dignified man is entitled to let himself go, to be disturbed and even to cry. He knew he had
a literary tradition behind him to justify his emotions and to give appropriate words to them. After
having concluded his account of the fall of the Kingdom of Macedon under Perseus in 168 B.C. –
the end of the third23 empire – Polybius picked up a treatise on Fortune in which Demetrius of
Phalerus had commented upon the fall of the first24 empire – Persia – and generally animadverted
on the inconstancy of human fortunes. Polybius was impressed by the fact that in the generation
after Alexander Demetrius had foreseen that Macedon would one day fall in its turn. He quoted
from Demetrius and concluded: “I, as I wrote and reflected on the time when the Macedonian
monarchy perished, did not think it right to pass over the event without comment, as it was one I
witnessed with my own eyes, but I considered it was for me also to say something befitting such an
occasion, and recall the words of Demetrius” (29, 21 transl. W. R. Paton, Loebxiii).
It is perhaps25 superfluous to quote the other more famous passage (38, 21)xiv in which Polybius
tells us of how he was near Scipio Aemilianus, the Roman commander, when Carthage was burning
in 146 and had Scipio grasping his hand and repeating Homer’s line: “A day will come when sacred
Troy shall perish”xv. The fall of empires was to Polybius not only a well known chronological
scheme, but also a recognized emotional experience. In other words, Polybius saw the history he
was dealing with – the history of the rise of Rome to become a world empire – as the culmination of
previous attempts at establishing a world empire. Each of these attempts, by unifying a large part of
the world, created favourable conditions for writing something close to universal history, but only
the empire of the Romans created the ideal conditions for writing the perfect universal history.
Polybius presented in fact a theory of the succession of empires which was at the same time a
theory [12] about the conditions of development of historiographical forms.
The notion of a succession of empires was not of course new. In my next lecture I shall have to
consider the relation between Greek thought and the Jewish version of the same scheme of a
succession of empires which the Book of Daniel formulated in Jerusalem more or less in the same
years in which Polybius was writing in Rome. Here it will be enough to say that26 Polybius was
probably not even the first to import the scheme of the succession of empires into Rome. We
happen to know from a strange gloss inserted in Velleius Paterculus 1, 6, 6 that Aemilius Sura, an
otherwise unknown author of a book, De annis populi Romani, placed the Romans at the end of a
succession of empires starting with the Assyrian and continuing with the Medes, the Persians and
the Macedoniansxvi. More precisely, he dated the beginnings of the Roman World Empire during
the reigns of Philip V of Macedon and of Antiochus III of Syria, that is, either before 179 B.C., the
date of Philip’s death, or before 187 B.C., the date of Antiochus III’s death. There are too many
difficulties in this text to be certain when it was written, but one is inclined to believe that Aemilius
Sura gave such a precise date because he wrote in the earlier part of the second century B.C. and
was himself a witness of the Roman victories against Macedonia and Syria. I have also heard it
suggested that his name, Aemilius Sura, seems to indicate that he was a man of Syrian origin who
became a slave and then a freedman of a member of the gens Aemilia. But Sura is the “cognomen”
22
P-o 121: I quote, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 100, 99: third <-> fourth, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 121 id., interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 173: corr. def.
24
P-o 100, 99: first <-> third, msb[AMM]; P-o 121 id., interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 173: corr. def.
25
P-o 100, 99: is perhaps <-> would be, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 121 id., interl.msn[Mom].
26
P-o 100, P-o 99: In my next lecture ... to say that, ts. fra parentesi quadre, affiancato in P-o 100 da punto
interrogativo in mgsn, msn[Mom?]); P-o 121, -> In my next… to say that, del.
23
122
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
of several Romans of unimpeachable Italian extraction, such as the Catilinarian P. Cornelius
Lentulus Sura. Sura means in Latin “calf of the leg”. Our Aemilius Sura is therefore likely to have
been of Italian origin. But he may have imported into Rome a scheme of the succession of empires
which was current in the Greek East27 in the early second century B.C.28 [13]29 Ultimately the
scheme went back to Herodotus and Ctesias. Both Herodotus and Ctesias had a clear and explicit
notion of the succession of empires. Herodotus states in so many words that the Persians became
the rulers of Asia in succession to the Medes (I, 95; 130). He structured his whole work around the
notion of the Persian Empire. He included in his history those nations which Persia had either
subjugated (such as Egypt, Lydia and Babylonia) or tried to subjugate (like Scythia and Greece). He
even promised to write a special account of Assyriaxvii , though for reasons unknown he did not do
so. Ctesias fulfilled this desideratum and introduced Persia by way of an extensive account of the
Assyrian Empire. He devoted much space to Media as an intermediate stage between the empires of
Assyria and Persiaxviii . Diodorus says that he owes to Ctesias most of what he knows about the
succession of empires in the East.
Given these achievements of Herodotus and Ctesias, it may seem strange that Polybius should
have picked as his predecessor Ephorus who, as I have said, does not seem ever to have claimed the
title of universal historian. But Polybius had the advantage, which we have not, of being able to
read Ephorus. Furthermore, even with our limited knowledge of Ephorus’ fragments, we can
recognize some features which would have appealed to Polybius. Neither Herodotus nor Ctesias had
complied with Polybius’ requirement that the universal historian should explain “whence, how and
why the final situation was brought about” (5, 32). Neither of them had perceived Fortune, in
Polybius’ sense, directing events towards “one and the same goal”. Neither of them had brought
before the reader a synoptic view “of the operations by which Fortune accomplishes the unification
of world affairs”xix. Indeed, without pretending to hold any brief for Herodotus or for Ctesias, I
venture to believe that they would have been glad to be left out of this business of world history, if
world history was what Polybius thought it to be. But Ephorus had tried hard to associate closely
Greek and non-Greek history in the periods in which the Greeks found themselves fighting against
Persians, Macedonians and Carthaginians. There is no certain sign that he [14] lived long enough to
see the foundation of Alexander’s Empire in Asia, but he certainly described as a contemporary the
rise of Macedon under Philip II and, generally speaking, organized his Greek history around the
hegemonies of Sparta, Athens and Thebes, while paying due attention to the leading role of
Syracuse in the West. Polybius admired Ephorus’ technique of knitting together different trends of
history. That Ephorus had prefaced his history with a sketch of world geography would of course be
another good point in his favour. Polybius therefore forgave him for being too fond of genealogies,
colonial history and other frivolities (9, 1) and for being more competent on naval than on land
warfare (12, 25 f.).
Polybius’ choice of Ephorus as his predecessor in the writing of world history confirms the
limitations of his interests as a historian. He convinced himself – probably a very original thought –
that one must have a situation of world empire in order to have a universal history. But he was not
interested in the world empires which had preceded Macedon; and Ephorus was of course more
helpful about Macedon than Herodotus and Ctesias.
When we come to consider the relations between Daniel and Greek historical thinking, we shall
have to keep in mind that the Greek historians of the fifth and fourth centuries had already
examined the succession of Eastern world empires and that Aemilius Sura with his concern for the
same subject was perhaps a contemporary of Polybius and therefore of Daniel. It is not surprising
that as a Greek living in Rome in the middle of the second century B.C. Polybius should not have
27
P-o 121: Greek speaking world <-> Greek East, interl.msn[Mom].
Per il testo alternativo di P-o 173 da qui all’inizio del cap. V, precedente rispetto a quello di P-o 100, 99 e 121, vd.
infra, Appendice a GL 1980 1, pp. 127-28.
29
P-o 100: [NB pp. 13-15 new, typed 13.1.80] tsf,mgdxmsb[AMM].
28
123
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
given much thought to Assyria, Media and Persia. But I wish we knew more about Agatharchides
of Cos, indisputably his contemporary, who reached his own view of universal history by an
independent route. Having worked in Alexandria for the better part of his life, he probably had a
less Europe-centred vision of universal history than Polybius could form in Rome. In any case he
divided his universal history into two uneven sections, one including Asia and Egypt and the other,
much longer, on Europe. He kept the Oriental events separate from the European ones for the period
before Alexander, but one essential feature of his history we do not know [15] well enough: how he
organized the story of the Macedonian and Roman empires down to the middle of the second
century B.C. Some of Agatharchides’ preoccupations are revealed by a small ethnographical
pamphlet which he wrote in his last years (perhaps about 130 B.C.) about the Red Seaxx. There his
condemnation of any imperialism, whether Ptolemaic or Roman, is fairly explicit. He idealizes
primitive nations which are independent and undisturbed by conquerors and exploiters.
V
Some of the universal historians directly under the influence of Polybius accepted in full his
premise that proper universal history could not be written before the rise of Rome as a world
empire. Therefore they continued Polybius down to their own day: Posidonius of Apamea to about
60 B.C. at the latest and Strabo of Amaseia to the end of the civil wars, perhaps about 30 B.C. The
novelty which Posidonius transmitted to Strabo, in so far as it was transmissible, was the use of
Herodotaean ethnography to illustrate the interpenetration of cultures brought about – chiefly but
not exclusively – by Roman conquest. Most of the world Posidonius had conjured up in his vivid,
rich prose has, alas, disappeared with the loss of his work. He was probably superior to any of the
other post-Polybian universal historiansxxi . But in the first century B.C. there was another school of
thought which did not accept the chronological limits imposed by Polybius and bravely imitated
Ephorus in going back to remote antiquity. Though individually no match for Posidonius, as a
group they were more interesting.30 They tried to offer some resistance to a view of world history
which was an implicit (and even explicit) glorification of Rome. They gave pride of place to the old
civilizations of the East and of Greece: and they emphasized either the relative barbarism of the
recent conversion of the Romans to Greek customs (which amounted to the same).
[15bis] These historians were active in the second half of the first century B.C. They lived in a
revolutionary age and showed it in their strange personal lives and in their unusual attitudes of
mind. Circumstances lifted them out of their native surroundings and their intrinsic mediocrity.
They started their intellectual career in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the years of Julius Caesar.
Some of them concluded their lives under the traditionalistic, strictly Italic, reaction of Augustus.
We may suspect – and we shall later find support for our suspicions – that they were more at ease
under Caesar than under Augustus.
Two of these writers, interestingly enough, were Italians: the others were provincials. But one of
the two – who was also the earlier – came from the border territory of Gallia Cisalpina: Cornelius
Nepos. He wrote a universal chronicle in three books which his friend Catullus advertised, probably
before 54 B.C. The other Italian, Titus Pomponius Atticus, the friend of Cicero, had lived in Greece
for about twenty years. Circa 48-47 B.C. he published a Liber annalis, one book, which, though
mainly devoted to Roman republican history, included foreign events. Nepos was a pioneer in
writing universal history in Latin, but his work was little read. On the other hand the more famous
Liber annalis by Atticus, which helped Cicero to clarify his ideas about Greek and Roman
chronology (F. Muenzer, Hermes 40, 1905, 50-100) xxii, was too short to provide more than basic
synchronism between Greek and Roman history. The provincial competitors, who wrote at far
30
P-o 100, 99, 121: He was probably superior ... more interesting. <-> P-o 173: Though Posidonius was probably
superior to any of the other post-Polybian universal historians, those who did not accept the chronological limits
imposed by Polybius and bravely imitated Ephorus in going back to remote antiquity were, as a group, more interesting.
124
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
greater length, ultimately gained more readers: two of them, Diodorus and Trogus Pompeius,
partially survived, the latter in a summary.31
[16] Diodorus lived32 in the small Greek town of Agyrium in Sicily and apparently left it only to
look for books and other historical information in cultural centres like Roma and Alexandria.
Trogus Pompeius was a Gaul from Gallia Narbonensis whose grandfather had been given Roman
citizenship by Pompey and whose father had served under Julius Caesar. He wrote in Latin a vast
work curiously called Historiae Philippicae – an echo of the title of Theopompus’ great book on
Philip II. This work was summarized by Justin, perhaps in the second or third century A.D.; and this
summary, together with an index of the contents of the original text, is almost all we have. The third
universal historian of the age, Nicolaus of Damascus, was probably a Hellenized Syrian who
managed to be tutor to the children of Cleopatra and Antony, secretary and envoy of King Herod of
Judaea for many years, and finally a friend of Augustus, of whom he wrote a biography. Timagenes,
the last of this group33, was forcibly removed from Alexandria to Rome about 56 B.C., wrote a
universal history in Greek called “Kings” and created for himself the reputation of being a bitter
critic of anything Roman34. Augustus, who apparently did not dislike Timagenes, was at long last
obliged to cut him off, but Asinius Pollio, that cautious republican – a historian himself with some
experience of persecution – gave him undisturbed shelter in his own house.
We cannot expect to find a uniform attitude towards Rome in the surviving books of Diodorus
(about half his entire work), in Justin’s summary of Trogus, in the abundant fragments of Nicolaus
of Damascus and in the scanty remains of Timagenes. But they seem to have three features in
common: they expatiate on the merits of Oriental and Greek civilizations; they allocate a
comparatively small space to Roman history and they face frankly the social issues raised by the
Roman civil wars.35
Diodorus seems to have been a great admirer of Julius Caesar. Apparently he had meant to carry
on his history to the triumphs of Caesar in 46/5 B.C., but Caesar’s murder in 44 persuaded him that
it was more prudent to stop at the [17] uncontroversial year 60/59 B.C. In any case, as a member of
the educated Greek society in Sicily, he and his ancestors had had 150 years in which to learn
prudence in their relations with the Romans. He is, to my knowledge, the first Greek historian to
claim command of Latin as an asset for his historical work (1, 4, 6). All the more impressive is his
emphasis, even in the introduction to book I, on the superior merits of Greek education. Quite
consistently he chose Ephorus as his main guide to Greek history. As a good pupil of Isocrates,
Ephorus had put into historical prose the master’s creed about the cultural differences between
Greeks and barbarians and about the necessity of replacing local loyalties by pan-Hellenic
patriotism. Even the Celtic Trogus retold with deep emotional involvement the story of the end of
Greek freedom at the battle of Chaeroneia in 338 B.C. He was obviously aware of other more recent
battles lost in defence of freedom. He was not afraid of saying at another point that the Romans
were generous in giving what did not belong to them, “facile de alieno largientibus” (36, 3, 9).36 In
the contemporary polemic, of which we have echoes in Livy, as to whether the Romans had reached
world power by fortune or by merit, Trogus seems to have been definitely on the side of the
supporters of fortune (30, 4, 16; 39, 5, 3). His master-stroke – a piece of really good historical
imagination – was to conclude his work by bringing together the free Parthians of the East and the
no longer free Celts and Spaniards of the West. He simply declared that the Parthians were sharing
the rule of the world with the Romans after having won three wars against them (41, 4). We know
31
P-o 121: se già 5,50 tagliare ultime pagine, mginfms[Mom]; per il testo alternativo di P-o 173 f. [15bis] vd. infra,
Appendice a GL 1980 I, pp. 127-28.
32
P-o 121: as we all know, interl.msb[Mom].
33
P-o 100, P-o 99: the last of this group, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 121: id., interl.msb[Mom].
34
P-o 121: the surrounding society <-> anything Roman, interl.msn[Mom].
35
P-o 121: They used the succession of empires to remind themselves and their readers that there had been greatness
in the world before Rome had conquered the world, interl.msn[Mom].
36
P-o 121: Diodorus seems to have been… 36, 3,9), ts. evidenziato a mg. e annotato con NO.
125
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
how these victories had hurt the Romans. Augustus never really managed to wipe them out, and all
the imperialistic rhetoric of the Augustan poets sounded hollow when the Parthians were
mentioned. Trogus had hit where it hurt most. He seems to have been left undisturbed – or
unnoticed.
How precisely Nicolaus of Damascus organized the 144 books of his Universal History – the
biggest ever composed in Antiquity – remains a mystery. He wrote part of them in Jerusalem to
please Herod but apparently finished [18] them in Rome after 4 B.C. It is a fair guess that the Jews
loomed larger in his Universal History than they did in the contemporary writings of Diodorus,
Trogus and Strabo. Nicolaus of Damascus had defended Jewish customs before Agrippa and was
well acquainted with Biblical traditionsxxiii . Unfortunately we have not much information about the
Jewish section in his Universal History. Apart from some very problematic references in the tenthcentury Hebrew Yosippon, our main source for Nicolaus of Damascus is Flavius Josephus who
evidently did not need Nicolaus to find his way through the Bible and its rabbinic interpreters.
Flavius Josephus used Nicolaus chiefly for his account of Herod xxiv . We know more about
Nicolaus’ sympathetic treatment of other Oriental civilizations, for which he used sources written in
Greek, for instance Xanthus on Lydia and Ctesias about Persia. We also know that in his history
there was a definite disproportion in favour of the Greeks agains the Romans.37
The anti-Roman bias of the last of these four historians, Timagenes, needs no demonstration. It
was recognized by his readers38, such as Seneca in De ira III, 23, 4; and may be reflected in the
disparaging remark by Livy about the “levissimi ex Graecis” who prefer the Parthians to the
Romansxxv. But the surviving fragments of Timagenes are few and most of them geographical (as an
authority on the Celts he was still read in the fourth century A.D.). Modern scholars have tried the
usual method of enlarging our knowledge by making Timagenes the source of Trogus Pompeius
and of Strabo. As a guess, it is not impossible; it may even be probable, but it cannot be provedxxvi .
The idea of the succession of empires also appears in historians – either of the Augustan age
(like Dionysius of Halicarnassus, I, 2, 2-4) or of later times (such as Appian in the late second
century) – who did not write universal history. By the time the Christians took it over, it had
achieved respectability among pagans. In the last 150 years before Christ both the apologists of
Roman imperialism and those who had more or less stringent reservations about it used the idea of
the succession of empires as an argument. Succession of [19] empires and universal history had
become almost synonymous terms in Polybius and remained synonymous for his successors. The
difference is that several of them used the succession of empires to remind themselves and their
readers that there had been greatness in the world before Rome had conquered the world.39 Indeed
Trogus, and perhaps Timagenes, looked to the Parthians to reassure themselves that not all the
world was Roman.
We can begin to see why the Jews40 found the idea of the succession of empires congenial: it
could be used to emphasize the transience of empires41. But we now have to examine the special
twist the Jews gave to the idea before they passed it on to the Christians. To a large extent, the
transmission was not direct from pagans to Christians, but from pagans to Jews, and from Jews to
Christians. We shall furthermore have to ask why, notwithstanding the popularity of the idea of the
four empires, so little universal history was written by pagans after Augustus.
i
ii
37
38
39
40
41
FLUSSER 1972.
KRIEGER 1977.
P-o 121: Augustus never really managed ... against the Romans, ts. evidenziato a mg. e annotato con NO.
P-o 121: ancient sources <-> his readers, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 121: The idea of the succession ... had conquered the world, ts. Evidenziato a mg. e annotato con un NO.
P-o 100, 99: Jews <-> Christians, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 121: id., interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 100, 99: it could be ... of empires, interl.msb[AMM]. P-o 121: id., mginfmsb[Mom].
126
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
iii
Il riferimento verosimilmente è a MEYER 1910 (part. alle pp. 51-53).
Hes. Op. 640
v
GL 1980 III (Flavius Josephus), cc. 3-4.
vi
Hes. Op. 174-5, tr. di H.G. Evelyn-White (Loeb 1914).
vii
Cfr. Varr. RR II 1,3; Porph. De Abst. IV 2.1-9 ; Hier. Adv. Jovin. II 13 (= frr. 48-50 Wehrli).
viii
Per l’excursus su Roma e i suoi vizi vd. Amm. Hist. xiv 6.2ss. (cfr. inoltre MATTHEWS 1989, 250).
ix
August. Serm. 81.8
x
Plat. Prot. 320c-322d.
xi
Porph. De abst. II 26.1-4 B.-P.
xii
Cfr., e.g., Pol. Hist. 1, 4, 2 e 5, 33, 1.
xiii
Paton, W.R., Polybius, the Histories, London-Cambridge (Mass) 1967-72.
xiv
Per un precedente contributo momiglianeo sul tema, cfr. Alien Wisdom, pp. 22 ss.
xv
Il. 6.448.
xvi
Cfr. Hellegouarc’h, J. (ed.), Velleius Paterculus, Histoire Romaine. Tome I. Livre I., Paris 1982, per il
commento ad loc. Il passo, un’interpolazione inserita nel testo dal Delbenius nell’edizione aldina del 1591, rappresenta
l’unica menzione dello storico, verosimilmente autore di un compendio di storia universale, e che già MOMMSEN 1861
considerava contemporaneo di Silla. Sul rifiuto di una sua identificazione con il Mamilio Sura di cui parla Plinio, N.H.
18,16, cfr. SCHANZ – HOSIUS 1914- 35, II, 587-88; BARDON 1952-56, I 195; si rimanda invece a SWAIN 1940 per
un’ipotesi di datazione dell’opera di Emilio Sura tra il 189 e il 171 a.C.
xvii
Herod. 1, 184.
xviii
FrGH 688 F. 5 (=Diod. Sic. 2.32.4-34.6); cfr. inoltre FF. 6 - 8.
xix
Polyb. 1.4.1
xx
WOELK 1966; BURSTEIN 1989.
xxi
Cfr. Alien Wisdom, pp. 32 ss.
xxii
Me inflammavit studio illustrium hominum aetates et tempora persequendi, in Brut. 18.74 (cfr. Settimo, 91).
xxiii
Sui negoziati condotti con Agrippa cfr. Ios. Ant. 12,3,2 (=FrGH 90 F 81); per Nicola come fonte di Giuseppe
su storia e tradizioni ebraiche, vd. (e.g.) Ant. 16,7,1 (=FrGH 90 F 101,2); Ant. 13,8,4 (= F. 92); Ant. I1,3,6 (=F 72); Ant.
7,2 = F 19.
xxiv
Bellum, lib. I ; Ant., l. XIV-XVIII. Per un’analisi delle fonti si rimanda a SCHÜRER 1985 (vol. I), 59.
xxv
Liv. 9.18.6
xxvi
L’ipotesi risale a VON GUTSCHMID 1882, che cercò di dimostrare come Pompeo Trogo non fosse altro che
“un’edizione latina di un’opera originariamente in greco”, quella di Timagene; alla tesi si oppose tuttavia già
WACHSMUTH 1891 (cfr. ID. 1895, 114ss.). Per i riferimenti bibliografici al dibattito successivo si rimanda a SCHÜRER
1985, I 50.
iv
Appendice a GL 1980 I:
Divergenze del testo di P-o 173 da P-o 100, P-o99 e P-o 121.
1. f. [13] ss.
second century B.C. -> What seems to be unprecedented in Polybius, therefore, is the persuasion that
you must have a situation of world empire in order to have a universal history. He does not say explicitly in
his allusion to Ephorus why he considered him his own first and only serious predecessor as a universal
historian, but he must [13] have meant that Ephorus had competently described and analysed some of the
previous situations in which the world had come near to being a world empire.
In his evaluation of Ephorus Polybius was substantially correct. Though Ephorus himself, as I have said,
does not seem ever to have claimed the title of universal historian, he had tried hard to associate closely
Greek and non-Greek history in the periods in which the Greeks found themselves fighting against Persians,
Macedonians and Carthaginians. There is no certain sign that he lived long enough to see the foundation of
Alexander’s Empire in Asia, but he certainly described as a contemporary the rise of Macedon under Philip
II and, generally speaking, organized his Greek history around the hegemonies of Sparta, Athens and Thebes,
while paying due attention to the leading role of Syracuse in the West. Polybius had many technical objects
against Ephorus. He considered him too fond of genealogies, colonial history and other frivolities (9, 1); he
found him more competent on naval than on land warfare (12, 25 f.). But he admired his technique of
knitting together different trends of history.
127
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
I. Universal History in Greece and Rome
It would of course be easy to make a case against Polybius and in favour of Herodotus and Ctesias as
universal historians. Both Herodotus and Ctesias had an idea of the succession of empires. More particularly,
Herodotus structured his whole work around the notion of the Persian Empire. He included in his history
those nations which Persia had either subjugated (such as Egypt, Lydia and Babylonia) or tried to subjugate
(like Scythia and Greece). He even promised to write a special account of Assyria, though for reasons
unknown he did not do so (Ctesias, however, fulfilled this desideratum and introduced Persian history by
way of an extensive account of the previous empire). But one must admit that Herodotus did not comply
with Polybius’ requirement that the universal historian should explain “whence, how and why the final
situation was brought about” (5, 32). This is what Polybius considered to be the historian’s proper attitude to
what he called Fortune: “Just as Fortune has bent almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and has
compelled them to incline [14] towards an one and the same goal, so history must bring before the readers a
synoptic view of the operations by which Fortune accomplishes the unification of world affairs” (1, 4, 1).
Without pretending to hold any brief for Herodotus, I venture to believe that he would be glad to be left
out of this business of world history. He saw an ultimate unifying factor in the will of the gods, but a strictly
pragmatic unification, in Polybius’ sense, was outside his mental horizon. Since Polybius, as far as we know,
theorized the Greek form of universal history, we may accept his verdict that Herodotus and, a fortiori,
Ctesias are outside that line of thought which does not go back beyond Ephorus. There remain enough
universal historians in the Polybian sense either among his contemporaries or among his successors. Some of
them are mere names. Among those whom we know a little better, one of the most intriguing is
Agatharchides of Cnidos, because, as a contemporary of Polybius, he seems to have worked independently
and reached his own view of universal history. Having worked in Alexandria for the better part of his life, he
had probably a less Europeocentric vision of universal history than Polybius could form in Rome. In any
case he divided his universal history into two uneven sections, one including Asia and Egypt and the other,
much longer, on Europe. He kept the Oriental events separate from the European ones for the period before
Alexander, but one essential feature of his history we do not know well enough: how he organized the story
of the Macedonian and Roman empires down to the middle of the second century B.C. Some of
Agatharchides’ preoccupations are revealed by a small ethnographical pamphlet which he wrote in his last
years (perhaps about 130 B.C.) about the Red Sea. There his condemnation of any imperialism, whether
Ptolemaic or Roman, is fairly explicit. He idealizes primitive nations which are independent and undisturbed
by conquerors and exploiters.
2. f. [15bis] ss.
These historians were active in the second half of the first century B.C. Two were Italians, Cornelius
Nepos and Titus Pomponius Atticus. The others were romanized provincials writing either in Greek or in
Latin. They lived in a revolutionary age and showed it in their strange personal lives and in their unusual
attitudes of mind. Circumstances lifted them out of their native surroundings and their intrinsic mediocrity.
They started their intellectual career in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the years of Julius Caesar and
concluded their lives under the traditionalistic, strictly Italic, reaction of Augustus. We may suspect – and we
shall later find support for our suspicions – that they were more at ease under Caesar than under Augustus.
Cornelius Nepos opened the series about 50 B.C. His three books on universal history were commended
by his friend Catullus who, like him, came from Gallia Cisalpina. We know almost nothing about their
contents, but the extant short biographies show Nepos’ wide sympathies going beyond Greeks and Romans
and including Carthaginians and Persians. Cornelius and Atticus were friends themselves, besides being
friends of Cicero. Atticus imitated Nepos on an even smaller compass. His one book began with the
foundation of Rome but, according to the decisive information from Cicero (Orat. 34, 120; cf. Brut. 3, 14),
included non-Roman events. The two friends are obviously important because they wanted to make the
Romans familiar with a universal history which did not start with Rome’s hegemony. The brevity of their
works – which could hardly include more than lists of facts and dates – seems to indicate, however, that in
intrinsic importance they never competed with Diodorus and the other non-Italian authors.
128
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
GL 1980 II Daniel and the World Empires
Sedi e date:
CL 1979 (26 aprile, cfr. D-a 1)
GS 1979 (15 novembre, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 422)
GL 1980 (30 gennaio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 422; c1 P-o 106 AMM)
Documenti:
a) CL 1979 III [Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic]
P-o 101 ms.
P-o 105 (b) top c. di P-o 101.
P-o 106 (b), P-o 177, P-o 183 (b), c.c. di P-o 105.
P-o 102 xerox di P-o 183(b), cfr. P-o 103, P-o 104.
b) GS 1979 II [Daniel and the World Empires]
P-o 123 ms., introduzione per GS 1979 II.
P-o 105 (c), aggiunte, cfr. P-o 109 (CL 1979 V1), top c.
P-o 106 (c), aggiunte, cfr. P-o 110 (CL 1979 V); P-o 183 (c), aggiunte, cfr. Po 111 (CL 1979 V), c.c.
c) GL 1980 II
P-o 105 (a) introduzione e aggiunte per GL 1980 II, top c.
P-o 106 (a), P-o 183 (a): c.c. di P-o 105 (a)
P-o 137 xerox di P-o 106 (a-b-c).
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Il modesto numero di documenti conservati in archivio su Daniel and the World Empires non
rende a prima vista ragione della complessa evoluzione testuale della lecture, condotta – secondo un
usus consolidato – tramite l’arricchimento di materiale preesistente per mezzo di integrazioni o
modifiche tali da rendere uno stesso fascicolo testimone dell’intero arco di sviluppo del testo. È il
caso del documento preso come base per l’edizione, P-o 106: un testo composito, che conserva
intorno al nucleo di partenza b (CL 1979 III) le aggiunte per Princeton (c) e quelle, comprensive di
una nuova introduzione, della definitiva versione oxoniense (a)2, per un totale di 29 cc. dalla
numerazione discontinua e spesso ricorretta a mano3.
Lo stesso stato testuale della c.c. P-o 106 si riscontra tanto nella sua top c. P-o 105, quanto nella
c.c. “gemella” P-o 183: a rendere P-o 106 testimone privilegiato è però la presenza di correzioni di
mano di AMM, ripartibili in tre fasi grazie all’uso di penne differenti (penna blu chiaro, per i refusi
– non riportati in apparato –; penna blu scuro; penna rossa).
Ulteriori documenti conservati sono: P-o 101, il testo ms. della prima versione della lecture,
presentata come CL 1979 III con il titolo di Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic; le successive
riproduzioni della sua top c., nucleo b di P-o 105 (oltre alla c.c. P-o 177 e alle xerocopie
scarsamente annotate P-o 102, 103 e 104); la nuova introduzione ms. per GS 1979 II, P-o 123 (in
cui compare per la prima volta il nuovo titolo Daniel and the World Empires) e le sue riproduzioni
(sezione c di P-o 105, 106, 183); infine, P-o 137, una xerox della versione completa GL di P-o 106
(a-b-c) priva di annotazioni significative.
2. Argomento della lecture
Il ricorso alla figura di Daniele, nell’omonimo libro, si basa sulla grande antichità della sua
figura e sulla sua reputazione di uomo giusto e saggio. Fatto prigioniero da Nebuchadnezzar dopo la
caduta di Gerusalemme (600 a.C. ca.) è presentato come l’unico fra i maghi del regno in grado di
interpretare il sogno del sovrano: una statua dalle parti metalliche, frantumata da una pietra del
1
The Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian Historiography.
Datata al 30.1.80 da un’annotazione ms. di AMM, c.1.
3
I primi due fogli sono “numerati” a-b (a1); la sequenza successiva, normalizzata a mano a partire da materiale
eterogeneo (sezioni a e b, cfr. supra) vede in ordine: 1 (b1); 2-2bis (a2); 3-5 (b2); 6-6bis (a3); 7-8 (b3); 9-12 (a4); 8-9
(c1); 15-15 bis (a5); 11-19 (c2).
2
129
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
cielo, che simboleggia la successione dei regni terreni interrotta dall’instaurazione di quello divino.
A questa prima e più antica parte del libro ne segue una seconda riconducibile al periodo di
sudditanza ad Antioco IV: qui il tentativo di armonizzazione con le precedenti sezioni del testo
induce l’autore a recuperarne il medesimo schema profetico, sostituendo al simbolismo dei metalli
quello degli animali feroci. Se il modello elaborato da Daniele è quello greco di successione degli
imperi del mondo, sia pure rivisitato in chiave religiosa, il motivo del mancato riconoscimento da
parte della critica della sua origine ellenica deriva dalla tradizionale riconduzione della statua vista
in sogno da Nebuchadnezzar a influenze orientali. Il processo di deterioramento metallico,
indifferente – se non contraddittorio – in ottica ebraica, trova tuttavia spiegazione solo in quanto
prestito esiodeo; allo stesso modo, benché tracce di analoghi simbolismi siano presenti nella
letteratura dinastica persiana, la nozione di successione degli imperi come spina dorsale della storia
rimane in sé greca. Del tutto ebraico è invece l’esito apocalittico che porta all’instaurazione del
Regno di Dio: Daniele sembra quindi mutuare lo schema greco al fine di trasformarlo in una critica
radicale del potere mondano.
A distanza di pochi decenni, la prospettiva storicistica di Daniele è raccolta dagli Oracoli
sibillini, scritti apocrifi con cui gli Ebrei prima e i Cristiani poi recuperano l’oracolistica pagana
adattandone i contenuti alla propria visione storica e teologica. Emerge da questi libri un forte
elemento di novità, rappresentato dal riconoscimento (in chiave ostile) di Roma come impero del
mondo, lettura destinata ad essere trasmessa dagli oracoli ebraici a quelli cristiani. Su piano analogo
si muove l’Apocalisse di Giovanni4 - collocata da Ireneo sotto Domiziano, ma retrodatata da
Momigliano in età neroniana (cfr. voce corrisponente su CAH 1934) – che affianca a un’attitudine
contraddittoria nei confronti della popolazione ebraica la netta speranza che l’impero romano
scompaia, e contribuisce così a mettere in luce l’importanza dell’apocalittica nella resistenza ai
Romani.
3. Note di contenuto: le fasi di rielaborazione della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi.
La trasformazione del testo dalla redazione per Chicago a quella per il Gauss Seminar di
Princeton, a sua volta destinata a essere sostanzialmente ripresa (salvo qualche aggiunta incipitaria)
nella versione oxoniense, passa per l’inserimento di ampi stralci recuperati dalla prima stesura della
conferenza successiva (CL 1979 V, The Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian
Historiography), riproposta anch’essa a Princeton come GS 1979 III con il titolo di Flavius
Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography. L’integrazione,
documentata sia da P-o 105 che da P-o 106, consiste nella trasposizione alla fine del testo delle cc.
8-9 e 11-19, confluite rispettivamente da P-o 109 (in P-o 105) e da P-o 110 (in P-o 106). La prima
sezione spostata verte sulla trasformazione della materia oracolare tramite l’adozione della forma
sibillina da parte di Ebrei e cristiani, mentre in quella successiva si approfondiscono le questioni
della perdita di interesse della storia universale per gli antichi imperi, della progressiva predilezione
cristiana per il tema del contrasto tra Roma e regno di Dio e del doppio esito individuabile
nell’ottimismo storico di Eusebio e nel compromesso agostiniano con l’Apocalisse.
Il problema che la trasposizione delle due sezioni pone è di natura affine a quello incontrato
nell’analisi dei rapporti tra The Jews inside (GL 1979 III) e The Defence (GL 1979 IV), vale a dire
la presenza di duplicati nella redazione definitiva del testo5: il fatto che la sezione finale di The
Paradox sia spostata in Daniel (sia GS che GL) non comporta in parallelo l’eliminazione della
sezione stessa dalla sua conferenza di origine. Al contrario, nella sua rielaborazione GS e GL come
Flavius Josephus, The Paradox mantiene una parte consistente del materiale in questione: se il
paragrafo sui libri sibillini (cc. 8-9) viene sostituito da una riflessione sul classicismo della
storiografia pagana imperiale, la sezione finale del testo, dedicata alla storiografia cristiana, è non
4
5
In appendice alla lecture, pp. 143-44.
Per cui cfr. supra, pp. 74-75.
130
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
solo integralmente conservata ma anche rivista e sottoposta a correzioni minute (Daniel cc. 22-24 =
Flavius Josephus cc. 18-20).
È proprio in considerazione di tali interventi, evidentemente testimoni di un’ulteriore
avanzamento compositivo, che si propone in questa sede un’edizione del testo di Daniel privo dei
paragrafi duplicati6. Non si può tuttavia negare la natura di compromesso della soluzione: la
reiterata trasposizione della sezione in Daniel (P-o 109, 110), il fatto che sia poi stata trascritta
nuovamente nelle copie GS e in quelle GL, il continuo ripensamento del testo, sono tutti indizi che
inducono a ritenere che Momigliano attribuisse carattere unitario, organico, alla sequenza di
argomenti così ottenuta7. È plausibile che, in prospettiva di un progetto futuro di revisione delle
lectures a scopo di pubblicazione, si proponesse di continuare a riflettere sulla collocazione delle cc.
in questione. Va d’altronde osservato come la versione di Daniel comprensiva di tutte le aggiunte,
un documento composito dalla lunghezza di 29 cc. dss., vada ben al di là delle possibilità concesse
dai tempi di esposizione: c’è quindi anche e soprattutto una ragione pratica dietro alla motivazione,
documentata su P-o 106 da una nota ms. di AMM datata al 20/01/19808, di concludere la lettura
Grinfield con il foglio n. 23 (= c. 18). Il testo edito si fa terminare anche qui in coincidenza di tale
interruzione; si propone tuttavia in appendice il testo successivo alla segnalazione di fine lettura
(nonché a un ulteriore paragrafo di raccordo, già spostato però da Momigliano in Flavius Josephus,
c. 3). L’appendice offre infatti un’analisi dell’Apocalisse che non sarà recuperata altrove ma che
pure è presupposta dalla formulazione della teoria di Agostino interprete di Roma avanzata nel
finale di Flavius Josephus, che nella ridotta formulazione della lecture di appartenenza può
avvalersi solo di un rapido cenno introduttivo (“He [scil. Agostinus] culled from Revelation…”, c.
19).
Per quanto concerne i rapporti di Daniel con la prima lecture del ciclo (GL 1980 I, Universal
History), si segnala l’operazione di riedizione parziale a cui i due testi sono andati incontro insieme
nella pubblicazione del saggio The Origins of Universal History (= The Origins). Recuperata come
conclusione di una generale riflessione su origini e sviluppi della storia universale (per cui cfr.
supra, pp. 113-14), la materia di Daniel risulta qui condensata in un paragrafo finale di appena sei
pagine; una differenza di estensione che corrisponde evidentemente – al di là della ridotta
disponibilità di spazio argomentativo rispetto al ciclo di Chicago – allo spostamento del focus
tematico che il titolo stesso del saggio preannuncia. In The Origins Daniele compare soltanto come
una tra le voci che delineano lo sviluppo del tema generale: rilevante, anche perché conclusiva, ma
non oggetto di riflessione specifica. Del resto già un anno prima della Creighton (1980)
Momigliano aveva dato alle stampe, benché con carattere di “comunicazione preliminare”, il suo
pensiero su Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi (= Daniele, teoria). Si tratta di
un testo particolarmente breve e sintetico, che non presenta novità rispetto ai contenuti della
Grinfield lecture ma che offre piuttosto una sintetica panoramica delle sue principali acquisizioni.
Va tuttavia segnalata la sfumatura leggermente possibilista riservata nell’edito alla trattazione
dell’eventualità che la successione metallica in Daniele subisca influenze da fonti iraniche, al
contrario recisamente negata in Daniel (cfr. infra, n. xiv in fondo al testo).
6
Per i punti in cui le cc. 22-24 di Daniel divergono da quelle di Flavius Josephus, cfr. GL 1980 III, apparato ad locc.
Significativo, in tal senso, quanto Momigliano stesso scrive in una lettera ad AMM databile in fase di elaborazione
del ciclo GS: “Come vedrai, ho riorganizzato la seconda lecture in modo da includere gran parte della terza: e cioè
contenere quanto voglio dire su Daniel e i Sibillini, nonché Revelation. La terza è costituita dalla parte nuova su
Giuseppe Flavio, una parte della seconda lecture [i.e. c.3, n.d.C.] e il finale della terza lecture. Il tutto è forse un po’
breve. Ma è possibile che aggiunga alla terza lecture ancora un paio di pagine alla fine o verso la fine, dipenderà dal
tempo” (Chicago, 31.X.79).
8
Cfr. apparato ad loc., n. 59.
7
131
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
II*9
Daniel and the World Empires10
I
In my previous lecture I tried to establish the following four points:
1) Universal history is a notion which received its classical formulation from Polybius in the
middle of the second century B.C. He connected the notion of universal history with the notion of
the succession of empires. His particular line of succession was: Persian Empire, Spartan Empire,
Macedonian Empire, Roman Empire. Only the latest empire, the Roman Empire, was really
universal and therefore suitable for world history.
2) We do not know whether Polybius was the first to formulate explicitly the equivalence of the
notion of the succession of world empires with the notion of world history. But the notion of the
succession of world empires had been familiar to the Greeks since Herodotus and Ctesias. Both
Herodotus and Ctesias imply with different degrees of clarity that Assyria, Media and Persia were
world empires in succession. The same world empires, with Macedonia as the fourth, reappear in
Aemilius Sura’s list which I attribute to the second century. In any case the idea of world history
originated in critical research about the succession of world empires. In its turn the succession of
world empires was formulated by political historians working in the Greek tradition.
3) This is not to deny that before and after Polybius Greeks and Romans experimented with nonpolitical schemes of historical development which were potentially capable of producing universal
histories. Such were the scheme of the succession of five ages characterized by metals, the scheme
of biological development according to which political organizations move from childhood to old
age, and the scheme of technological progress. But, to the best of my knowledge, none of these
schemes was elaborated so as to account for what the Greeks and Romans themselves considered
the past of mankind.
[b] 4) A group of historians who lived in the first century B.C. gave the Polybian notion of
universal history a new dimension by emphasizing the importance of pre-Roman world empires.
These historians were not necessarily anti-Roman (even the extent of Timagenes’ opposition to
Rome is open to question), but in effect they vindicated the importance of non-Roman
achievements in history. Trogus Pompeius, Diodorus and Nicolaus of Damascus belong to this
group.
It will by now be no surprise if I try to show that the Book of Daniel is based on a Greek notion
of the succession of empires and used it, as some Greek and Roman historians did, but more
radically, to criticize the ruling power of the day.
The Jews had just passed from the world empire of the Persians to the world empire of the
Greeks and were in a good position to understand the meaning of the Greek theory of the succession
of empires. They were also in a position to appreciate that for the Jews themselves the new world
empire of the Greeks was no improvement on the old one of the Persians. Indeed some particularly
pious Jew was bound to ask whether God was not altogether tired of this succession of empires. I
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 106. Si tratta di una c.c. riveduta e corretta di P-o 105, documento composito che
conserva insieme al nucleo CL 1979 le aggiunte GS 1979 e Gl 1980, per un totale di 29 pp. dalla numerazione
discontinua (cc. a-b, 1-24 con 2bis, 6bis, 15bis). Le correzioni su P-o 106 sono di AMM e appaiono eseguite in tre
momenti, segnalati dall’uso di penne diverse: penna blu chiaro (prevalente e dedicata ai refusi, non segnalata); penna
blu scuro; penna rossa. Si considerano all’occorrenza in apparato le varianti presenti sulla seconda c.c. di P-o 105, Po 183, oltre che eventuali lezioni alternative presenti su P-o 102, 103 e 104, copie xerox del nucleo CL 1979 di P-o 183.
Per i passi derivanti dalla GL 1980 III, Flavius Josephus, si cita dal testo base, P-o 114.
9
P-o 106: II, (former III), msb[AMM]; (Xerox to Pisa 11.2.80), mgsnms[AMM]; New beginning for Grinfield lecture II,
30.1.80 (20.1.80), mgdxms[AMM].
10
P-o 106: World Empires <-> Dangers of Apocalyptic, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 105: id., interl.msb[AMM].
132
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
suggest that the Book of Daniel represents the answer to this simple question. The answer is of a
kind as to make the book the most conspicuous Jewish intervention in the classical debate about the
structure of world history.
[1]
II11
12
It was customary in the Hellenistic period both among Jews and among Gentiles to attribute
sayings, visions and books in general to wise men of the past. Moses, Enoch, Elijah and Ezra are
among the Hebrew men of the past to whom literary works were attributed: the Greeks used the
names of Orpheus and Pythagoras for a similar purpose. Daniel was not such a big name, but his
reputation had been on the increase for some centuries. The prophet Ezechiel 14: 4 chose Noah,
Daniel and Job as the prototypes of righteousness. Ezechiel 28: 3 taunts the King of Tyre: “are you
wiser than Daniel?” So Daniel was not only just, but wise. And he was probably not Jewish, as
Noah and Job were not strictly speaking Jewish. In the Book of Jubilees 4: 20, which is more or less
contemporary with the final version of the Book of Daniel as we have it, we find a Daniel or rather
Danel whose daughter married Enoch, the other more important biblical figure to whom apocalyptic
books were attributed in the second century B.C. If Danel and Daniel are two variant spellings of
the same name, which seems undoubted, the figure of the just man Danel may go back to the
Ugaritic text of the fourteenth century B.C., “The Tale of Aqhat”, were we find a King Daniel who
“Judges the cause of the widow, tries the cause of the orphan”i. Thus Danel or Daniel was a well
thought out hero of the past.
What is surprising is to find him placed in the courts of Babylon and Persia by the book to which
he gives his name. According to the book he would have been taken prisoner at the fall of
Jerusalem at the beginning of the sixth century B.C. (600 B.C. according to the approximate
chronology of the Book of Daniel itself)13. At present we have no idea when and how Daniel
became a hero in the sixth century B.C. According to the Book of Daniel, he was at the court of
Nebuchadnezzar to begin with, and there he and three Jewish friends had their first adventure. They
were better magicians and exorcists than all other professional magicians of the kingdom. They
[2] 14 were trained as courtiers and given Babylonian names: Daniel for instance was called
Beltheshazzarii. Nebuchadnezzar had a dream which none of the non-Jews could interpret, and he
was determined to kill his professional advisers. Dreams, needless to say, were a constant
preoccupation in real life. In an ostrakon from Elephantina of the fifth century B.C. a man writes to
his wife: “From then I have been exceedingly feverish, I saw a vision. All is well. Sell all my
belongings. The children may eat. There should be not a few left?” (J. C. L. Gibson, Aramaic
Inscriptions, II, 27iii). In our case Daniel was brought in, gave the right interpretation and thereby
saved his gentile colleagues or rivals. The dream is that of the great image with the head of fine
gold, breast and arms of silver, belly and thighs of bronze, legs of iron, feet part iron and part clay.
A stone from heaven (according to the dream) shattered the statue. In Daniel’s interpretation, the
different metals in the different parts of the statue each symbolize one kingdom, and the kingdoms
are not concurrent but successive. Like most interpreters of the present day, I regard it as virtually
certain that Daniel implied that the head of gold is Babylon, silver means Media, bronze Persia, iron
Alexander, and iron and clay his Macedonian successors. But it is important to remember that our
text of Daniel chapter 2 does not make these identifications explicit. The reasons why the
identifications seems to me certain are various. Firstly, the same identifications are mandatory for
the final part of Daniel, especially for chapters seven and eleven: indeed in chapter eleven Persia
and Greece are mentioned by name. Whether or not chapter two was written by the same author
11
P-o 106: III (former) Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic, tsf (former msb[AMM]); 4.4.79 – 2 c.c.’s sent to
Chicago; II <-> I, mgdx,sup ms[AMM].
12
P-o 102, 103, 104: cc. a-b deff.
13
P-o 183: -> 600 B.C.… of Daniel itself, del.
14
P-o 106: New 20.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
133
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
who wrote chapter seven, the compiler of the present Book of Daniel evidently took the four metals
of chapter two to correspond as symbols of world empires to the four beasts of chapter seven.
Secondly, the description of the fourth kingdom in chapter two as composite or divided can only
allude to the breaking up of Alexander’s kingdom after his death. Thirdly, the stone does not put an
end to just one dynasty, but to all earthly kingdoms – which implies that the preceding kingdoms
were not successive members of a dynasty, but successive stages of the world. This interpretation is
negatively confirmed by the [2bis]15 constatation that all attempt to interpret the four kingdoms of
chapter two as four successive reigns in the same dynasty have so far failed. I shall mention only a
recent one by Professor John Gamnie in Journal of Biblical Literature 95, 1976, 191-204iv because
it is excellently argued. Gamnie sees in the four kingdoms an allusion to the first four Ptolemies of
Egypt, but is unable to explain, among other things, why the reign of Ptolemy IV should be
described as divided or composite.
In any case Daniel makes it clear that the stone is the true God, and what follows the destruction
of the statue is the establishment of the Kingdom of God which will endure forever. Some recent
interpreters (John Collinsv) have thought that the kingdom which endure forever was originally
meant to signify the return of gold, or rather of the golden age, associated with Babylon. Thus we
would have here a pagan (Oriental) prophecy refurbished and reinterpreted by the Jewish author.
But the stone smashes all the elements of the statue, including the golden head. The story, as we
have it, excludes the return to a past golden age; it sets an eternal Jewish Kingdom of God in place
of all the empires of the past taken together. It indicates the transition from the ages of mortal
empires to the age of the one and permanent God. The statue is not meant to represent a succession
of empires: it rather symbolizes the co-existence of all the past, as it had developed through a
succession of empires, at the moment in which all the past is destroyed by the divine stone and
replaced by a new order.
[3] Before we explore the implications of this unusual idea, we must remind ourselves of two or
three other features of the Book of Daniel, such as it has reached us. The next four chapters tell
other stories about Daniel and his friends as courtiers – always talking about them in the third
person, as if the writer were registering events of the distant past. Chapter three does not concern
Daniel, but only his friends who refuse to worship a golden image set up by Nebuchadnezzar. These
Jews are thrown into a furnace, but are not burned. The King blesses the God of the Jews and
prohibits any offensive act against him. Chapter four is the story of the insanity of Nebuchadnezzar.
It is to a great extent couched in the form of an autobiographical letter by the King himself with
additional information from a narrator. The transition from the third to the first person reminds one
of the Books of Tobit and of Ezra-Nehemiah. The King confirms that only Daniel had been able to
interpret the dream which foreshadowed his insanity. Chapter five is the story of the writing on the
wall for Belshazzar who is presented as the son of Nebuchadnezzar and the last King of Babylon –
although he was neither: as a matter of fact, also Darius the Mede, who is supposed to have
conquered Belshazzar, is a strange invention. It is unnecessary to add that in 539 B.C. Cyrus the
Persian, not Darius the Mede, entered Babylon and imprisoned the last Chaldaean king, Nabonidus,
whose son and co-regent was in fact called Belshazzar. One of the Qumran texts, the “Prayer of
Nabonidus”vi, has at least shown that other Jewish Hellenistic writers knew about the identity of the
last King of Babylon. Chapter six shows Daniel ascending even higher on the ladder as a minister of
Darius. The other courtiers, jealous of his influence, trick Darius into ordering an exclusive cult to
himself for thirty days. Daniel, who prays to the true God three times a day (perhaps the earliest
evidence of this Jewish custom, unless Psalm 55: 17 has the same meaning16), obviously cannot
obey this order and is thrown into the lion’s den. But of course in the end all is well.
These episodes may have indirectly had some meaning for the generation of [4] Jews which
rebelled against Antiochus IV and his attempt to Hellenize the cult of Yahwe in Jerusalem. Daniel
15
16
P-o 106: New 20.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
P-o 183: “evening and morning and at moon I will pray”, ָא ִ ֣שׂיחָה. ו ָ֣ב ֹ ֶקר ֭ ְו ָצה ֳַרי ִם. ֶ ֤ע ֶרב, msb[Mom] con segr.
134
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
and his companions exemplified steadfast Jews who preferred death to the cult of foreign gods or of
living kings. But while these chapters presuppose Alexander the Great and the formation of the
Hellenistic monarchies, they do not allude specifically to Antiochus IV or his time. They envisage
Jews living at the courts of kings and managing in spite of all to reconcile worldly success as
courtiers with the duties of pious Jews. The situation resembles that of the Book of Esther more
than that of the Books of Maccabees. Another parallel is represented by the tale of the Tobiads in
the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephusvii. The Tobiads have nothing of the prophetic powers of
Daniel, but are altogether successful in being both courtiers of foreign kings and devoted Jews. The
emphasis is on privileged Jews, as they existed in real life, who remained faithful Jews among the
temptations of a pagan court.
The second part of Daniel is differently oriented. It is clearly concerned with the situation of
Jerusalem and the rest of Judaea under Antiochus IV and has Daniel directly communicating his
visions in the first person. The stories about Daniel and his companions are replaced by the words
of Daniel himself. It seems obvious, however, that the author or authors who composed what now
constitutes chapters 7-12 of the Book of Daniel knew the first part well. Two visions are placed in
the reign of Belshazzar, who is the last Babylonian king according to chapter five. Chapter nine, the
third vision in the second section, is placed in the reign of the imaginary Darius the Mede who
appears in the first section as the conqueror of Belshazzar. Finally, the fourth vision in chapters 1012 happens under Cyrus the Persian, who according to Daniel17 succeeded the non-existent18 Darius
the Mede. There are in fact other signs that the Book of Daniel, though composed of heterogeneous
elements, was put together with conspicuous care by an editor who was interested in producing an
impression of coherence and even stylistic harmony. The task was by no means easy because, as we
all know, Daniel is one of the two books of the Bible which are written [5] partly in Hebrew and
partly in Aramaic, the language most, if not all, Jews spoke in Palestine during the Second
Temple.19 The other book is Ezra. What is more peculiar is the quick transition from one language
to the other in the same text. In the Book of Ezra the transition is combined with the quotation of
certain Persian decrees in Aramaic, but the main Aramaic section goes beyond the simple quotation
of documents to an extent which is difficult to understand. As for Daniel, there is at least a pattern
which indicates that the editor had some idea of how to compose a bilingual work. With the present
division of chapters,20 the first chapter is in Hebrew, the next six chapters are in Aramaic; in the
second section of the book the order and the proportions are inverted: one chapter in Aramaic is
followed by six chapters in Hebrew. We may as well forget the word “chapters” because the
division of the Bible into chapters is late21 medieval; but the fact remains that in the first section of
the Book of Daniel a short portion in Hebrew is followed by a long section in Aramaic, whereas in
the second section a short portion in Aramaic is followed by a long section in Hebrew. This must be
by design and indicates that the editor of the book did his best to give it an appearance of unity.
This would be even more true if we were to follow H. L. Ginsberg in his very acute, but to my mind
unconvincing theory that the text of Daniel was originally all in Aramaic, but was later partly
translated into Hebrewviii. What matters to us is that the man who put together the stories about
Daniel now in the first section and the visions of Daniel now in the second section wanted to
emphasize the unity of the work and the relevance of the first section to the interpretation of the
second section.
Now the second section develops that philosophy of history which we have already found in the
second chapter of the first section. It must immediately be emphasized that the idea of the
17
P-o 106: according to Daniel, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 183: id., mgdxmsb[Mom].
P-o 106: the non-existent, interl.msb[AMM].
19
P-o 106, 183: the language most ... Second Temple <-> Both Ezra and Daniel were put together in the period of the
Second Temple when the Jews spoke Aramaic in daily life, but still used Hebrew as their liturgical language,
interl.msb[106 AMM, 183 Mom].
20
P-o 106: With the present division of chapters, interl.msb[AMM].
21
P-o 106: late, interl.msb[AMM].
18
135
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
succession of empires is taken up again and expanded, but the symbolism of the metals which was
associated with it in the statue of chapter two is not retained. In chapter seven Daniel tells of [6]22
his dream of the four beasts: lion with eagle wings, bear, winged leopard, and a nameless monster
with ten horns. The first23 three beasts must respectively symbolize Babylon, Media and Persia. The
ten horns of the fourth monster certainly symbolize three Macedonian and seven Seleucid kings,
and the eleventh little horn which later developed among them is Antiochus IV. Each beast dies in
turn, and what follows the four empires is the kingdom and dominion of the people of the Saints of
the Most High – an everlasting kingdom. Whereas the first four kingdoms are represented by beasts,
the fifth kingdom is symbolized by the Son of Man. The allusion to Antiochus IV also includes a
reference to his war with Egypt in 169 B.C., as the pagan philosopher Porphyry recognizedix in the
third century A.D. There is also a clear reference to some persecution of the Jews, but not, as far as
we can see, to the prohibition of circumcision and of the Sabbath. It would seem, therefore, that
chapter seven was written between 169 and 167 B.C., and the author expected the persecution to
last three and a half years.24
In chapter eight Daniel reports another vision. This time the ram symbolizing Iran is trampled
down by the goat representing Alexander the Great. The ram as Persia is to be found also in
traditions of astrological geography analysed by F. Cumont in Klio 9, 1909, 265-273x. This is
essential confirmation of the interpretation which identifies the last monarchies with Persia and
Macedon. A rapid transition brings us to Antiochus IV and his prohibition of burnt offerings in the
Temple of Jerusalem, which we know to have happened about December 167. The persecution is
supposed to last 2,300 evenings and mornings, that is 1,150 days or three years and three months,
not three years and six months. We deduce that the prophecy of chapter eight must have circulated
independently of the prophecy of chapter seven. Chapter nine interrupts the prophecies of the
succession of empires and is a meditation by Daniel on the text of Jeremiah predicting that the
desolation of Jerusalem would last seventy years. It begins with a prayer of atonement which
became a model for Kippur prayers (or vice versa). Then the Archangel Gabriel explains that
Jeremiah’s seventy years really mean “seventy weeks of years”, that is 490 years, which [6bis]25
would take us from about 587 B.C. to about 97 B.C. I have never seen a reasonable explanation of
this. If taken as a prophecy post eventum, it would date this chapter beyond the Maccabean period
well into the reign of Alexander Jannaeus. Probably Daniel did not know how to count or – rather –
only wanted to appropriate Jeremiah’s prophecy and did not pay attention to chronological
implications. If so, there is some excuse for those of his interpreters who stretched the seventy
weeks of years as far as the resurrection of Christ or the destruction of the Second Temple.
[7] The last vision in chapters 10-12 is far simpler. In a style which is more reminiscent of a
Greek chronicle than of Hebrew prophecy, the seer anticipates the main outline of events from
Cyrus the Persian to Antiochus IV. The writer, by now clearly a contemporary of Antiochus IV,
ventures his one and only prophecy on the future of Antiochus and goes wrong. He prophesies that
Antiochus will wage another campaign against Egypt, that he will win, but that he will meet his end
“between the sea and the holy mountain”, that is between the Mediterranean and Jerusalem on the
Phoenician coast. But Antiochus IV died during an Eastern campaign when he vainly tried to
pillage a sanctuary in Elymais about November 164. As the news of his death had reached Babylon
before December 18, according to the well-known cuneiform text published by Sachs and
Wisemann in Iraq 16, 1954, 202-9xi, it must have been known in Jerusalem not later than January
163 B.C. From this we deduce that Daniel wrote his prophecy turned wrong not later than the end of
164 B.C. The book concludes on an eschatological note. There is hope of resurrection for the
22
P-o 106: New 27.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
P-o 183: The first <- According to Babylonian astral geography as reported by an old source, Teucer of Babylon (F.
Cumont, Klio, 9, 1909, 263-73), del.
24
P-o 103: and a half years -> but the prophecy about the length of the persecution may have been added later, when
the persecution was [non legitur] to have lasted about three years and a half, interl.msn[Mom], del.
25
P-o 106: New 27.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
23
136
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
righteous: “Some will live forever, while others will become everlasting objects of contempt and
abhorrence” (12: 2). Daniel does not speak as if he were alone. We knows himself to be surrounded
by people who act wisely, those whom he calls the “mashkilim” (11: 33). They will help the
multitude to understand and will receive some little help from somewhere: the mysterious allusion
has been taken to point to Judas Maccabaeus and his followers, and this seems to me still the best
explanation. The wise men surrounding Daniel do not identify themselves with the revolutionary
armed activists guided26 by Judas Maccabaeus: yet they admit to being on the same side.
If we had only the second section of the Book of Daniel – which is directly inspired by the crisis
in the reign of Antiochus IV and written while he was still alive – it would have been recognized
long ago that the author or authors [8] of these visions worked on the basis of the Greek concept of
a succession of world empires. The religious interpretation, the apocalyptic finale, is of course the
specific Jewish contribution to the reading of the situation. The desecration of the Temple is for
Daniel the sign that the end of the Greco-Macedonian world empire is in sight: something like a
Messianic kingdom will replace it, though its outlines are still vague, and even the extent of
individual resurrections is left prudently undetermined. But the foundation of all this Messianic
structure is provided by the scheme of the succession of empires which we found in Polybius, and
which Polybius presupposed to be widely accepted in his own time. Traces of it are evident even for
us in preceding historians like Ephorus27 and Ctesias; and we have seen that Aemilius Sura who,
like Polybius, contributed to divulging the scheme among the Romans is likely to have lived in the
first half of the second century B.Cxii. True enough, Polybius and Sura extended the scheme to
involve the Romans. There is no reason to be surprised if people writing in Jerusalem about 164
B.C. did not yet consider Rome a world empire to be added to their scheme. All they seem to have
known about the Romans – whom they called Kittimxiii – was that they had stopped Antiochus IV
when he tried to occupy Egypt. A few years later the situation would have appeared differently. In
161 B.C. Judas Maccabaeus sent an embassy to conclude an alliance with Rome: about forty28, or
perhaps even only thirty29, years later, the author of the First Book of Maccabees was in no doubt
about the position of Rome as a world empire. In 164 B.C., even outside parochial Judaea, there
must have been many Greeks and Hellenized Orientals who still looked at the heirs of Alexander as
the latest world empire. We must not forget that Trogus Pompeius who wrote in the age of
Augustus was still using a scheme which only with difficulty admitted Rome into the series of the
world empires30.
If it is not generally recognized that the Book of Daniel turns a Greek scheme of world empires
into a scheme for the preparation of the Messianic age, this is of course because in the first section
of the book the interpretation [9]31 of the statue as a scheme of world empires seems to prove its
Oriental origin. But is this inference correct? Let us return to chapter two and its statue.
The statue is made of four different metals: it is destroyed by God’s stone. In the opinion of
Daniel, the interpreter, the four metals represent four successive empires – very probably
Babylonia, Media, Persia and Macedon, and the destruction of the statue prefigures the Kingdom of
God. The symbol is impressive because, as we have already observed, it delivers Daniel’s message
effectively: all the kingdoms of the past are going to be replaced by a new divine order. But the
metallic ingredients can hardly be said to make sense in the context. The four metals – gold, silver,
bronze and iron (to which the mixture of terracotta and iron is added to represent the successors of
Alexander) – must be deemed to represent successive stages in the decline of the earthly kingdoms.
Daniel does in fact say, as a natural compliment to the King whom he is addressing, that the next
kingdom will be lower (2, 39). But Daniel does not appear to be interested further in the process of
26
27
28
29
30
31
P-o 105, 106: guided <-> led, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 106: Herodotus <-> Ephorus, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 106: forty <-> fifty, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 106: thirty <-> forty, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 183: We must … empires, ts. tra parentesi quadre.
P-o 106: New 21.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
137
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
deterioration. His prophecy as a whole is not a description of the progressive deterioration of the
world, as Hesiod’s account of the five ages was. It would indeed be remarkable if a Jewish writer
gave the highest mark to Babylonia which had destroyed the First Temple. It seems evident that the
author of Daniel chapter two found the scheme of the metals somewhere and applied it to another
scheme, that of the world empires to which it did not belong. Now it cannot be an accident that the
scheme of the metals, where we find it outside the Book of Daniel, has nothing to do with the
scheme of the world empires. We found it in Hesiod, who describes a procession, not of empires,
but of human races, each worse than its predecessor. In Persia the symbolism of the metals was
used to indicate a succession of rulers in Persia, reflecting different stages of their attitude towards
Zoroaster and his doctrine. The details are notoriously confusing because the basic text of the
Avesta – and more precisely of the Vohuman Yasn – is lost, and what we have are medieval
commentaries, the Dînkart and the Bahman Yasht, which do not agree between themselves on the
meaning of the basic text. But fortunately for our purpose the details do not matter much because it
is at least clear that the Avesta and its commentaries – whatever their dates – [10]32 were concerned
with a succession of historical periods inside Persia, not with a succession of world empires. We
may agree that it is33 much more probable that the Jews should have learned the symbolism of the
succession of the metals from the Persians rather than from the Greeks: they were nearer to the
Avesta than to Hesiod, chronologically, geographically and intellectually. But Daniel chapter two
cannot derive from a Persian source in its combination of a series of metals and a series of empires
because, as far as we know, the notion of the succession of empires as the backbone of history is a
Greek notion34. The most we can concede is that somebody in Persia had already combined metals
and Persian kings before the author of Daniel chapter two combined metals and world empiresxiv.
The combination of metals and world empires is to be found for the first time in this chapter of
Daniel, and we shall be well advised to consider it a creation of its author until the evidence to the
contrary is provided.35 In the Hellenistic age36 a myth of human changes expressed in terms of a
succession of metals circulated both in the East and in Greece37. The author of Daniel chapter two,
who was attracted by the Greek notion of the succession of empires, had the idea of combining the
two notions of metal ages and world empires38 even if the result was bound to be somewhat
incoherent. Whether the author of Daniel chapter two was also the first to put all the metals inside a
statue I cannot say for certain; but I would consider this probable, because the co-existence of all
the ages in one image was in perfect agreement with his notion of the advent of the eternal
Kingdom of Good. It may, indeed, have been the attraction of the symbol of the statue that
persuaded him to use the combination of metals in order to express, however inadequately, the coexistence of various ages in the statue. In other words, he used the metals to indicate, not
deterioration, but temporality against eternity.
The author of Daniel chapter two was certainly writing before the time of Antiochus IV, to
whom he makes no reference. He was therefore the model for the later author of chapter seven. The
most recent historical allusion to be found in Daniel chapter two is in verse 43 where there seems to
be a fairly evident reference to the tragic outcome of the marriage between the Seleucid Antiochus
II and Berenice, the daughter of Ptolemy II, about 250 B.C.: “Just as you saw the iron mixed with
terracotta, they will be mingled by intermarriage, but they will not hold together”. The alternative
interpretation that there is here an allusion to the marriage between Ptolemy V and Cleopatra,
32
P-o 106: New 21.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
P-o 106, 183: We may agree that it is <-> It is certainly, interl.msb[AMM].
34
P-o 106: because, as far as we know ... a Greek notion, interl.msb[AMM].
35
P-o 183: As the late Professor Arthur Darby Nock one said to me: “I have reluctantly reached the conclusion that
somebody may occasionally have an original idea”, mgsup con segr, msb[Mom].
36
P-o 106: In the Hellenistic age, interl.msb[AMM].
37
P-o 106: both in the East and in Greece <-> in the East, interl[106 msbAMM, 183 msnMom].
38
P-o 106: notions of ... empires <-> successions, interl.msb[AMM].
33
138
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
daughter of Antiochus III, about 193 B.C. is far less convincing, because this marriage lasted39.
Thus it would appear that Daniel chapter two was written not much later than 250 B.C. I do not
know, of course, whether this date can apply to the whole set of chapters 1-6 [11]40 which is in any
case earlier than the reign of Antiochus IV, that is earlier than about 175 B.C. What we can now see
is that already the author of Daniel chapter two used the Greek scheme of the succession of empires.
He combined it with the basically extraneous scheme of the metal ages. The seer or seers who wrote
the second part of Daniel (chapters 7-12) were rooted, even more than he was, in Greek culture and
easily encouraged by his example to use the Greek notion of the succession of empires to illuminate
the ways of God and to express the conviction that the Kingdom of God was near, very near indeed.
III
If my story is correct, the Book of Daniel as a whole will have to be seen as a book which uses a
Greek political interpretation of history – the scheme of empires – to reach the very un-Greek
conclusion that the Kingdom of God is approaching.41 For the moment let us consider some of the
implications of Daniel’s having introduced the notion of the succession of empires into Jewish
thought either in the third or, at the latest, in the second century B.C.
The assumption that about 250 B.C. the Greek idea of world empires may have been circulating
among Jews either in Palestine or elsewhere should not cause surprise. It was a very relevant – and
very simple – idea: certainly far simpler than those philosophic notions about life, pleasure and
death which exercised the mind of Qohelet, the Ecclesiastes, about the same time. Before 200 B.C.
there were already in circulation historical works written in Greek by Jews such as Demetrius,
whom Flavius Josephus foolishly mixed up with Demetrius of Phalerum. These Jews who learned
to write history in Greek must have read some Ctesias, if not some Herodotus, and were possibly
acquainted with some of the Hellenistic writers of world history whom Polybius despised to the
point of being silent about them.
That the Book of Tobit in ch. 14, 4-7 presupposes a succession of Assyria, Media and Persia and
apparently by-passes Babylonia is neither a confirmation nor a refutation of what I have been
saying. The Book of Tobit is not concerned with world history, but with the fact that Media and
Persia granted [12]42 peace to the Hebrew nation, while Babylonia destroyed Jerusalem. It is a
different perspective from that of Daniel. Besides, we do not know either the date or the place of
origin of Tobit. The book has been dated in the fourth, third and second centuries B.C. and placed
either in Persia or in Palestine. To my knowledge, the discovery of Aramaic fragments of Tobit in
Qumran has not contributed to resolving any of our questions about this book43.
The notion of empires is conspicuously absent from other apocalyptic compositions of the
second century B.C., such as the so-called Apocalypse of Weeks and the so-called Animal
Apocalypse in the First Book of Enoch (the Ethiopian Enoch: chapters 91, 12-17 and 93 for the
former; and 83-90 for the latter). Both Apocalypses show signs of having been written about 165
B.C. The Apocalypse of Weeks divides Jewish history into ten periods, three of which are still to
come. The author lives in the seventh week, one of persecution.
39
P-o 106: because ... lasted, mgdx,infmsb[AMM].
P-o 106: New 21.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
41
P-o 103: is approaching.->A corollary of this interpretation is that Daniel, in so far as he uses the scheme of empires,
finds himself on the side of Edward Augustus Freeman who, as we recognize, was still thinking in terms of the Holy
Roman Empire in the sixties of the nineteenth century. There is another side to Daniel which would have been less
palatable to Freeman, notwithstanding his Christian upbringing: the expectation of a Kingdom of God. But this other
side we shall have to examine later, del.
42
P-o 106: New 20.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
43
P-o 106: questions ... book <-> doubts, interl.msb[AMM].
40
139
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
The most immediate heirs to Daniel’s universal history are not the typical apocalyptic books44
but the Jewish and Christian Sibylline books. They share with Daniel the interest in details of past
history. Furthermore, it has been demonstratedxv that within twenty-five years from the appearance
of the Book of Daniel there were in circulation Jewish Sibylline oracles influenced by Daniel’s
views on history.
Oracles uttered by women in trance called Sibyls were being collected as early as the sixth
century B.C. Such collections were known to the philosopher Heraclitus who describes their
character: “The Sibyl with frenzied mouth uttering things not to be laughed at, unadorned and
rough, yet reaches to a thousand years with her voice by aid of the God” (fr. 92xvi). We are
reminded that in later times the Sibyls uttering such oracles were supposed to be a thousand years
old. The Romans gave to the Sibylline oracles a place in their official religion and consequently
burnt many a Sibylline answer which was considered to be contrary to the interests of the State.
[13] 45 There is no evidence that such collections of pagan Sibylline oracle expressed any
coherent view either of the past or of the future of mankind. They seem to have been made up of
miscellaneous predictions about individual events.
When the Jews, and later the Christians under Jewish influence, adopted the form of the
Sibylline message to convey their beliefs and expectations, a transformation of the contents slowly
took place. Individual predictions yielded to comprehensive descriptions of the history of mankind
from the creation of the world – or at least from Noah – to the end of the world. Doctrinal
preoccupations were broadcast loudly. What used to be piecemeal forecasts tended to become
universal pronouncements (a compound of history and theology). The evolution from the pagan to
the Judeo-Christian form is still recognizable in the surviving collection of Jewish and Christian
Sibylline oracles. It is a collection in twelve books of uneven lengthxvii . Owing to some peculiarity
of the manuscript tradition, the collection gives the unjustified46 impression of a gap between book
VIII and book XI47. At least books I to VIII seem to have been known in their present form already
to Lactantius, the Christian writer of the early fourth century. These books are therefore earlier than
A.D. 300. Internal references and other scattered quotations help to place them between A.D. 80
and A.D. 180 circa, with exception of book III, which belongs to the second century B.C.
Through the device of Sibylline oracles allegedly uttered by pagan prophetesses, Jews and
Christians were able to communicate to the pagan readers something of their own view of history
which was different from that of the surrounding world. On the other hand few Jews and Christians
living in a pagan society were prepared to despise a confirmation of their beliefs and expectations if
it came or was supposed to come from an authoritative pagan source. To all appearances, the
Sibylline books were not only meant to persuade (or deceive) the pagans: they were meant to
encourage (if necessary, by using deception) the Jews and Christians themselves. The Christian
Fathers – not only the ignorant Emperor Constantine – eagerly invoked the support given by the
[14]48 Sibylline oracles to the Christian faith. The scholarly side of Judaism – if this is the right
definition for the rabbinic schools – was far more distrustful. I do not know of any quotation of
Sibylline books in rabbinic texts. As a pagan Sibyl was supposed to utter the Jewish or Christian
truth, there was less opportunity, or perhaps less temptation, to give sectarian versions of the Jewish
or Christian beliefs. The emphasis on monotheism against pagan polytheism is obvious. Nor must
we underrate the value of the Sibylline books as short handbook of universal history, impressive in
their imagery and easy to memorize, being written in verse. As Lactantius shows in his frequent
quotationsxviii , they were also easy to anthologize. They were less precise, but more intriguing, than
the pedestrian pagan summaries of universal history.
44
45
46
47
48
P-o 106: apocalyptic books -> (such as Revelation and Second Ezra), del.
P-o 106: 13 <-> 8, msb[AMM].
P-o 106: unjustified, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 106: and book XI -> which is, however, more apparent than real, del.
P-o 106: 14 <-> 9, msb[AMM].
140
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
The third Sibylline book is both the oldest and the most complex of the collection: it must have
been difficult to put together. Since it mentions Ptolemy VII as the most recent King of Egypt, its
main section can hardly be later than 140 B.C. The much later date suggested by Valentin
Nikiprowetsky in his valuable book on the Third Sibyl (1970)xix is, as I have indicated elsewherexx,
an unwarranted extension to the whole book of what is obviously the date of its proemium, which
contains allusions to the second triumvirate and to Cleopatra and must be dated between 40 and 30
B.C. The author is interested in the immediate past and in the imminent eschatological future, but
sees them in a perspective of universal empires which, in its precise formulation, betrays both the
direct influence of Daniel and the Jewish-Egyptian origin of the text.
According to this book, the struggle between God and Titans was also the beginning of war
among men. War produces empires (ll. 159-161). The successive empires are: 1) Egypt; 2) Persia
with its appendages of Media, Ethiopia and Assyrian Babylonia; 3) Macedon; 4) Egypt again, that
is, Ptolemaic Egypt after Alexander the Great; 5) Rome. The double mention of Egypt is enough to
reveal the author as an inhabitant of Egypt. This Egyptian Jew recognized Rome as a world empire
not later than in 140 B.C. Less than [15]49 twenty-five years before, the new empire had not yet
been perceived by his master Daniel. The third Sibylline book is certainly anti-Roman (ll. 350-365),
which confirms the impression that the mention of Rome as the fifth world empire is not likely to
be a later addition, as has been suggested. The author seems to believe that after the Empire of
Macedon two empires now co-exist – the Egypt of the Ptolemies and Rome – which would
correspond to the situation of about 140 B.C. Recognition of the eminence of Rome and hatred of
Rome often went together. If we accept that the anti-Roman allusions are part of the second-century
text, the book seems indeed to be the first literary expression of Jewish hostility towards Rome. In
being anti-Roman our author, who lived in Egypt, simply shared a widespread feeling among
Greeks and Orientals who had been humiliated either by Roman conquest or Roman protectorship.
Not all the Jews must be supposed to have shared the sympathy and admiration for Rome shown by
the First Book of Maccabees – written perhaps about 130-120 B.C., but echoing the gratitude to
Rome felt by Judas Maccabaeus who had been helped by the Romans against the Seleucids.
According to Valerius Maximus 1, 3, 3 the Jews were expelled from Rome exactly in 139 B.C.,
which seems to be more or less the date of the anti-Roman utterings of the third Sibylline book. The
coincidence is significant.
In the early first century B.C. (to judge from the Vegoia prophecyxxi ) there were analogous antiRoman speculations in Etruria: they were based on the Etruscan scheme of successive saecula
which bears a strong resemblance to the weeks scheme of Enoch and may ultimately go back to a
common model.
The inclusion of Rome in the scheme of empires and the expression of dislike or of hatred
towards Rome also go together in later Sibylline books. When these books was written no rival was
left to Rome except the distant Parthians. Only God and the Parthians were in a position to harm
Rome, and it was fairly evident that God would have to make the greater contribution. Given the
political and social structure of the Empire, apocalyptic hopes [15bis]50 were as realistic or as
unrealistic as any other hope of change.
The fourth book is of special interest because it was written by a Jew about A.D. 80 – ten years
after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem. It treats the eruption of Vesuvius in A.D. 79,
which destroyed Pompeii, as a sign of God’s wrath against the Romans. Like the Book of
Revelation, it expects the return of the Emperor Nero from the East as part of the divine visitation.
Tacitusxxii and Suetoniusxxiii prove that there were many pagans who believed that Nero was not
dead and would return at the head of a Parthian [16]51 army. The author of Sibylline IV mourns the
destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, but is not interested in the Temple cult itself. He seems
49
50
51
P-o 106: New 27.1.80, mgdx, supmsb[AMM].
P-o 106: New 27.1.80, mgdx,supmsb[AMM].
P-o 106: 16 <-> 11, msb[AMM].
141
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
therefore to have been not very distant from the circle of Johannan ben Zakkai, the rabbi who was
quietly rebuilding Judaism without the Temple. Contrary to authoritative opinion, this lack of
interest in the Temple, even if combined with an eloquent invitation to the sinners to wash their
persons in perennial waters (an echo of the first chapter of Isaiah) xxiv , is no argument for
considering book IV of the Sibylline Collection as the work of a member of a Jewish baptist sect.
What we read is rather the expression of the feelings of an Egyptian Jew with Pharisaic sympathies
ten years after the disaster. He knows five empires – Assyria, Media, Persia, Macedon and Rome –
and expects or hopes that the end of the Roman Empire will come about in consequence of an Asian
rebellion started by the return of Nero. One curious feature of his calculations is that he attributes a
certain number of generations to each empire, except Rome: Assyria is given six generations, Media
two, Persia and Macedonia one each, Rome none. Rome is left outside the ten generations. As early
as the second century B.C. (as we can read in chapters 91-93 of the First Book of Enoch) the tenth
generation or the tenth week indicated the time immediately preceding the Universal Judgement.
We know from Servius’ commentary on the Fourth Eclogue of Vergil that an oracle attributed to the
Sibyl of Cumae divided the history of mankind into the four metal ages and assigned ten
generations to these four ages taken together.52 There is an evident similarity between the Jewish
Fourth Sibylline and this pagan product of the Sibylline industry, but the mere fact that the pagan
put the tenth generation under the rule of Mithras (the sun god) indicates the difference of outlook
between the two writers. Justice and happiness, Mithra’s gifts, were not what the Jewish Sibyllist
expected from the tenth generation and even less from Rome which followed it. Our author, in
leaving Rome outside the scheme of the ten generations, probably meant to imply that the empire of
Rome was not the last stage of mankind, but the first stage of the end of the world, so bad an empire
it was.
[17]53 Even more explicitly, the fifth book announces its anti-Roman character in its first line:
“Now come to hearken to the woeful chronicle of the sons of Latium”. There are in the book a
couple of explicit Christian statements which can easily be treated as interpolations into a text
which appears otherwise entirely Jewish (l. 68; ll. 256-9). The real difficulties of the fifth book are
elsewhere. First, the list of the emperors goes as far as Marcus Aurelius, though in the54 text there
seems to be no allusion to specific events later than a comet of A.D. 7355 known also from Pliny,
Nat. Hist. 2, <22>56xxv. Secondly, the Emperor Hadrian, who ruthlessly repressed the rebellion of
Bar Kochba and made Jerusalem uninhabitable to Jews, is defined in the same list as “a most
excellent, most noble and dark-haired prince” (ll. 48-49). We know of course from certain rabbinic
sources that in the first years of Hadrian’s reign some Jews were hoping that he would order the
reconstruction of the Templexxvi . But the fifth book is under no delusion of this kind. The writer
expects the end of the world – and the destruction of Rome, “the unclean city of Latin land”xxvii .
This excludes any hope of his part for a restoration of the cult in Jerusalem by imperial concession.
I suspect that most of the text of the fifth book was written immediately after the destruction of the
Temple, that is about A.D. 75; but I have no explanation for what would be later additions and in
particular for the strange compliment paid to Hadrian. Perhaps the characterization of Hadrian was
introduced in irony by a later reader who could count on the widespread Jewish and Christian
dislike of an emperor who (apart from anything else) had deified his lover Antinous57.
52
P-o 183: Sibyllini, quae Cumana fuit et saecula per metalla divisit, dixit etiam quis quo saeculo imperaret, et Solem
ultimum, id est decimum voluit: novimus autem eundem esse Apollinem, <Servius in Verg.Ecl. 4,4>, mginfmsb[Mom]
con segr.
53
P-o 106i 17 <-> 12, msb[AMM].
54
P-o 183: following, interl.msb[Mom].
55
P-o 183: 73-4 probably known, interl.msn[Mom].
56
Docc.: 2,25.
57
P-o 106: Perhaps the characterization ... his lover Antinous, ts. affiancato da x, mgsnmsb; P-o 183: I cannot believe
that the characterization of Hadrian is a disguised sarcasm by a later reader who could count on the widespread Jewish
and Christian dislike of a homosexual emperor <-> Perhaps the characterization… his lover Antinous, interl.ms.
142
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
Enough has been said to indicate the atmosphere of anti-Roman feeling and of eschatology
which, against a background of universal history, characterizes the Jewish Sibylline books. The
Christian Sibylline books followed the Jewish model in this. The Christian book VIII, which
probably belongs to the age of Marcus Aurelius, take the third book as a model. It defines Rome as
the fifth empire and enjoys describing the progressive decline of her power, “for indeed the glory of
the eagle-bearing legions shall fall” (78). [18]58 Books I and II, which were originally a unity,
represent the transitional stage from the Jewish to the Christian Sibyllines. Indisputably Christian in
their present form, and probably belonging to the middle of the second century A.D., they tell the
story from the creation to the end of this world, and the destruction of the Roman Empire as an
inevitable stage in the process. They confirm that in the first two centuries of the empire hatred of
Rome united many Jews and Christians, notwithstanding their doctrinal disagreements. We can only
admit that Gibbon was consistent in his admiration for the golden age of the Antonines and in his
dislike of Jews and Christians.59
Appendice: l’Apocalisse di Giovanni
[19] Let us take Revelation as our example: it is the one with which we are all familiar. The
identity of the author – a John who is confined on the island of Patmos and writes circular letters to
seven churches of Asia – does not matter much: it may even be that the initial letters have a
different author from the rest of the book. The date of the visions does matter. A tradition going
back at least to Irenaeus (Adv. Haeres. 5, 30, 3) in the late [20]60 second century dates Revelation
under the emperor Domitian (81-96) who harrassed both Jews and Christians – to what extent we
have not enough evidence to determine. But the Domitianic date does not emerge from the text
itself. We may indeed suspect that it is in conflict with the evidence provided by the text. In chapter
17 there is a rather complex piece of description of the Roman State as a beast with seven heads and
seven hills on which a harlot sits. The seven hills are clearly the seven hills of Rome, and the seven
heads are seven Roman emperors. The harlot sitting on the hill must be the city of Rome, the new
Babylon, even if some commentators drag their feet over this. Five of the heads (the text says) –
that is, five of the emperors – have already passed away, the sixth is now reigning and he will be
followed by a seventh for a brief period. The eighth, and last, king will not be new, but rather one of
the previous seven. If we start from Caesar, whom Suetonius considered one of the legitimate
emperors, the seventh emperor is Galba who effectively reigned only for six months, from June 68
to January 69 – the brief period mentioned by Revelation. In such a chronology Nero is the sixth
emperor. He is also undoubtely the eighth emperor who is said by Revelation to be not new, but one
of the previous seven. No other emperor could be characterized as both one of the first seven and
the eighth. As we know, many Romans did not believe that Nero had committed suicide in June 68
and expected him back from the East. To judge from the text, the author of Revelation says that he
himself is writing under the reign of Nero, but in fact he knows of Nero’s elimination and his
replacement by Galba. He also knows that Galba is about to fall and that many people are waiting
for Nero’s return. His knowledge stops at this point – which means that he wrote in the later part of
A.D. 68. The empire was torn by rebellions in the provinces and by civil war; Nero, the emperor
who had persecuted the Christians and launched the massive military operations against the Jews in
Palestine, had disappeared, whether for good or to return with the Parthians. An appropriate
moment to foresee the imminent end of the world. I must therefore confirm my old allegiance to the
Neronian date for Revelation, which I declared in 1934 when my chapter on Nero appeared [21]61
58
P-o 106: 18 <-> 13, msb[AMM].
P-o 106: end of Grinfield II, mgdxmsb[AMM]. Le successive cc.18-19(inizio) sono evidenziate a mg. in P-o 106 con
linea ondulata verticale, accompagnate da nota ms.[AMM] “This § to go on p. 3 of Grinfield lecture III” e spostate ad
loc.: The Sibylline books were bravely trying ... such distinctions were perhaps not always clear-cut), per cui vd. c. 3.
60
P-o 106: 20 <-> 15, msr[AMM].
61
P-o 106: 21 <-> 16, msr[AMM].
59
143
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
in the Cambridge Ancient History, Vol. Xxxviii . The date seems to be corroborated by the notorious
passage of the measurement of the Temple in chapter 11. Whatever this passage may mean, prima
facie it presupposes the existence of the Temple of Jerusalem which was destroyed in the year A.D.
70.
Revelation presents Rome as the only empire worth considering. Rome is the antithesis of a city
which is also a Temple, Jerusalem. In so far as Rome is the antithesis of Jerusalem, it can also be
characterized as Babylon – the previous enemy of Jerusalem. It seems to me that the author of
Revelation takes it for granted that in the Messianic millennium preceding the Universal Judgement
there will be a Temple in Jerusalem. As the Temple in Jerusalem had not yet been destroyed (or at
least it had not been reported as destroyed) when he wrote, there was no need to say explicitly that
the Temple would be there during the millennium: ex hypothesi it was just there. Unlike the Jesus of
the Gospels the author of Revelation does not expect – and in any case does not want – the
destruction of the Temple. The confirmation is that when in his opinion there will be a time without
a temple, he makes this crystal clear. After the Last Judgement the new Jerusalem, which is the
centre of the New Heaven and Earth, will have no temple of stone, because its Temple will be the
very sovereign Lord God and the Lamb. In the same spirit there will be no sun or moon and
consequently no night, because the Lamb will be the Light.
The specific attitude of Revelation towards the contemporary Jews is no part of our argument. It
cannot escape attention, however, that there is a difference on this point between the introductory
seven letters to the Churches and the main body of the textxxix . The introductory letters speak of the
Jews “as those of Satan’s synagogue who claim to be Jews but are lying frauds” (3, 9). The main
body of the text has no hostile word against the Jews and foresees salvation for 144,000 Jews
(12,000 for each of the twelve tribes). We may ask ourselves whether the man who wrote the
introductory letters to the seven churches is also the man who wrote the main text. The linguistic
evidence, [22]62 taken alone, is indecisive about the unity of Revelation.
In any case the work as a whole shares with important strata of the Jewish population the hope
that the Roman Empire will disappear. Jewish apocalyptic had a determining part in persuading the
Jews to fight and die against the Romans.63
i
Leggenda di Aqhat, rr. 24-25.
Dan. 4.9, 19.
iii
GIBSON 1975, 27.
iv
GAMNIE 1976.
v
J.J. COLLINS 1975A; ID. 1975b; ID. 1977.
vi
4Q242 (4QPrNab) vd. MILIK 1956, tav.I; CROSS 1984; GARCIA MARTINEZ 2003, 475-6.
vii
Ios. Ant. 12, 154-241 (per i successi di Giuseppe e Ircano prima della costruzione della fortezza presso Tyros e
della ellenizzazione degli ultimi Tobiadi, cfr. 12.160-227); per un precedente contributo momiglianeo sul tema si
rimanda a I Tobiadi nella preistoria del moto maccabaico (= I Tobiadi).
viii
GINSBERG 1948; ID. 1949.
ix
Porphyr. CChr, fr. 43a Harnack (= 464a Stern); cfr. BERCHMAN 2005, 157.
x
CUMONT 1909.
xi
SACHS- WISEMANN 1954.
xii
Vd. GL 1980 I (Universal History), c. 12 e n. xvi.
xiii
Originariamente la parola Kittim designava in ebraico la città di Kition su Cipro (o l’intera isola). Geremia 2,
10 sembra attestare per primo un’estensione dell’espressione al distante ovest, mentre Daniele 11, 30 ricorre a Kittim
indicando miratamente i Romani, in riferimento al loro intervento in Egitto del 168 a.C. Cfr. in proposito The Romans
and the Maccabees (= Roman-Maccabees), 747.
xiv
Cfr. Daniele 37-8 per un ulteriore contributo momiglianeo sull’argomento. Il passo in questione risulta più
possibilista rispetto a GL 1980 II rispetto alla prospettiva di uno scambio tra letteratura iranica e Dan. 2, benché
ii
62
P-o 106: 22 <-> 17, msr[AMM].
Da qui alla fine del documento: P-o 106 = P-o 114 (Flavius Josephus), cc. 18-20 (cfr. apparato ibid. per eventuali
discrepanze).
63
144
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
II. Daniel and the World Empires
concordi nel negare che l’autore di Daniele trovasse in tali fonti il principio di adattamento dei metalli
all’interpretazione della storia universale come successione di differenti imperi.
xv
FLUSSER 1972.
xvi
Die Fragmenter de Vorsokratiker, ed. by H. Diels and W. Kranz, 6th ed., Zurich 1951, I, fr. 92 = Plut. De
Pythiae oraculis 397A.
xvii
Per le edizioni di riferimento (dello stesso Momigliano, cfr. From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil [=From the
Pagan] 730, n. 5) si rimanda a GEFFCKEN 1902, al testo dei libri I-XI in traduzione tedesca e commento di KURFESS
1951 e alla traduzione inglese di Collins, J.J., in CHARLESWORTH 1983-85 I, 317-472. Vd. inoltre J.J. COLLINS 1987
(cfr., per un aggiornamento, ID. 1997) e Goodman, M., in SCHÜRER 1986, III 617-54.
xviii
Per una rassegna delle cinquantasette occorrenze di versi sibillini presenti nelle Institutiones di Lattanzio, cfr.
BOWEN-GARNSEY 2003, 18.
xix
NIKIPROWETSKY 1970, 216, data l’intero libro alla età del I sec.a.C., considerandola una composizione unitaria
risalente al tempo di Cleopatra VII e del secondo triumvirato: solo il v. 736 (su Camarina) e i vv. 63-74, che descrivono
la Samaria come “Sebaste” e vanno quindi datati dopo il 25 a.C., sarebbero aggiunte posteriori.
xx
Momigliano, A., La portata storica dei vaticini sul settimo re nel terzo libro degli Oracoli Sibillini (= Portata
storica), cap. II; cfr. inoltre la ripresa in Id., From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil (= From the Pagan) 733-36.
xxi
LACHMANN 1848, I 350. Si rimanda inoltre allo studio di HEURGON 1959, che in nota di apertura si dichiara
“very much indebted to A. Momigliano and S. Weinstock for valuable suggestions”.
xxii
Tac., Hist. II.8
xxiii
Suet., Nero LXII.
xxiv
Or.Sib. V 165; Is. 1,16.
xxv
Il passo a cui Momigliano sembra fare riferimento è Or. Sib. V 298-9: dopo la menzione, ai vv. 286-97, di un
fortissimo terremoto che parrebbe identificabile con quello del 17 d.C. menzionato da Tac. Ann. ii, 47 e Plin. N.H. ii,
86, la Sibilla allude a una meteora successiva provocata dalla collera divina. Il riferimento a Pl. N.H. 2.25 (vd. apparato)
è però verosimilmente un lapsus: nel passo in questione si parla infatti di una cometa avvistata nel 42. a.C., quando
Decimo Bruto fu assediato a Modena da Antonio, mentre è in Pl. N.H. 2.22 che si menziona un avvistamento avvenuto
in occasione del quinto consolato di Tito.
xxvi
Genesis (=Bereshit) Rabbah 64,10.
xxvii
Or.Sib.V168
xxviii
MOMIGLIANO 1034D.
xxix
Per un ulteriore contributo momiglianeo sul tema dell’unità del testo cfr. From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil
(=From the Pagan), par. IV. Qui si fa riferimento, in particolare, alla divisione nelle attribuzioni proposta da
MASSYNGBERDE FORD 1975, 28-37, che prevede l’assegnazione del principale corpo della visione a Giovanni Battista.
Momigliano ritiene tuttavia che né l’attribuzione in questione né la separazione delle lettere preliminari dell’Apocalisse
dalla visione centrale possano considerarsi legittime, posta anche e soprattutto l’omogeneità stilistica che caratterizza
complessivamente il testo.
145
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
GL 1980 III Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian
Historiography
Sedi e date:
CL 1979
(10 maggio, cfr. D-a 1)
GS 1979
(29 novembre, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 420)
GL 1980
(6 febbraio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 422)
Documenti
a) CL 1979 V [the Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian Historiography]
P-o 107 (a), P-o 108 mss.
P-o 176 (b) top c. di P-o 108
P-o 107 (c), P-o 120: c.c. di P-o 176 (b).
P-o 109 [escluse pp. 8-19, confluite in P-o 105(c)1] nuova versione ds. basata su P-o
107 (a-b-c), top c.
P-o 176 (a), P-o 110 [escluse pp. 8-19, confluite in P-o 106], P-o 111 (b)
[escluse pp. 8-16, confluite in P-o 183(c)]: c.c di P-o 109.
(P-o 106, P-o 183) c.c.
b) GS 1979 II [Flavius Josephus]
P-o 111 (a) ms. + (b).
P-o 112 xerox di P-o 111 (a-b)
P-o 113 (b) nuova versione ds., top c. basata su P-o 111(a-b)
P-o 114 (b), P-o 125 (a), P-o 124 (b): c.c. di P-o 113 (b)
c) GL 1980 III
P-o 113 (a) top c., introduzione e aggiunte per GL 1980 III
P-o 114 (a), P-o 125 (c), P-o 183 (d) c.c. di P-o 113 (a)
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Come nel caso della precedente lecture, anche per Flavius Josephus il passaggio nei tre cicli
Chicago – Princeton – Oxford ha determinato accanto a un ripensamento della struttura anche
quello del titolo, divenuto tale solo in occasione del Gauss Seminar a partire da un originario The
Paradox of the Roman Empire and Christian Historiography. Di questa prima versione CL si
conservano come testimoni P-o 107 (parzialmente ms.; dopo le pp. 1-9 segue la versione ds.) e P-o
108, a sua volta base della top c. P-o 176; le c.c. di P-o 176, P-o 107 (c) e P-o 120, così come la
nuova versione ds. basata sull’assemblamento delle componenti mss. di P-o 107, la top c. P-o 109.
Già in P-o 109 si individua un intervento significativo nell’evoluzione dallo stadio di Chicago a
quello di Princeton, lo spostamento di una consistente sezione centrale (cc. 8-19) dal testo di The
Paradox a quello della lecture precedente, Daniel and the World Empires2. Lo stesso spostamento è
presente anche nelle altre c.c. di P-o 109, P-o 110 e 111. P-o 111 si qualifica a sua volta come
documento composito e già evidentemente testimone della versione GS: il nucleo ds. CL (cc. 1-7;
17-19) è qui preceduto dall’inserto manoscritto con la nuova sezione incipitaria della lecture (cc. 19), dal titolo Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography.
Questo stato provvisorio del testo, riprodotto dalla copia xerox P-o 112, appare modificato nella
versione rivista P-o 113 e nelle sue c.c. P-o 114, 125 e 124. Come già altrove, queste stesse copie
GS vengono recuperate da Momigliano per l’integrazione in vista della definitiva versione GL
tramite l’inserimento di una nuova introduzione (cc. 1-3) e aggiunte (c. 15).
Come base per l’edizione della lecture si è scelto P-o 114. Si tratta di un fascicolo di 21 cc. dss.,
rivedute e corrette a mano. L’ultima fase di interventi, effettuati con penna rossa, sembra risalire al
4.2.1980 (cfr. nota su c. 183). Tutte le pagine risultano c.c. di P-o 113, tranne tre: c. 7 (la parte
finale, la cui dattiloscrittura in P-o 113 appare frettolosa e con interlinea ridotto, è ricoperta da una
1
Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic, aggiunte da P-o 109 (CL 1979 V) prob. per GS 1979 II.
P-o 109 reca infatti la nota ms. su c.1: “Pp. 8-13 removed from this set and inserted (as pp. 13-18) in Grinfield
Lecture II (Daniel and the World Empires) 27.1.80; also pp. 14-19 (= 14-24) as end of lecture II”, mgaupmsn[AMM]..
3
New 4.2.80, mgsupmsr[AMM].
2
146
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
striscia ds. corretta); c. 16 (le ultime due righe, che hanno in P-o 114 interlinea ridotto, presentano
in P-o 113 un interlinea normale); c. 18a (la quartultima e la terzultima riga mostrano in P-o 114
interlinea ridotto).
Infine, indicazioni mss. di AMM sulla c. 3 inducono a confermare la presenza di una porzione di
testo proveniente da P-o 106 (GL II 2, Daniel): cfr. infra, apparato alla lecture, nn. 7 e 8. Sulla
presenza di duplicati nel testo, interessato nel finale (cc. 18-20) dalla riproposizione letterale di un
intero paragrafo di GL 1980 II (Daniel and the World Empire), si rimanda invece all’introduzione
alla lecture in questione (par. 3, alle pp. 130-31).
2. Argomento della lecture
Fino al I sec. d.C. lo schema (mutuato da Daniele) di successione degli imperi viene conservato
negli Oracoli Sibillini come sfondo dell’attesa messianica, benché con il passare del tempo gli
imperi più antichi perdano progressivamente di interesse e il vero contrasto venga sempre più
identificato, come si evince dalle apocalissi della seconda metà del secolo, in quello tra Roma e
regno di Dio. La particolare attenzione di Flavio Giuseppe per Daniele acquista significatività se
colta in prospettiva a questi scritti contemporanei e alla sua volontà di neutralizzare qualsiasi
interpretazione ostile al potere dell’impero romano. Lo storico recupera Geremia, Ezechiele e
soprattutto Daniele come profeti di Roma anche al prezzo di inevitabili imbarazzi esegetici: è
costretto a tralasciare l’esito apocalittico delle visioni contenute in Daniele; costruisce un intero
episodio, quello della visita di Alessandro Magno al Tempio di Gerusalemme, allo scopo di fare del
profeta una figura propizia agli imperi. Questo conduce inevitabilmente Giuseppe a sottovalutare la
portata della componente apocalittica in Daniele e insieme anche di tutta quella presente nella
letteratura contemporanea; al tempo stesso, la sua resistenza alle tendenze centrifughe rispetto
all’impero gli impedisce di cogliere l’importanza di sinagoghe e rabbini.
In ambito romano, se Livio riasserisce la validità del vecchio tipo di annalistica nazionale,
spontaneamente centrata su Roma, gli storici pagani non danno segno di voler emulare
l’universalismo polibiano, finendo piuttosto per isolare la storia di Roma in paradossale parallelo
con la visione storica dei Sibillini. I sentimenti pessimistici che animano tali storici non sfociano
però mai nell’idea che l’impero possa finire: a corruzione e minacce dall’esterno fa da contraltare il
sentimento classicista di consapevolezza della nobiltà passata che si accompagna, in una visione
ciclica, alla speranza di un ritorno dell’età aurea. Saranno piuttosto gli storici cristiani ad adoperarsi
per ricordare la transitorietà del mondo, assumendosi il compito di sviluppare le idee sibilline e
apocalittiche in direzione di un’analisi critica delle possibilità di riconciliazione tra impero di Roma
e regno di Dio. La conversione di Costantino induce Eusebio a credere nella possibilità di una
convergenza tra i piani; Agostino, teorico dell’antagonismo permanente tra città terrena e città
celeste, perde invece questa certezza, ma assegnando a Roma una funzione di preparazione alla
civitas Dei ottiene una mediazione tra l’immagine satanica riservatale dall’Apocalisse e l’ottimismo
provvidenziale di Eusebio.
3. Note di contenuto: Flavio Giuseppe, tra testi editi e nuovi progetti.
Come le altre lezioni del ciclo Daniel and the Origins of Universal History, anche Flavius
Josephus è andato incontro nel 1980 a una destinazione editoriale autonoma, sia pure in forma
ridotta (storici pagani e nascita della storiografia restano ai margini dell’operazione), all’interno
dell’introduzione alla traduzione italiana del saggio di P. Vidal Naquet, Flavius Josèphe, ou du bon
usage de la trahison. Ѐ un’introduzione dal taglio peculiare, come si apprezza fin dalla scelta del
titolo, Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide (= Ciò che Flavio), finalizzato – prima ancora che alla
presentazione della monografia – all’enunciazione di una concezione di Flavio Giuseppe come
interprete fallimentare del giudaismo rinnovato, che rappresenterà il punto di partenza di ogni nuova
riflessione di Momigliano sullo storico della guerra giudaica:
147
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
Per Flavio Giuseppe l’adozione del greco ha il significato opposto [i.e. rispetto alla traduzione
giovannea del sentimento apocalittico] di indicare la desiderabilità che il giudaismo, così come egli lo
concepisce, viva entro la civiltà greco-romana. Ma apocalisse e sinagoga sono estranee a quel modello
di giudaismo che egli, a torto o a ragione, ricava dalla Bibbia e dalla sua esperienza e presenta ai suoi
lettori gentili o, se ebrei, ellenizzati. (…) Preferisce accentuare quanto si è già avverato, cioè il
dominio di Roma, e conservare nell’ombra quanto è ancora nascosto, perché futuro. La diffidenza
contro gli entusiasmi apocalittici qui si combina in misura non accertabile con la prudenza di chi sa di
essere sorvegliato4.
Non è una prospettiva lusinghiera. In Ciò che Flavio Momigliano valuta con durezza tanto il ruolo
socio-politico di Giuseppe quanto, soprattutto, la sua ricettività di storico. L’errore di prospettiva,
considerato frutto del calcolo “di chi sa di essere sorvegliato”, costa a Giuseppe il giudizio di “un
giudaismo appiattito, non falso e non triviale, ma retorico, generico e poco reale” così come la
definitiva esclusione “dalle correnti vitali del giudaismo del suo tempo” (p. xix).
L’analisi condotta finisce dunque per affiancarsi, piuttosto che sovrapporsi, a un’ulteriore
pubblicazione licenziata sul tema appena un anno prima, Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to
Jerusalem (=Alexander’s visit). Qui Momigliano attinge piuttosto dal materiale legato all’episodio
della visita di Alessandro Magno al Tempio, così come descritta nell’XI libro delle Antichità
Giudaiche: dopo l’alleanza con i Samaritani, Alessandro marcia alla conquista di Gerusalemme, ma
si ferma presso le porte riconoscendo nel sacerdote Jaddus l’uomo che in sogno gli ha promesso
l’impero persiano. Viene quindi condotto all’interno del Tempio dove riceve lettura del libro di
Daniele, in cui trova conferma della profezia di vittoria (11, 337); per la gioia concede allora agli
Ebrei di vivere secondo la propria legge, privando in parallelo i Samaritani dei suoi favori.
L’individuazione di una sovrapposizione tra fonti (due, discordanti, sui rapporti tra Alessandro e
i Samaritani, oltre che l’intrusione di un duplicato profetico al racconto del sogno, rappresentato
dall’episodio della lettura di Daniele nel Tempio) porta Momigliano a una formulazione di un
giudizio non positivo sulla padronanza di Flavio Giuseppe nell’uso delle fonti (giudizio che
costituirà poi un elemento portante della futura GL 1982 II, The Jewish Sects), ma soprattutto offre
spunto per la suggestiva tesi dell’autoinvestitura di Giuseppe a “erede profetico” di Daniele, tramite
l’elevazione del secondo a fonte di legittimazione del potere macedone e – in prospettiva – di quello
romano, che appare al cuore anche della sezione dedicata a Flavio Giuseppe nella GL qui presentata
(cc. 4-10).
Nella lecture si apprezza, in proposito, un fenomeno rilevante. La tesi del recupero strumentale
di Daniele da parte di Flavio Giuseppe e quella del rifiuto di quest’ultimo per l’apocalittica
dialogano tra loro, finendo per sostenersi vicendevolmente; l’efficacia della costruzione così
ottenuta apre uno spiraglio sulle nuove possibilità di indagine di una figura il cui complesso valore
storico finisce per trascenderne opportunismo e debolezze metodologiche. Questo emerge con
chiarezza dal breve giudizio, ambiguo ma illuminante, che Momigliano riserva in Flavius Josephus
alle “conseguenze indirette” della strumentalizzazione operata da Flavio sulle profezie di Daniele, a
vantaggio dei Romani:
By common Jewish consent, the Bible had an apocalyptic dimension. Josephus could do his best to
reduce it, but he could not abolish it. What he did achieve, as far as he was concerned, was to
trivialize it, with an interesting consequence. Without a real emphasis on the Messianic age – which
would have been equivalent to an anti-Roman message - the four or five world empires were bound
to lose importance in Jewish eyes. Thus the succession of the empires became a rather peripheral and
not sharply defined section of Josephus’s historical territory. (c.9)
In sintesi, la strategia politica di Flavio Giuseppe finisce per anticipare involontariamente quella
prospettiva universalistica degli oracoli sibillini che sarà poi alla base della produzione degli storici
4
Ciò che Flavio, xvii.
148
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
cristiani. Il dato è sufficiente per ravvivare l’interesse di Momigliano: lo documentano cenni fugaci,
tra il terzo e il quarto ciclo di lectures, alla sua intenzione di riflettere ancora sul ruolo e sulla figura
di Flavio Giuseppe, nei cui confronti pare avvertire quasi un debito di indagine non sanato, la
percezione di una necessità di continuare ad approfondirne il ruolo storico5. Di tale intenzione la GL
1982 II (The Jewish Sects) rappresenterà un primo tentativo, inevitabilmente parziale: la valutazione
dell’affidabilità di Flavio nella ricostruzione delle sette giudaiche di età ellenistica offre solo uno
spaccato della questione e non riveste che valore preparatorio rispetto al proposito, formulato
esplicitamente in GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), di “riesaminare l’intera opera di Flavio Giuseppe
dalla prospettiva della reazione del giudaismo rabbinico sia alla storia che all’apocalittica”.
Forse è la mole del progetto auspicato, di chiara impostazione sistematica (se non monografica),
a far sì che rimanga irrealizzato; ma il migliore indizio della direzione verso cui Momigliano
intendeva indirizzarlo si ricostruisce probabilmente dal fugace giudizio con cui in Jews and
Gentiles chiude il suo cenno allo storico: “For it seems to me that Flavius Josephus is both the
greatest Jewish representative of the historiography of the oppressed and a chief witness for that
disenchantment of the Jews with history which was to continue down to modern times for more
than 1500 years” (c. 9).
5
Cfr. ad es. CL 1981 III (Some Exemplary), c. 2: “The limits of my time will prevent me – at least this year – from
extending my examination to Flavius Josephus. But what I am saying shoud contribute to a better understanding of
Flavius Josephus too”.
149
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
III
Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians
and the Birth of Christian Historiography*6
I
If my previous story has any substance, Greek and Roman historians used the notion of a
succession of empires to explain world history, and the notion was never an unqualified support for
the empire of the day. Polybius was more concerned with understanding than with praising Rome’s
rise to world power. Some of his successors of the first century B.C. tried to give their due to past
empires or to those unexpected competitors of Rome, the Parthians. It was, however, reserved to a
Jew to turn the Greek notion of world empires into a condemnation of all empires. That Jew, if I am
correct, was the author of Daniel chapter 2 and wrote about 250 B.C. He combined the notion of the
succession of world empires which, as far as I know, is to be found only in Greek historians with
the notion of metal ages that was to be found almost everywhere in the Hellenistic age. He
envisaged the coming of a Kingdom of God which would put an end to the succession of world
empires. His idea of universal history was received and developed by the group of enlightened
people, of mashkilim, who operated in Jerusalem about 165-164 B.C. at the beginning of the
Maccabean revolutioni and put together the present Book of Daniel. What Greek political historians
had described as a series of world powers was interpreted as the prelude to the Kingdom of God.
Sibylline books of Jewish – and later of Christian – manufacture seized on this idea. The earliest we
have, the Third Sibylline Book, is probably only twenty-five years later than the Book of Daniel,
though clearly under its influence. It acknowledges Rome as a world power – the first Jewish text
we know to do so. With the Third Sibylline Book Rome entered the horizon of Jewish
eschatological thought, never to leave it. The Christians followed the Jewish precedent.
Religious resistance to Roman imperialism was of course not confined [2] to Jews and
Christians. It was to be found more or less everywhere the Romans went. But far less has survived
of what Greek oracles, Syrian seers, Etruscan haruspices and Celtic Druids said against Rome. And
we would not expect from them the Jewish idiosyncrasy of the Kingdom of the One God, the God
of Abraham.
Until at least the early second century A.D., if not later, the Sibylline books7 bravely tried to
keep the scheme of the empires as a background for their Messianic and anti-Roman expectations.
This was after all Daniel’s legacy. But as time progressed the preceding empires were becoming
less and less real. Alexander the Great proved an exception, but as a man and a conqueror, not as
the founder of a specific Greco-Macedonian empire. Even the Sibylline books were obviously
beginning to yield to this tendency. The scheme of the four or five empires becomes vague, and in
the Jewish fifth and in the Christian second book is indeed difficult to perceive.
The same characteristic applies to the famous prophecy of the Tiburtine Sibyl and would be very
relevant to our argument if we could be persuaded by Professor David Flusser to take it as “an early
Jewish Christian document” to be dated in Domitian’s time. Professor Flusser carefully argued
paper recently appeared in Paganisme, Judaïsme, Christianisme. Mélanges offerts à Marcel Simon
(Paris 1978, 153-183)ii. The profecy itself, as is well known, has a complicated textual history both
in Greek and in Latin which was studied by Ernst Sackuriii and later by Paul J. Alexanderiv and is
now summarized, rather inadequately, by Bernard McGinn in his Visions of the End, 1979, 43-50.
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 114, c.c. rivista e corretta di P-o 113, nuova versione GL 1980 basata sul nucleo
GS P-o 111 con l’aggiunta di introduzione e integrazioni. Nei casi di duplicazione testuale si riportano, nel testo o in
apparato, le lezioni di P-o 106, ts. base della GL 1980 II Daniel and the World Empires (per cui cfr. supra).
6
P-o 114: New beginning (pp. 1-3) for Grinfield Lecture III, 6.2.80 (typed 3.2.80), tsfmgdxmsb>r[AMM].
7
P-o 114: da the Sibylline books fino a not always clear-cut) ts. proveniente da GL 1980 II (Daniel), ff. 18-19 di P-o
106, cfr. note ad loc. e qui, infra.
150
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
The basic text common to all versions drops the four empires and divided world history into ten
generations: it includes an explicit allusion to Constantine. Flusser has to eliminate this allusion to
Constantine in order to get his date under Domitian. That excision by itself is not difficultv. But I
remain with the impression that the preceding section of the Latin version, which Flusser himself
treats as part of the original text, is intelligible only as a reference to events of the third century. It is
a description of the ninth generation when “duo reges de Syria ... obtinebunt civitates et regio[3]nes
Romanorum usque ad Calcedoniam”. Who else can be these two Kings of Syria invading Roman
territory but Odenathus and Vaballathus of Palmyra? If so, the oracle of the Tiburtine Sibyl in its
earliest version is certainly to be treated as evidence for the decline of the notion of the four
empires, but has to be placed in the fourth century.
Leaving the Tiburtine Sibyl and returning to the earlier Sibylline books, it is evident that even in
them the real contrast was increasingly between Rome and the Kingdom of God – and this was
better expressed in the straight dualism of apocalyptic works like the Second Ezra, the Syrian
Apocalypse of Baruch, and of course Revelation. In this sense the apocalyptic books of the second
half of the first century A.D. are more modern than the contemporary Sibylline books. They also
indicate the way which was to lead to the conflict between the Terrestrial and the Heavenly City in
St. Augustine. Consequently the apocalypses pay altogether less8 [19 ex P-o 106] attention to the
historical setting and far greater attention to the salvation of individual souls, which plays little or
no part in the Sibylline booksvi. Making no pretence of speaking as pagan oracles, the apocalypses
can spell out their religious claims without any inhibition. They do not entirely forget the four or
five empires. But they have nothing interesting to say about the empires which preceded Rome (as
the locus classicus of II Baruch 39, 5 exemplifies). They are, however, in line with Daniel and his
Sibylline followers in two essential features. The apocalypses invariably see the end of the world as
a political event: the last empire, Rome, is both condemned and destroyed. In II Esdras, written in
the late first century A.D., and only preserved in Latin, Syriac and more recent translations, God
himself explains to Ezra that Daniel did not interpret correctly the symbol of the eagle when he
identified it with Macedon. As a good and gentle scholar, who respects other scholars’ opinions,
God says to Ezra: “This is the interpretation of the vision you saw: the eagle you observed coming
out of the sea is the fourth Kingdom that appeared in a vision to Daniel your brother. But it was not
interpreted by him in the same way that I interpret it to you or as I have interpreted it [previously?]9.
Indeed days are coming when a kingdom will rise on earth that will be more dreadful than all
Kingdoms that existed before it” (transl. J. M. Myers, Anchor Bible, 12, 11-13)vii. This kingdom is
of course Rome. Furthermore, in the apocalypses, as in Daniel, the process of destruction leads to a
new order of realities which can be characterized as a new and eternal Israel (either a Jewish Israel
or a Christian Israel, but such distinctions were perhaps10 not always clear-cut).11
[4]12 Flavius Josephus’s interest in Daniel and his reinterpretation of prophetic utterance in the
Jewish Antiquities becomes meaningful against the background of contemporary or near
contemporary sibylline and apocalyptic writings. We can assume that he knew what his fellow-Jews
were thinking and hoping, and we can quote some definite passages of his work in support of this
assumptionviii. But above all we can infer from his own presentation of Daniel that he was trying to
neutralize other interpretations. He had already done something like that during the war when he
had referred to Vespasian (Bell. Iud. 3, 402) the ambiguous oracle “likewise found in the sacred
scriptures” of the Jews (6, 312) that one from their country would become ruler of the world – an
8
P-o 114: [add here p. 19 from Lecture II (Daniel and the World Empires) from “attention to ...” to “not always clearcut)]”, mgdxmsr[AMM].
9
P-o 106: [previously?],msn[AMM], cfr. n. 7.
10
P-o 106: were perhaps <-> are, msn[AMM], cfr. n. 7.
11
P-o 106: NB. This § to go on p. 3 of Grinfield lecture III (Flavius Josephus), mgsnmsr[AMM].
12
P-o 114:Revised version (pp. 1-7 new, part of original Lect. II; and end of original Lect. III), as send at Princeton,
29.XI.79. Retyped by miss. D., 16.11.79 (2 c.c. expressed to Chicago), tsfmsb[AMM]; -> Lecture III – Flavius Josephus,
the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography. I, tsfds., del.
151
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
oracle “which more than all else had incited them to the war”. Apart from this specific reference I
am not aware that Josephus allows us to know precisely which contemporary text he read. If he was
acquainted with John’s Revelation he does not tell us. He had plenty of time to read it if Revelation
was written, as I believe, in A.D. 68 or 69.13
When Flavius Josephus wrote his Jewish Antiquities under Domitian, the best and the worst of
his life were behind him. He had failed as a politician and a general among his fellow-Palestinian
Jews; he had abandoned (and by implication betrayed) them. He also seems to have failed in his
first attempt at writing an account of the war of A.D. 66-70 which was meant to explain the Roman
victory to Aramaic-speaking Jews. This work has left no trace in Jewish tradition.14 On the other
hand he had been the protégé of emperors to whom he had predicted the throne in a bout of
prophetic inspiration which may even have been genuine. He had had his Greek version of the
Jewish War authenticated by Titus in a form for which I know no precedents in classical literature.
His material existence had been made secure by the emperors, and he was settled in Rome among
Diaspora Jews who had not fought in the Jewish war and could therefore hardly reproach him for
having run away. He had learnt their Greek and wrote, if not exclusively for them, certainly for
them [5]15 as well as for educated pagans. If the Greek Book of Baruch was put together in Rome
about A.D. 75 by Jews who were anxious to see prayers for the emperors restored in Jerusalem,
these Jews would have been friendly to Josephus. But Domitian’s government was creating some
problems both for him personally and for his fellows-Jews of the Diaspora. Josephus16 dedicated his
last two great works, the Antiquities and the Contra Apionem, to a freedman, Epaphroditus, no
doubt an important personage, but quite a come-down from the lofty protectors to whom he was
accustomed ix . Epaphroditus, incidentally, seems to be identifiable with a bibliophile from
Chaeronea who shared generic love of learning and specific curiosity for Jewish things with his
more distinguished countryman Plutarch. Josephus claimed in his autobiography that Domitian
added to his honoursx, but he had little to show for this claim. The Diaspora Jews in general were
subject to harassment by Domitian who was bent on discouraging Jewish proselytism and on
humiliating individual proselytes. What we know from our sources hardly explains the rebellion of
the Diaspora Jews under Trajanxi which reached colossal proportions in Africa and ended in equally
colossal disaster. We have little indication of the atmosphere of anguish and self-questioning in
which the rebellion must have17 matured. It is relevant to remark that not even the rebellion proved
sufficient to bridge the chasm existing between Diaspora and Palestinian Jews. The Palestinian Jews
did not join the Diaspora rebellion under Trajan and were themselves left alone by the Diaspora in
their own rebellion under Hadrian which receives its name from Bar-Kochba.
Flavius Josephus was clearly set against movements hostile to Rome18 and therefore against the
encouragement they received from the anti-Roman interpretation of prophetic texts, especially of
Daniel. He had never given up his pretension to prophetic gifts. He claimed them for the sect of the
Pharisees to which he belonged19 (Ant. Jud. 17, 43); he attributes them to his ancestor on his
mother’s side John Hyrcanus (Bell. Jud. 1, 68; Ant. Jud. 13, 299). But above all he presents himself
as skilled in divination and prophecies. Talking in the third person he describes himself as “an
interpreter of dreams and skilled in divining the meaning [6]20 of ambiguous utterances of the
Deity; a priest himself and of priestly descent, he was not ignorant of the prophecies in the sacred
books” (Bell. Jud. 3, 351-4)xii. It was not by chance that he felt such sympathy towards Daniel and
dedicated a conspicuous number of pages to paraphrasing most of his book. As he explained, “we
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
P-o 114: Apart from ... A.D. 68 or 69, mgsn e interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: This work ... tradition., interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 5 <-> 2, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: Josephus <-> He himself, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: must have, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: movements hostile to Rome <-> anti-Roman movements, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: belonged, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 6 <-> 3, msr[AMM].
152
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
are convinced that Daniel spoke with God, for he was not only wont to prophecy future things, as
did the other prophets, but he also fixed the time at which these would come to pass. And, whereas
the other prophets foretold disasters and were for that reason in disfavour with kings and people,
Daniel was a prophet of good tidings to them, so that through the auspiciousness of his predictions
he attracted the goodwill of all” (Ant. Jud. 10, 267-68)xiii. Two were, therefore, the special virtues of
Daniel as a prophet: he was less vague about chronology than his fellow-prophets and, above all, he
produced good tidings. The irksome question, however, was: good tidings for whom?
Josephus did all he could to show that not only Daniel, but other prophets had been uttering
prophecies in favour of Greeks and Romans. He stated that Jeremiah had left behind “writings
concerning the recent capture of our city” (Ant. Jud. 10, 79), by which he clearly meant the Roman
capture of Jerusalem. From the same passage it would appear that Ezechiel also had said something
on this subject. More curiously, Josephus seems to add a reference to the destruction of the Temple
and to the dispersion of the Jews in his paraphrase (Ant. Jud. 8, 296) of the prophecy of Azariah as
given in II Chronicles 15, 1. But it is of course Daniel who provides the most impressive pieces of
evidence: “In the same manner Daniel also wrote about the empire of the Romans and that
Jerusalem would be taken by them and the temple laid waste” (Ant. Jud. 10, 276). True enough, this
passage, as I have here reported it in a translation, is partially preserved only in a quotation by John
Chrysostom, Adversus Judaeos 5, 9, not a source one would consider a priori above suspicion. But
I do not know of any serious argument for doubting the authenticity of his quotation of a passage
which in the transcripts of the manuscripts of the21 original text is evidently incomplete. Josephus of
course knew – and said so twice (in the very passage and in [7]22 Ant. Jud. 12, 322) – that Daniel’s
prophecy about the desolation of the Temple had become true at the time of Antiochus Epiphanes;
but this did not prevent him from believing that the same passages or other passages of Daniel were
intended for Rome. In the same way St. Jeromexiv took passages of Daniel to be allusions both to
Antiochus and to the Antichrist.23
What Josephus was trying to do was to accept the contemporary trend of the Jewish exegesis of
Daniel which made him out to be a prophet of the Roman rule, but to suppress that part of the
exegesis which was manifestly anti-Roman. He was bound to find himself in embarrassing
situations. He agreed with those interpreters who saw in the four kingdoms of Daniel’s chapter 2
Babylonia, Persia, Macedon and Rome. He could not therefore escape the implication that the
divine stone, by destroying the statue of the empires, would ipso facto destroy Rome. It is
interesting to see how he tried to avoid drawing this conclusion from his premises: “And Daniel
also revealed to the king the meaning of the stone, but I have not thought it proper to relate this,
since I am expected to write of what is past and done and not of what is to be; if, however, there is
anyone who had so keen a desire for exact information that he will not stop short of inquiring more
closely but wishes to learn about the hidden things that are to come, let him take the trouble to rend
the Book of Daniel, which he will find among the sacred writings” (Ant. Jud. 10, 210). There was
indeed worse in Daniel when seen through the eyes of contemporary Jewish exegesis. As I have
mentioned, the prophecy of the four beasts in Daniel 7 had been interpreted to include the Romans:
the apocalyptic II Esdras24 made God himself vouch for this interpretation. It is a notable feature of
these anti-Roman interpretations that they are put into the mouth of God himself, to avoid any
chance of error. Thus in the Second Baruch 38-9, the so-called Syriac Baruch, it is God himself who
interprets the vision about the four kingdoms: “And I prayed and said: ‘O Lord, my Lord ... make
known to me the interpretation of this vision ...’ And he answered and said unto me: Baruch, this is
the interpretation of the vision which thou hast seen ... And after these things a fourth kingdom will
arise, whose power will be harsh and evil far beyond those which were before it ... When the time
21
22
23
24
P-o 114: manuscripts of the, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 7 <-> 4, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: In the same way ... Antichrist., interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: Esdras <-> Ezra, msb[AMM].
153
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
of its consummation that it should fall25 [8]26 has approached, then the principate of my Messiah
will be revealed’.” (transl. by R. H. Charles). Josephus, who was aware of the weight attached by
his fellow-Jews to the interpretation of the fourth beast of Daniel 7 as Rome, decided not to mention
the contents of this chapter at all. The omission is not fortuitous.
Josephus tells instead at great length the story of the visit of Alexander the Great to the Temple
of Jerusalem and inserts in it an episode concerning the Book of Daniel which could not be better
from his point of viewxv. Josephus, as is well known, is our earliest evidence for the story of the
visit of Alexander to Jerusalem. A second version is contained in a scholion to the rabbinic Megillat
Ta’anit under the date of 21 Kislev and in a passage of the Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 69 a. A third
version in Pseudo-Callisthenes II, 24 used to be treated as independent of the first two, but is now
suspected of being a late interpolation from Josephus. I may add dogmatically that I do not believe
in the historicity of this visit of Alexander to Jerusalem which is unknown to any of the best27
source. It is a legend which Josephus found in the Jewish tradition. The one detail of the legend
which interests us here appears in Josephus only. When Alexander is taken inside the Temple he is
shown the Book of Daniel in which his victory over the Persians was prophesied. The priests
apparently did not tell him that he was mentioned in the book. He was left to make the discovery for
himself, and he was greatly pleased. One peculiarity of this episode, as told by Josephus, is that it
has no essential function. The prophecy about Alexander’s victory is a mere reduplication of
Alexander’s previous dream which, on the contrary, is essential. When the Samaritans decided to
pass over to Alexander’s side (so Josephus tells us), the Jews were determined to remain faithful to
their oath of loyalty to Darius King of Persia. Therefore Alexander marched against Jerusalem. But
God told to High Priest not to panic: he and his fellow-priests were to go to meet the King in their
white robes. Alexander was awe-struck. He prostrated himself before the High Priest and explained
to his companion Parmenion that he had seen the same figure in a dream when still in Macedon: the
man had [9]28 promised him the empire of Persiaxvi. Thus, Alexander had no need to read in Daniel
that he would win the war. The High Priest had already told him in the dream. The substance of the
story, which connects Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem with the rivalry between Samaritans and Jews,
has nothing to do with Daniel. It has been suggested by others that it may have been first put into
circulation in Egypt when Samaritans and Jews brought their dispute about the legal rights of their
respective sanctuaries before Ptolemy VI Philometor about the middle of the second century B.C.
Ptolemy Philometor apparently found for the Jews (Ant. Jud. 13, 74-79) xvii . As I indicated in a
recent paper of mine in Athenaeum 1979xviii ,29 I suspect that the detail about Alexander the Great
being given Daniel to read was not a part of the original legend and was in fact invented by
Josephus himself. It was not a detail anyone would invent as long as the Book of Daniel was read in
an anti-Macedonian key. But neither was it the invention one would expect from a man who read
Daniel in an anti-Roman key. I attribute the invention to Josephus because there cannot have been
many who saw Daniel in the rosy colours in which Josephus saw him. But of course Josephus may
already have found this detail with the rest of the story which in his time was traditional: in that
case all we can say is that it was for him a congenial discovery. What remains true is that Josephus
would have liked Daniel (and perhaps by implication30 himself) to be a dispenser of world empires
to deserving candidates. But it was not so easy for a man who like Josephus31 had never given up
his ancestral faith and never dissociated himself from the interpretation of the Bible current in his
own time. By common Jewish consent, the Bible had an apocalyptical dimension. Josephus could
25
P-o 114: to avoid any chance ... it should fall: f. originale ricoperto da una striscia ds. corretta con interl. normale,
contenente lo stesso testo di P-o 113.
26
P-o 114: 8 <-> 5, msr[AMM].
27
P-o 114: any of the best <-> Hellenic, msb[AMM].
28
P-o 114: 9 <-> 6, msr[AMM].
29
P-o 114: As I indicated ... 1979, interl.msb[AMM].
30
P-o 114: and perhaps by implication <-> or perhaps, msb[AMM].
31
P-o 114: like Josephus, interl.msb[AMM].
154
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
do his best to reduce it, but he could not abolish it. What he did achieve, as far as he was concerned,
was to trivialize it. With an intersting consequence. Without a real emphasis on the Messianic age –
which would have been equivalent to an anti-Roman message – the four of five world empires were
bound to lose importance in Jewish eyes. Thus the succession of the empires became a rather
peripheral and not sharply defined section of Josephus’s historical territory. He did not care much
for world history. In his effort to avoid apocalyptic only made him more32 parochially [10]33 Jewish.
Even in telling the story of the Jewish rebellion of A.D. 66-70 Josephus was incapable of grasping
the evident fact that the Jews were not alone in rebelling against Rome. Modern historian who still
isolate the Jewish rebellion of 66 from the anti-Roman agitations in other provinces – and indeed
from the civil war of the year of the four emperors – are under Josephus’ spell. He underrated the
Messianic trends expressed by apocalyptic books, sibylline books and finally by what we call the
Gospels. What he said about Jesus is very little, even in the most uncritical evaluation of the
Testimonium flavianumxix. Though he had made himself a Jew of the Diaspora, he did not even see
what was the most important phenomenon of the Diaspora – the spreading of the Synagogues. He
does not show any sign of understanding that rabbis and synagogues were ensuring the survival of
Judaism and its unquenchable intellectual vitality. His vision of Biblical history was singularly
devoid of any direction toward the future. Placed as he was at the crossing between apocalypse and
synagogue, he turned his eyes away from the former and did not see the latterxx.
But we must not hasten to look down on Josephus. His position as a man and a historian was
difficult enough. In his Jewish War he indicates in an indirect way what sort of alternatives he had
been obliged to consider. He had faced suicide and had decided not to die (3, 364-378). But the
leaders of Masada had decided for suicide, and he transferred to the speech which he put into the
mouth of their representative, Eleazar, some of the thoughts which had obviously been his own (7,
320-388). He knew, as this speech shows, that facing failure of Messianic hopes was tantamount to
facing suicide.
Furthermore in this static attitude of mind, which underrated past empires and indications of
change in the structure of the Roman Empire, Josephus was rejoining most of his fellow-historians
of the gentile persuasion. Like him, they were less and less interested in the succession of empires
or capable of a universalistic outlook.
[11]34
II
As we saw, the provincials who in the time of Caesar and Augustus had been given for the first
time the chance of taking a close look at the Roman Empire produced books of history which
placed Rome in the course of universal history. This35 was done by Trogus Pompeius, Diodorus,
Timagenes and Nicolaus of Damascus, respectively a Celt from France, a Greek from Sicily, a
Greek from Egypt and a Hellenized Syrian. In the time of Caesar, they were supported or perhaps
guided on a minor scale by Italian writers such as the Cisalpine Cornelius Nepos and Cicero’s
friend Pomponius Atticus. But the next generation of36 Italians who had received Roman citizenship
en masse and considered themselves the ruling group of the Empire preferred reflecting in their own
way on Rome’s destiny – Vergil and Horace in verse, Livy in historical prose. In fact, Livy
conspicuously reasserted the validity of the old type of Roman national historiography by writing
Annals which gave an account of Roman military and political events year by year. With these
Italians the rhetoric and the universality of the Roman Empire went on side by side with the
historiographical practice of writing annalistic history centred on Rome without any pretence of
producing a world view of events. It was Cicero who before Vergil had said: “it is against sacred
32
33
34
35
36
P-o 114: only made him more <-> he merely remained, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 10 <-> 7, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: 11 <-> 8, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: This -> as we have seen, del.
P-o 114: next generation of, interl.msb[AMM].
155
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
law for the Roman people to serve: the immortal gods wanted them to rule the other nations” (Phil.
6, 19). And it was a contemporary of Cicero, the so-called author of the Rhetorica ad Herennium (4,
13), who, as far as we know, first identified the Roman Empire with the inhabited “orbis
terrarum”.37
What interest us is that its provincial corrective in the time of Caesar and Augustus – universal
history – did not find any continuators of the same importance. Brief pagan summaries of universal
history have reached us from later centuries. We have a Liber Memorialis by L. Ampelius and the
Epitome of Trogus Pompeius by Justin written either in the second or in the third century A.D.
Most of the historical literature of the imperial period is [12]38 of course lost. But there is no sign
that any pagan historian writing either in Greek or Latin carried on universal history in the
dimensions characteristic of the Caesarean and Augustan age. A typical example of the decline in
the writing of universal history in the second century A.D. is the mysterious Kephalion, a historian
who apparently lived under Hadrian as an exile in Sicily. Though most of his work is lost, we know
enough of it to form an opinion because he was appreciated in Late Antiquity by the historian of
Antioch, John Malalasxxi . Furthermore, Patriarch Photius had Kephalion’s Universal History before
him and gives some idea of its structure, though he does not seem actually to have read the whole of
itxxii. It was a work in nine books, like Herodotus’, and was written in the artificial Ionic dialect
used by those who wanted to imitate Herodotus. It included the history of the known world from
Ninus and Semiramis, the traditional founders of the power of Assyria, to Alexander the Great. The
author boasts of having consulted 140 authors with a total of 2.428 books in order to compile his
first five booksxxiii : the number of authors and books consulted for the remaining four was given but
is lost. The figures we have – 140 authors and 2.428 books – are more than even a research assistant
in a modern university is expected to produce for his employer in a period of economic depression.
Kephalion was obviously pulling his reader’s leg. What he says about mythical events in Greece
does not improve this impression, though one must admit that no historian is at his best when
dealing with myths. Universal history was becoming a farce.
A serious man, Plutarch, who was interested in so many aspects of the historical scene – from
politics to religion – used biography, not universal history, as the frame for his picture of the dual
civilization of Greece and Rome under which he lived. He developed a parallel treatment of which
Varro had given a crude example in his Imagines. About half a century later a Hellenized native of
Bithynia in Asia Minor, who had become a Roman consul, Flavius Arrianus, wrote about Alexander
the Great and his immediate successors and about the history of the Parthians, but never thought of
putting the Roman Empire in some organic connection with the Macedonian Empire which had
preceded [13]39 it or with the Parthian Empire which was its rival and enemy in the East. Arrian’s
historical outlook was less unified than that of Trogus Pompeius two centuries earlier. More
significantly, another Greek from Bithynia, Dio Cassius, who became a consul in A.D. 218 under
the Emperor Severus Alexander, adopted the annalistic tradition of the Romans when he wrote in
Greek 80 books of Roman History, probably the biggest Roman history composed after Livy and
certainly the most influential in the Greek world. Dio Cassius continued to be read either in the
original text or in an abbreviated form throughout all periods of the Byzantine Empire. To my
knowledge he was the first Greek historian to accept in full the conventions of Roman annalistic
historiography. Only Appian, in the brief passage of the introduction of his history of Rome,
compares the Roman Empire to the previous empires of Assyria, Media, Persia and Macedon, in
order to affirm the superiority of the Roman Empire in extension and duration. But he does not
return to the subject inside his historical work.40
37
P-o 114: “orbis terrarum” -> This rhetoric – rhetoric which remained rhetoric even when it was turned into fine
poetry – did not stop with the ruin of the Roman Empire and shall not occupy us any longer, del.
38
P-o 114: 12 <-> 9, msr[AMM].
39
P-o 114: 13 <-> 10, msr[AMM].
40
P-o 114: Only Appian ... historical work, interl. e mgsup, msb[AMM].
156
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
We have to register41 the strange fact that the important pagan historians living in the Roman
Empire after Augustus isolated the history of Rome. Whether they wrote in Greek or in Latin made
no difference. They forgot Polybius’ teaching, did not relate the rise of Rome to the decline of
previous empires and treated the Parthians as a marginal phenomenon of Roman history, not as the
heir of the Persian Empire. The Roman Empire was felt to have a vitality and a rhythm of its own: it
was often treated (as we had the opportunity of remarking in a previous lecturexxiv ) as an individual
going through the stages of life from childhood to old age. It was a Roman Empire virtually living
alone. The good pagan of the golden age of the Antonines did not care to communicate in an active
way with the world which had preceded the Roman Empire or with the world which was outside it.
Classicism contributed to this isolation because it offered literary and philosophical models, not as
products of specific social and political conditions of the past, but as eternally valid. In historical
matters our good pagan was by no means self-assured. He was happy to be told that he had had
noble ancestors and would have noble descendants. If he was an Athenian or a Spartan with a great
past, he wanted to be reassured by the Sophists that, glorious as his past might have been, there was
perfection in the present, too. If, notwithstanding these reassurances, he remained a pessimist, this
pessimism was, as a rule, nurtured in isolation, inward-looking and confined to the destiny [14]42 of
the Roman Empire. Tacitus at the end of the first century and Ammianus Marcellinus, his ideal
disciple in the late fourth century, did not shut their eyes to tyranny, corruption and external
dangers. But they never envisaged the possibility of the Roman Empire’s emerging from or sinking
into other empires. The science of politics can hardly develop where there is no desire to reflect on
different political systems. The Romans of the imperial age had little inclination for comparative
studies. Therefore they had no science of politics. The only allusion to the scheme of empires I
know in Tacitus is, characteristically enough, in his excursus about the Jews (Hist. 5, 8-9):43 “While
the East was under the sway of the Assyrians, the Medes and the Persians, the Jews were the most
contemptible of the subject tribes. When the Macedonians became supreme, King Antiochus strove
to destroy the national superstition of the Jews44 and to introduce Greek civilization” (transl. A. J.
Church and W. J. Brodribbxxv). In this excursus about the Jews Tacitus repeats what his Greek
source had told him about the Jews: he is likely, therefore, to preserve a Greek attempt to place the
Jews in universal history. He uses the scheme of universal history, not for Rome, but for a nation
which he, like his source, considered neither civilized nor amenable to civilization and therefore
deserving of destruction. If for Daniel the scheme of the empires serves to put the Jews above
history, for Tacitus and his source in this passage the scheme served to put the Jews below history.
In the Greek and Roman pagan literatures of the imperial epoch, the notion of a succession of
empires was mostly confined to rhetorical compositions and even there it did not play a
conspicuous role. Thus at the end of the first century A.D. Dio Chrysostom in his speech 7945 “On
Wealth” (5-6) expressed the fear that Rome might fall, as Assyria, Media and Persia had fallen in
the past, because of the corruption brought about by wealth. About A.D. 155 Aelius Aristides
delivered in Athens his grand Panathenaic Speech in which he celebrated Athens’ contribution to
civilization.46 Briefly, but pointedly, he stated that Athenian civilization [15]47 had begun at the
time of the Assyrian Empire, continued to prosper under the empires of the Persians and the
Macedonians, and now under the Roman Empire “which is in every way the best and the greatest, it
has the precedence over all (the rest of) the Greek race” (335). A compliment to Athens’ capacity to
survive every change of empire is conflated with a well chosen adulatory allusion to Rome. The
same Aelius Aristides briefly compared Rome with the other empires in his panegyric of Rome (26,
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
P-o 114: register <-> face, msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 14 <-> 11, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: (Hist. 5, 8-9): -> I quote, del.
P-o 114: of the Jews, interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 114: 79, interl.msr[AMM].
P-o 114: civilization.-> It was one of those “reassuring” orations I have mentioned, del.
P-o 114: 15 <-> 12, msr[AMM].
157
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
91). He implied that Rome had always been an empire, while the other empires had replaced each
other in turn:48 “For you alone are rulers, so to speak, according to nature. Those others who
preceded established an arbitrary tyrannical rule. They became masters and slaves of each other in
turn, and as rulers they were a spurious crew ... Macedonians had a period of enslavement to
Persians, Persians to Medes, Medes to Assyrians, but as long as men have known you, all have
known you as rulers” (J. H. Oliver, TA Philos. Assoc., N.S. 43, 4, 1953xxvi ). In these two passages
by Aelius Aristides there is little more than adulation. Finally, and more poignantly, Rutilius
Namatianus in the poem of A.D. 416, De reditu suo, when Rome had already been sacked by
Alaric, alluded to previous empires while reasserting his faith in Rome: “The stars never looked on
a fairer empire (nullum viderunt pulchrius imperium). The Assyrian arms never linked together an
empire like your empire. The Persians only subdued neighbours of their own. The mighty Parthian
kings and Macedonian monarchs imposed laws on each other through varying changes. It was not
that at your birth you had more souls and hands: but more prudence and more judgement were
yours” (Minor Latin Poets, edd. J. W. Duff and A. M. Duff, p. 771, modified).
There may be more allusions to the scheme of empires in the extant pagan and rhetorical
literature about Rome than I happen to know. But they cannot be very many and are nothing as
compared to all the other rhetorical and ideological armoury at the service of Roman propaganda.
The scheme of empires appears to be conspicuously absent from the imperial panegyrics and from
inscriptions and coins. Roman propaganda does not seem to have relied much on [16]49 the
comparison with the previous empires. Dio Chrisostom and Aelius Aristides, the two most
conspicuous exceptions, both came from Asia. Although I am not prepared to subscribe to the thesis
by Professor J. H. Oliver that Aelius Aristides’ Panathenaicus is an anti-Christian speech in
disguise (TAPhA N.S. 58, 1, 1968, n. 1xxvii ), I would not exclude a generic influence of the Jewish
and Christian society of Asia Minor in keeping alive the imagery of the four or five empires for
writers like Dio Chrysostom and Aelius Aristides who were born in that part of the world. As for
Rutilius Namatianus, he knew only too well that he was living in a world corrupted by Jews and
Christians. He answered them by extolling the immortality of Rome.
III
When the pagans seemed either to imply the permanence of the Roman Empire or at least to
avoid radical criticism of it, Jews and Christians made it their business to remind themselves and
the surrounding nations that anything in this world is transient, any empire bound to disappear –
except the final Kingdom of God (in whatever form it might be conceived). We are often told that
the main achievement of Christian historical thought was to give a precise place in universal history
to the empire created by Caesar and Augustus. This is true.50 A thought of this kind was improbable
in a Jewish mind; when it came to be formulated, it was an indication of how far the Christians had
diverged from the Jews. Yet even this radical deviation from Jewish thought would not have been
possible inside the Christian communities if many Christians, like many Jews, had not been51
puzzled by the ultimate meaning of the Roman Empire which affected their lives so deeply and
seemed to affect in mysterious ways the economy of redemption itself. The literary forms the Jews
had elaborated or refurbished to express their reaction to the surrounding empires – apocalypses and
sibylline books – were adopted by the Christians. With the form went at least part of the substance.
Apocalypses and sibylline books intimated the dangerous features of the Roman Empire and often
48
P-o 114: in turn: -> I quote, del.
P-o 114: 16 <-> 13, msr[AMM].
50
P-o 114: This is true <-> This is only one aspect of the matter, and a relatively late one, though Eusebius’ notion of
the providential role of the Roman Empire had precedents, interl.ms[AMM].
51
P-o 114: Yet even this radical ... had not been, interl.msb[AMM]<-> But in the first three centuries the Christians
remained close to Jewish thought in the sense that, like the Jews, they were.
49
158
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
propounded visions of its [17] 52 impending doom. There are good reasons to think that the
Christians christianized existing Jewish apocalyptic and sibylline books. The opposite case, of
Christian books turned Jewish by Jewish editors cannot be excluded a priori53, but I have never
seen it propounded as a fact54. However, as we have seen, not all the Jews who dealt with
apocalyptics wanted or expected the imminent fall of Rome (as the case of Josephus shows); nor are
the Jewish sibylline books uniformly hostile to Rome, as we have also seen55. This in itself
indicated various possibilities for Christian re-thinking about Rome. Ultimately it favoured the
concentration of Christian reflection on that unique relationship between Christianity and Roman
Empire, which was indicated by the mere fact that Christ was born under Augustus, and was later
confirmed by Constantine’s conversion.
I shall not even attempt here to sketch the development of this historiography which either turned
Jewish apocalyptics into a justification of the Roman Empire (Eusebius) or created on the same
basis a structure of permanent dialectical opposition between the “civitas terrena” and the “civitas
dei”. I should like only, by way of conclusion, to indicate one aspect56 of this evolution.
Relying on the apocalyptic57 hopes they had been given, the Jews fought three times, under
Vespasian, Trajan and Hadrian, with a courage their opponents were compelled58 to recognize, and
they died by the million. The Judaism which emerged from these three disasters was bound to be
very different. It was a ruined society which avoided demoralization, despair and ultimate
dissolution by submitting itself to the discipline and limitations we call Talmudic Judaism. Greek
was abandoned as a literary language, and together with Greek history and philosophy disappeared.
There would be no other Philo or Flavius Josephus for a long time. Apocalyptic speculations were
never suppressed entirely. They remained what has happy been called the hidden dimension of
Rabbinismxxviii . But they were effectively controlled – so effectively that all the apocalyptic books
written by Jews, with the exception of Daniel, slowly disappeared from the hands of the Jews and
were preserved only in the translations and adaptations made by more or less orthodox Christian
groups. The great Jewish apocalyptic literature ends [18]59 roughly with Bar Kochba and Hadrian.
The Jewish sibylline literature, being in a more popular vein and partly destined for pagan
readers, lingered on a little longer, perhaps to A.D. 200. But here again we owe its preservation to
the Christian followers and imitators. Only in a few Talmudic passages do we catch rabbis
dreaming of Romans falling into the hands of the Persians, just as the Babylonians had fallen (Bab.
Yoma 10, a; Berakhot 56a). At least in the third century there was a marked tendency among rabbis
to resign themselves to the reality of the Roman Empire60.
Paradoxically – but not absurdly – it was left to the Christians to develop the ideas which Jewish
apocalyptic and sibylline books, beginning with Daniel, had introduced into the interpretation of
history. Unlike the Jews, the Christians did not turn into collective action the hatred of the Roman
Empire which permeated Revelation and their own sibylline books. The many doubts educated
Christians felt about Revelation – doubts which went so far as to suspect the book being a forgery
by heretics – indicate that at the theoretical level, too, apocalyptic expectations encountered
opposition. Respect for and obedience to the Roman Empire were based on a long series of
authoritative statements, the earliest of which was attributed to Jesus himself (John 19, 11).
Nobody, however, was going to deny that the Roman Empire presented a problem to any Christian.
52
P-o 114: 17 <-> 14, msr[AMM].
P-o 114: a priori, interl.msb[AMM].
54
P-o 114: but I have ... propounded as a fact <-> but is unlikely, interl.ms[AMM].
55
P-o 114: have also seen <-> shall soon see, interl.ms[AMM].
56
P-o 114: one aspect <-> the main steps, interl.ms[AMM].
57
P-o 114: da Relying on the apocalyptic alla fine del testo: ± P-o 106, capp. III (fine) e IV, cfr.supra, GL 1980 II, cc.
22-3, e infra, note ad locc.
58
P-o 114: compelled <-> bound, interl.msb[AMM].
59
P-o 114: 18 <-> 15, msr[AMM]; New 4.2.80, mgsupmsr[AMM].
60
Only in a few talmudic passages… Roman Empire, def. in P-o 106.
53
159
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
The problem involved the whole status of classical civilization, as is clear from Tatianxxix in the late
second century.
The other empires could only be a distant background to the discussion. The Roman Empire was
the present reality. The pagans themselves, as we have seen, had restricted their horizon to the
present empire. The Christians had to recognize, and to face in its implications, this narrowing of
historical experience. But61 the Christians, with Daniel behind them – and more recently Revelation
– were able to ask how the Roman empire could be reconcilied with the Kingdom of God. Though
they did not provide alternatives to Rome, they could question the purpose of the Roman Empire62.
They could not follow the Roman pagans who had stopped thinking seriously about the Roman
Empire and were at best arguing about how much power should be given, or left, to the Senate. The
Christians never took the eternity of Rome for granted, and were acutely aware of the variety of
nations inside the Empire.63 One64 [18a]65 solution for the Christian was to turn the Roman Empire
into a near approximation to the Kingdom od God – and this was the solution that Constantine’s
conversion made plausible. It was spelt out, historically justified and made respectable by Eusebius
and his followers. But we must not forget that it had already been anticipated by Melitonxxx in a
time of persecution at the end of the second century.66 For Eusebius the Roman Empire was
equivalent to the world. Thus the Roman peace could be seen both as the peace of the world which
had favoured the spreading of the Gospel and, to a considerable extent, as the Messianic peace
promised by the Jewish prophets. The building of the Church [19]67 of the Holy Sepulchre ordered
by Constantine was identified by Eusebius (Vita Constant. 3, 33) with the descent of Heavenly
Jerusalem in Revelation. Orosius, who passed for a pupil of St. Augustine, still agreed with
Eusebius about the providential mission of Rome.68 More insidiously, the Church was given the
geographical dimensions of the Roman Empire. That meant that people outside the Empire were
treated with special suspicion by the Christians. The identification of the Black with the Devil was
spread by the Christians – especially monks – of the African marginal zones of the Empire where
the Black was the outsider par excellence.
Others remained less certain of the providentiality of the Empire. At the beginning of the third
century Hippolytus of Rome firmly identified Rome with the fourth empire of Daniel only to put it
nearer to the Antichrist (Comm. in Danielem 2, 7-13; 4, <7-16>; De Ant. <25>)xxxi ; and about two
centuries later St. Jerome adopted that order of ideas, though less emphatically.69
With the advantage or disadvantage of the same70 historical experience (which turned out to be
one of wars, defeats and humiliations for the Roman Empire), Augustine too was no longer so
certain as Eusebius. He culled from Revelation – perhaps through the mediation of Ticonius71 - the
permanent antagonism between the earthly Babylon and the heavenly Jerusalem and codified it in
his De civitate dei. He saw first in Assyria and then in Rome the main embodiments of the earthly
city which prides itself instead of loving God: he declared all the other empires mere appendages of
these two kingdoms (18, 2). For an heir of Greco-Roman civilization as after all St. Augustine was,
this thought is remarkable enough to deserve quotation: “But among the numerous kingdoms of the
world, into which the society motivated by world by advantage or satisfaction, which we call by the
61
The Christians… experience. But, def. in P-o 106.
Though they did not … Empire, def. in P-o 106.
63
The Christians never took… the Empire, def. in P-o 106.
64
P-o 114: da Revelation – were able a inside the Empire. One, ds. con interl. ridotto (cfr. Introduzione, par. 1).
65
P-o 114: 18a <-> 15, msr[AMM]. La parte iniziale del f. conteneva, un ts. pressoché identico a quello di P-o 106
(GL 1980 II), cc. 22 (fine)-23, poi cancellato, per cui cfr. supra, ad loc.
66
P-o 114: But we must ... second century., mginfmsb[AMM].
67
P-o 114: 19 <-> 16, msr[AMM].
68
P-o 114: Orosius ... mission of Rome., mgsupmsb[AMM]., def. in P-o 106.
69
That meant that other people… though less emphatically, def. in P-o 106; P-o 114: Others remained ... less
emphatically, ds. con interl. ridotto, scrittura originale, cfr. Introduzione, par. 1].
70
P-o 114: the same <-> another century, interl.msb[AMM].
71
P-o 114: -perhaps… Ticonius - , interl.msb[AMM], def. in P-o 106.
62
160
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
general name the ‘city of this world’ has been divided, we note that two powers have gained far
greater fame than the rest, first that of the Assyrians, and later that of the Romans, as neatly
arranged and well spaced from each other in time as in place” (transl. E. M. Sanford and W. McA.
Green, Loeb. ed.)72. But St. Augustine not only eliminated the Greeks: he also eliminated73 the
Jewish millennium to which the author of Revelation, still close to his Jewish roots, had clung. By
eliminating the millennium, St. Augustine was able to save the Roman Empire in the sense that the
Roman Empire had a function in the present world in relation to the heavenly city: “The Roman
Empire was expanded to be glorious among men not merely to pay such men such recompense as
they deserved. It was also intended for the benefit of the citizens of the eternal city while they are
pilgrims here” (5, 16 transl. W. M. Green, Loebxxxii ). Ultimately, therefore, St. Augustine offers a
mediation between the satanic picture of the Roman Empire [20]74 presented by Revelation and the
providential mission attributed to it by Eusebius. The three choices (Revelation, Eusebius and St.
Augustine) are still with us. Indeed75, they are probably nearer to us than the political interpretation
of empires propounded by Polybius from which we started. This follows from the fact that76 Daniel
had interposed himself between Polybius and his Jewish contemporaries – and gave a new
direction77 to historical thinking about empires78.
i
Per un precedente contributo momiglianeo sul tema cfr. Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione
maccabaica (=Prime linee), cap. I, part. alle pp. 14-18.
ii
FLUSSER 1978.
iii
SACKUR 1898.
iv
P.J. ALEXANDER 1967.
v
Cfr FLUSSER 1978, 183; SACKUR 1898, 4-15 (part. 14-15), et post eos consurget alius rex C nomine [=
i.e.Constantinus], potens in proelio qui regnabit a. XXX et edificabit templum Deo et legem adimplebit et faciet
iustitiam propter Deum in terram (cfr. ts. gr. ai rr. 178-194, in cui l’imperatore in questione è chiamato Olibos, e ai rr.
85-88, in cui si menziona Costantino).
vi
Per una riproposizione di questa conclusione cfr. From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil (=From the Pagan),
Nono, 738-9, dove Momigliano contrappone l’interesse degli oracoli cristiani per il tema della salvezza individuale alla
predilezione, in quelli ebraici, per “eschatological woes, cosmic judgement and finally perennial happiness for the
saved”.
vii
MYERS 1974, 12.
viii
Per la consapevolezza di Flavio Giuseppe sulle speranze dei suoi connazionali, cfr. BJ 2.258, 6.285; per la sua
conoscenza dell’interpetazione antiromana della profezia di Dan. 2,34 relativa alla pietra divina che spezza la statua
degli imperi, cfr. invece Ant. 10,210 e il supplemento offerto da Giovanni Crisostomo, Adv. Judaeos 5,9 (= PG 48, 897).
Sul passo in questione, e sulle problematiche che pone dal punto di vista testuale, cfr. Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide
(=Ciò che Flavio), cap. IV n. 2, e Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem (=Alexander’s visit), cap. IV.
ix
Ios. Ant. 1.8, Vita 430, Ap. I, 1, ii.1, 296. Problematica risulta un’identificazione definitiva di questo
personaggio, definito da Giuseppe “uomo devoto a ogni forma di apprendimento, ma soprattutto a quello della storia”:
si individuano infatti in questo periodo due distinti uomini di nome Epafrodito. Uno, protettore di Epitteto, liberto e
segretario di Nerone, fu fatto giustiziare da Domiziano nel 95 d.C. (Tac. Ann., 15,55; Suet., Nero 49,3; Domit. 14,4;
Suda, Lex., s.v. Ἐπίκτητος); l’altro, Marco Mettio Epafrodito, era invece un grammatico formatosi ad Alessandria che
visse a Roma dal tempo di Nerone a quello di Nerva e che lì raccolse una grande biblioteca, acquisendo fama di
mecenate e cultore delle arti (Suda, Lex., s.v. Ἐπαφρόδιτος; CIL VI 9454). Per i problemi di cronologia relativi al primo
Epafrodito cfr. THACKERAY 1930, x-xi; vd. inoltre SCHÜRER 1985, I 82,89.
x
Ios. Vit. 429.
72
For an heir… Green, Loeb, ed.) def in P-o 106.
P-o 114: But St. Augustine not only eliminated the Greeks: he also eliminated, interl.ms[AMM] <-> But St.
Augustine eliminated.
74
P-o 114: 20 <-> 17, msr[AMM].
75
P-o 114: Indeed <-> At least, msb[AMM].
76
P-o 114: This follows from the fact that <-> In any case, interl.msb[AMM].
77
P-o 114: direction <-> dimension, msb[AMM].
78
This follows… empires, def. in P-o 106.
73
161
Grinfield Lectures 1980 – Daniel and the Origins of Universal History
III. Flavius Josephus, the Pagan Historians and the Birth of Christian Historiography
xi
Per un recente lavoro sul tema – meno studiato della ribellione che portò alla fine del Tempio e di quella di
Bar Kochba, ma importante nella riflessione di Momigliano – si rimanda a PUCCI BEN ZEEN 2005, che ne offre
un’accurata ricostruzione e nuovi spunti interpretativi.
xii
Ios. BJ 3,351-4, trad. di H.St. J. Thackeray, Cambridge Mass. 1927
xiii
Ios. Ant. 10. 267-8, trad. di R. Marcus, Cambridge Mass 1937.
xiv
Hier. In Danielem, xi. 21 ss. (PL 565 ss. = Commentarium in Dan. libri III, cura et studio Francisci Glorie,
Turnhout 1964, 914 ss.).
xv
Ios. Ant. 11.336-9
xvi
Ios. Ant.11.302-35. Sui rapporti tra Samaritani ed Alessandro e sull’ellenizzazione della città di Samaria ad
opera del sovrano macedone cfr. part. SCHÜRER 1985 I 206-7. Giuseppe ricorda in questo passo come i Samaritani
conquistarono il favore di Alessandro edificando, proprio con il suo consenso, il tempio separatista sul monte Garizim
che sarebbe stato distrutto da Giovanni Ircano nel 128 a.C. (Ant. 13.255-6). Tracce di quello che sembra esser il podio
del tempio sono state in effetti scoperte sotto le fondamenta del tempio adrianeo di Zeus Hypsistos, cfr. BULL – WRIGHT
1965; IDD. 1968.
xvii
Cfr. FREUDENTHAL 1874, 103; FRASER 1972, I 285-6, e II 445-6, n. 793.
xviii
Cfr. Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to Jerusalem (=Alexander’s visit), 442-448.
xix
Ios. Ant. 18.63
xx
Per una riproposizione momiglianea dell’argomento, cfr. Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide (=Ciò che Flavio),
part. alle pp. 4-6, 9-11.
xxi
FrGH 93 T4-7.
xxii
FrGH 93 T2.
xxiii
FGrH 93 T2a.
xxiv
GL 1980 I (Universal History) cc. 6-7.
xxv
The History of Tacitus, translated into english by A.J. Church and W.J. Brodribb, Cambridge-London 1864.
xxvi
OLIVER 1953.
xxvii
OLIVER 1968.
xxviii
RIVKIN 1978.
xxix
Cfr. Tatianus, Oratio ad Graecos, part. capp. I-III, VIII-X, XIV, XVII-XIX, XXI-XXVI.
xxx
Hall, S.G., Melito of Sardis. On Pascha and Fragments, Oxford 1979, fr. 2 (Chronicon Paschale). Qui
Melitone sottolinea il sincronismo tra la nascita del cristianesimo e quella dell’impero romano, proponendo
l’associazione tra la diffusione del primo e la prosperità del secondo (sulla rilevanza ideologica dell’operazione vd.
MORESCHINI – NORELLI 1995, I 209-10, con relativa bibliografia).
xxxi
In Dan. 2.7-13 (=PG 10, 644); 4,7-16 (=PG 10, 646); De Ant. 25 (=PG 10, 747).
xxxii
Augustinus, De civitate dei, transl. W. M. Green, London-Cambridge 1969.
162
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
CL 1981 I, II The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian
and Roman Imperialism
Sedi e date
GL 1981 I (21 Gennaio, cfr. P-o 131, GRANATA 2006, 424)
CL 1981 I , II (aprile/maggio – giorno? – cfr. GRANATA 2006, 424)
Documenti
a) GL 1981 I
P-o 182 ms.
P-o 129, P-o 138, P-o 152: top c., ds. di P-o 182
P-o 130 nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 152, c.c., cfr. P-o 139 (a 1-2), c.c.; P-o 140
(a1), xerox.
b) CL 1981 I ( Greece)
P-o 139 (a-b), c.c. di GL 1981 I con aggiunte.
P-o 140 xerox di P-o 139
P-o 147, P-o 153, P-o 184: nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 139, 140.
c) CL 1981 II (East)
P-o 141 (a-b), c.c. di GL 1981 I con aggiunte.
P-o 142 xerox di P-o 141.
P-o 185 top c., nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 141, 142.
P-o 148, P-o 154, P-o 155: xerox di P-o 185.
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
Nell’edizione della lecture di apertura del terzo ciclo momiglianeo sul giudaismo ellenistico il
confronto tra la versione Grinfield 1981 e quella per Chicago 1981 induce a preferire nettamente la
seconda. Le ragioni non risiedono soltanto nella sua posteriorità (la GL è di febbraio, la versione
CL fu presentata in aprile), quanto anche e soprattutto nella sua maggiore articolazione: il testo di
partenza GL viene sviluppato in due lectures (1. Greece; 2. The East) risultanti dalla separazione
dei principali nuclei argomentativi e dal loro successivo ampliamento tramite aggiunte consistenti.
La serie P-o dell’AAM conserva una prima versione ms. del testo GL (P-o 182) e la sua
trascrizione ds. in 22 cc., in triplice copia (P-o 129, 138, 152). Due dei fascicoli (P-o 129 e 138)
recano un foglio ms. di introduzione alla lecture e al ciclo che appare di grande importanza nella
ricostruzione del processo di composizione delle conferenze sul giudaismo ellenistico, contribuendo
a gettare luce non solo sull’unità complessiva del progetto, ma anche sulla volontà di Momigliano
di rendere i suoi ascoltatori consapevoli già in itinere dell’organicità del suo percorso (per il testo
dell’introduzione e la sua analisi, cfr. infra, Appendice al testo).
Un nuovo ds. in 30 cc., P-o 130, copia carbone di un originale non conservato, offre invece il
testo di una versione ampliata su base GL in prospettiva della bipartizione CL 1981 I e II1. La
successiva serie di testimoni della conferenza segue infatti la divisione tra il nucleo di indagine
greca (Resistance, Greece) e quello orientale (Resistance, East). Il primo è documentato da P-o 139,
una c.c. in 16 cc. dss, e dalla corrispondente xerox non annotata P-o 140. Documento preso come
base per l’edizione è P-o 184 (il cui testo è presente anche in P-o 147, 153) una copia xerox che
offre la nuova e definitiva versione ds. della conferenza.
Resistance, East è invece testimoniato in una prima versione da P-o 141 (24 cc. dss., c.c. di GL
1981 con aggiunte) e dalla sua xerocopia P-o 142. Come testo base di questa seconda lecture si è
scelto P-o 185, top c. in 25 cc. che presenta (rare) annotazioni di mano di Momigliano e di cui si
conservano tre copie xerox, P-o 148, 154 e 1552. Posta la derivazione sia di P-o 184 che di 185 da
P-o 130, in entrambi i casi si segnalano in apparato solo le divergenze del testo CL con la versione
GL: quando non diversamente indicato, il testo va considerato come coincidente.
1
2
Cfr. annotazione di mano di AMM, c.1: “Chicago I + II (April) = Grinfield I (Feb. 81) with new additions, 30.3.81”.
Erroneamente catalogate da GRANATA 2006, 81-2, come copie carbone.
163
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
2. Argomento della prima lecture (Greece).
Con la conquista di Alessandro i Greci diventano partner nella costruzione dell’impero
macedone, fornendo lingua, tecnologie e cornice socioculturale. Previene tuttavia da
indentificazioni semplicistiche il fatto che molte città stato greche continuassero a sentirsi
minacciate dalle monarchie ellenistiche, finendo per divenire più vittime che beneficiari del nuovo
sistema. Conseguenza è la creazione di un’opposizione greca all’interno dello stesso imperialismo
greco-macedone che finirà per influenzare le future modalità di opposizione all’imperialismo
romano, per quanto sia difficile individuare un pattern coerente tra manifestazioni resistenziali che
non rivelano continuità o unanimità di propositi.
La lunga familiarità con i conquistatori alimenta una progressiva divaricazione dei fronti,
riassumibile nell’opposizione tra Polibio e scuola demostenica: se il primo accusa Demostene di
aver preteso che gli interessi della Grecia coincidessero con quelli di Atene, nell’ambito della
seconda il retore viene rivalutato come patriota esemplare, in un processo di idealizzazione che
coinvolge anche le sue competenze letterarie e filosofiche, determinando il paradosso
dell’esemplarità di Demostene presso i Romani proprio nei secoli in cui il suo corpus veniva
proposto come modello di letteratura di resistenza.
A differenza dell’opposizione di matrice orientale, quella greca poggia difficilmente su
argomenti mitici o utopistici: dei pochissimi documenti che esprimono condanna religiosa dei
Romani l’unico esempio esteso è offerto dai Fatti Mirabili di Flegonte di Tralle, una raccolta di età
adrianea di oracoli ed eventi miracolosi tra cui spiccano le profezie di distruzione dell’impero fatte
risalire alla guerra tra Siria e Roma. È un filone destinato a godere di fortuna crescente a mano a
mano che il potere romano si rafforza, come dimostrano documenti quali il III libro dei Sibillini, il
papiro di Amburgo, la “lettera di Annibale agli Ateniesi”; la politica di sterminio perseguita dai
Romani nel 146 a.C. finirà per fornire nuova ampiezza a questo conflitto ideologico, benché dopo la
sconfitta di Mitridate re del Ponto (88-86) nessun leader politico antiromano avrà più la statura per
sostenerne l’eredità profetica. Con l’eliminazione dello stato seleucide, Pompeo introdurrà la
Giudea nell’impero, facendo al contempo dei Parti l’unica alternativa rimasta ai suoi nemici.
3. Argomento della seconda lecture (The East)
La conquista greco-macedone del Vicino Oriente determina l’instaurazione di una nuova classe
di conquistatori e una conseguente sottomissione linguistica e culturale. Alle classi dirigenti
preesistenti viene offerta l’alternativa tra una lenta assimilazione o una pronta eliminazione.
L’Egitto è un valido esempio della devitalizzazione prodotta su un’antica cultura dalla conquista
macedone: malgrado i tentativi di resistenza la lingua egizia perde progressivamente di prestigio,
finendo per recuperare margine solo dopo l’avvento della cristianizzazione.
Tratto caratteristico delle manifestazioni resistenziali dei gruppi etnici asiatici nei confronti
dell’imperialismo greco-macedone prima e di quello romano poi è il recupero del patrimonio mitico
e sacrale per il tramite di profezie o sogni. Pubblicato da Grayson nel 1975, il primo documento di
resistenza religiosa ad Alessandro che sia arrivato fino a noi è una profezia post eventum della sua
conquista di Babilonia, culminante nell’incoraggiamento ai Babilonesi ad attendere il ritorno di un
re nativo. In ambito egizio, paragonabili testimonianze di odio per gli stranieri e nostalgia per
l’indipendenza sono l’Oracolo del vasaio, il papiro Krall di Vienna e la cronaca demotica di
Spiegelberg. È comune il ricorso a memorie della passata grandezza per supportare le speranze
future, sia pure entro cornici letterarie in cui il materiale autoctono appare fortemente influenzato da
topoi greci. Molto discusso è in particolare il legame tra materiale novellistico egizio e greco:
negando validità alle teorie di Kerenyi e Merkelbach sull’originario sviluppo del romanzo greco a
partire dalla storia sacra di Iside e Osiride, Momigliano considera erronea la deduzione per cui la
presenza di elementi orientali in un genere letterario sia una prova della sua diretta filiazione dal
patrimonio mitico orientale, ribadendo in parallelo come l’umiliazione della cultura egizia sia
passata anche e soprattutto per l’indifferenza e il disinteresse che i Greci le riservarono.
164
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
Sulla letteratura di resistenza persiana le testimonianze sono invece tarde e confuse: l’unico
documento ostile ai Romani pervenutoci è l’oracolo di Istaspe, trasmesso in duplice redazione (una
cristianizzata, con allusioni a Cristo, l’altra iranica, improntata alla caratteristica dicotomia tra Est e
Ovest). Ultimo caso di un’antica civiltà sottovalutata dai Greci è la Fenicia: tramite Eusebio si
conservano frammenti della Storia Fenicia di Filone di Biblos, versatile erudito vissuto ai tempi di
Adriano. Presentato come insegnamento del dio Taatos al mitico Sanchuniathon, figura anteriore
alla guerra di Troia, il testo – un racconto delle dottrine cosmologiche e teologiche fenicie –
rappresenta un tentativo di dimostrare sistematicamente la superiorità dei Fenici sui Greci. La
volontà di sollevare i Fenici rispetto agli altri popoli finisce per coinvolgere anche gli Ebrei in
un’ulteriore opera, la Storia degli Ebrei, in cui Filone di Biblos cerca di screditare la Bibbia
producendo una versione sacerdotale alternativa che ne neutralizzi le pretese di antichità. Tratto
comune dei testi asiatici di resistenza appare quindi, in conclusione, l’idealizzazione della propria
tradizione religiosa e culturale, in opposizione al modello improntato alla riflessione politica che
sostanzia le forme di dibattito in Grecia.
4. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi.
L’originaria ripartizione in sei capitoli di P-o 130 è destinata a perdersi nella redazione CL che
propone, in entrambi i casi, un testo continuo. P-o 184 (Greece) recupera in modo pressoché
identico l’esteso cap. I di P-o 130, incentrato sulle differenze nell’opposizione all’imperialismo tra
Grecia e Oriente. La riflessione sulle ragioni della scarsità delle espressioni greche contro Roma e
sul confronto con la relativa prolificità orientale, proposta in apertura di P-o 130, è eliminata qui e
trasposta alla c. 9 di P-o 184. Dopo un paragrafo di coincidenza (l’opposizione greca non mostra
continuità né struttura) le due trattazioni divergono: P-o 184 propone un testo del tutto nuovo, una
trattazione sull’opposizione ideologica tra Polibio e scuola demostenica che si estende fino alla c. 8
compresa. Dalla c. 9 di P-o 184 ricomincia invece il testo di P-o 130, recuperato a partire dal cap.
IV: il senso di superiorità culturale e retorica previene i Greci da manifestazioni resistenziali di tipo
utopico o religioso, la cui unica attestazione estesa è rappresentata dalle Storie Strane di Flegone di
Tralles, testo di età adrianea. La ripresa di P-o 130 prosegue fino alla fine della lecture (c. 16), che
si chiude con una riflessione su Mitridate re del Ponto come ultimo grande leader antiromano e
sullo spostamento in Persia, sotto Pompeo, del fronte di opposizione all’imperialismo.
I capp. II-III (caratteri della resistenza in Egitto e a Babilonia) e il primo par. del IV passano
invece a P-o 185 (The East) pressoché interamente, con l’eccezione dell’inizio del cap. II, che viene
espunto:
But let us go back to the earlier stages of Hellenization. This cannot be done without recognizing
that while Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, etc., were engaged in trying to save themselves from complete
Hellenization, the Macedonians and the Greeks were involved in self-defence against the Romans.
Indeed, if we went to be completely fair, we have to recognize that there were moments in the third
century B.C. in which the Romans themselves felt in danger of soccumbing either to GrecoMacedonians alone or to an alliance of Carthaginians and Greeks: the war of Pyrrus and the alliance
between Hannibal and Philip V of Macedon must be taken for what they were at their inception, a very
serious menace to Rome.
One fact has to be stated from the start without equivocation. Those who escaped Hellenization
most effectively were those who either avoided Greco-Macedonian rule or endured it for a short
period. The Romans avoided Macedonian rule by defeating Pyrrhus, the epigone of Alexander, who
tried to extend Macedonian conquest to Italy. Later in the same century, they avoided the rule of
another foreigner, strongly supported by the Greco-Macedonians – Hannibal. On the opposite side of
the map of the ancient world, the Iranians soon slipped out of the Seleucid State and re-established a
state of their own, which stood up to Greco-Macedonians and, later, Romans, and was to yeld only the
Arabs some ten [5] centuries later. Even the Jews, after all, broke away from the Macedonians
comparatively early, about 165 B.C., and had almost a century of uneasy independance before falling
into Roman hands.
165
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
Con l’esclusione di questo passo, P-o 185 riprende l’intero testo del cap. II, in cui si descrive
come l’Egitto offra l’esempio più evidente di una cultura devitalizzata dall’imperialismo macedone.
Per contrasto, la scarsità di documentazione testimonia la diversa condizione di Babilonia, dove a
rimpiazzare la dominazione greca non arrivano i Romani, bensì i Parti. Nel cap. III, riproposto in
successione, si esaminano documenti egiziani della resistenza religiosa contro i Greco-Macedoni e i
Romani. Dopo il salto del cap. IV (utilizzato, come si è visto, in P-o 184), anche i capp. V e VI di
P-o 130 passano interamente a P-o 185: qui si analizzano rispettivamente la letteratura di resistenza
iranica (oracolo di Istaspe) e quella fenicia, rappresentata dall’opera di Filone di Biblos. Nel
contesto di analisi di questa figura il testo viene ampliato da due aggiunte consistenti: la
rivendicazione filoniana di un’antichità pre-troiana e la contrapposizione tra il carattere politico
dell’opposizione greca e quello religioso oriental. Chiude P-o 185 un’anticipazione, aggiunta ad
hoc, sull’argomento delle due lectures successive, il cui scopo consisterà nell’esaminare alla luce di
questa (non assoluta) opposizione alcuni testi ebraici, lasciati intenzionalmente da parte.
Benché The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism
non sia mai andato incontro a forme di edizione autonoma, né nella sua versione unitaria né nella
più complessa articolazione di Chicago, è possibile in alcuni casi individuare una buona base di
confronto con passi licenziati all’interno di Some Preliminary Remarks on the “Religious
Opposition” to the Roman Empire (=Opposition), saggio edito postumo in Opposition et résistances
à l’Empire d’Auguste à Trajan - Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique, tome xxxiii (1986), pp. 103129, ristampato successivamente in On Pagans, Jews and Christians, Middletown 1987, pp. 120141 (= Nono, 681-699), e nella traduzione italiana contenuta in Saggi di storia della religione
romana, alle pp. 151-169. Si rimanda all’apparato per l’individuazione dei passi in comune, rispetto
ai quali si segnalano i casi in cui la ripresa risulta perfettamente coincidente (= =),
complessivamente uguale ma con differenze formali (=) oppure solo da mettere in relazione, per
diversa ampiezza o differenze significative (cfr).
166
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
I
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman
Imperialism – Greece *3
1 - Greece4
There must be something in Daniel’s visions of the four empires if they had such a sustained
success throughout the centuries. In fact, they epitomize a chain of events which still appeals to our
historical imagination. No doubt Daniel made a concession to the special concern of Jerusalem for
Babylonia when he presented Babylonia instead of Assyria as the first great empire. The Greeks,
from Herodotus onwards, were more clear-sighted in this respect. But Media, Persia and Macedonia
were agreed stages of the translatio imperii both on the Greek and on the Jewish map of events; and
the Romans were soon recognized by everyone as the successors of the Macedonians. Imperialism
involves oppression and exploitation. There is a story to be told of complaints about, and reactions
to, Assyrian and Persian conquest. I am leaving this out of my present consideration. But I shall try
to say something about the ideological reaction to the conquests of Alexander the Great – what we
call the Hellenization of the Near East – and, later, to the replacement of the Greco-Macedonian
imperialism by a Roman imperialism.
At the beginning of the fifth century B.C. the Greeks of Europe had succeeded in stopping the
expansion of the Persians and had even, for a short period, [2] liberated the Greeks of Asia. Thus,
they gave themselves the right to look at the Persian Empire from outside and to consider it an
inferior institution created by barbarians. Though we could mention exceptions, it is not the voice of
the oppressed which characterizes the attitude of the Greeks towards the Persians. On the contrary,
there is self-assurance about the superiority of Greek freedom and of Greek military competence.
What is new in the conquests of Alexander is the transformation of the Greeks into partners in the
building of the Macedonian Empire and in its exploitation. Not only do the Greeks powerfully
contribute to the conquering army and to the contingents of new settlers in the conquered countries,
but for all practical purposes they also provide the language, the technology and the social and
cultural framework of the new empire. The fact that Alexander’s conquests were soon divided
among several monarchies did not change the predominantly Greek character of Macedonian
imperialism. The Greeks were by now inside, not outside, the imperialistic way of life.
There is, however, a feature of the new political structure of the Hellenistic age which prevents
any simplistic identification of the Greeks with a new imperialistic race corresponding to the older
imperialistic races of the Assyrians and the Persians. The greater part of the Greeks of Europe
remained citizens of city-states and of leagues which felt threatened by the great Hellenistic
monarchies. They fought for survival, and at first for5 obvious geographic reasons they considered
the state of Macedonia in the North as the greater danger. With the useless wisdom of hindsight we
can shake our heads at their bickering6 rivalries, short-lived pacts and long-lasting delusions. But
the fundamental contradiction in their situation has to be understood. The Greeks outside the ruling
classes of the new Hellenized East were rather the victims than the beneficiaries of a political
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 184, copia xerox di un originale non conservato della nuova e definitiva versione
CL 1981 I. Si riportano in apparato le divergenze con P-o 130, fascicolo di 30 ff. che offre un testo GL ampliato
anteriore alla bipartizione CL (quando non diversamente indicato, il testo di P-o 184 può considerarsi coincidente) e,
all’occorrenza, lezioni significative di P-o 185, testo base di CL 1981 II derivato dalla seconda parte di P-o 130. Si
segnalano inolte eventuali paralleli con Some Preliminary Remarks on the “Religious Opposition” to the Roman
Empire (= bibl. 712), citato come Opposition, specificando se i passi sono identici (= =), quasi uguali (=) o solo da
mettere in relazione, ma con differenze significative (cfr).
3
P-o 130: Chicago I + II (April) = Grinfield I (Feb. 1981) with new additions tsfmsr[AMM].
4
P-o 184: 1 – Greece <-> P-o 130: I.
5
P-o 184: and at first for <-> P-o 130 and for.
6
P-o 130: bickering, rivalries; P-o 184: bickering rivalries.
167
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
system which would have been [3] impossible without the participation of Greeks. It follows that
there was a Greek opposition to Greco-Macedonian imperialism. It was much more political, in the
strict sense, than any native opposition in the East could ever be, because there were Greek states in
existence which did not want to be merged into the Greco-Macedonian monarchies. Athens and
Sparta were still active and respected. The Aetolian and the Achaean Leagues had found new
strength. As long as this opposition was able to operate in terms of conventional war and diplomacy
and to take advantage of the conflicts between the great monarchies, we must not expect the Greeks
to react as often as the helpless natives of the Eastern monarchies did in terms of religious or
utopian hopes. Political manoeuvres of the ordinary kind were still possible in Greece; they were
impossible among the natives of Egypt or Syria.
This consideration applies also to the attitudes of the Greeks towards the Romans in the second
century B.C. Until 168 B.C. and more markedly until 189 B.C., many Greeks were uncertain
whether the Romans represented the lesser evil in comparison with Macedonia. After all, the
Romans appeared to be more remote. Even when it became obvious that the Macedonians were no
longer in a position to compete with the Romans for the control of Greece, there was no unanimity
among the Greeks about their own paramount interests. The history of the relations between Rome
and Greece in the second century B.C. is capable of many interpretations, but at least two points, as
they emerge from our sources, are uncontroversial: 1) the Romans offered the upper classes of the
Greek cities a certain degree of social security, provided they were ready to play; this involved a
steadly elimination of those members of the Greek upper class, (of those principes as Livy would
call them) who were no ready to play. Thus any progress of the Romans almost automatically
implied the elimination of those Greek leaders who were not prepared to support them. 2)
Dissension [4] favoured the Romans and when something like a consensus emerged in the
opposition to Rome – as happened in the war between the Achaean League and Rome in 146
(Polyb. 38, 11) – there was no time left for dreaming or praying. The Romans of Mummius sacked
Corinth, massacred the men and sold women and children into slavery. Corinth remained a ghostcity for a century, and hence a warning.
There are some modern scholars who have tried to find a coherent pattern in the resistance of the
Greeks to the Romans, most notably, among the recent students of this subject, Jürgen Deininger in
his book of 1971i. Though in many ways very valuable, Deininger’s book has provided the
demonstration e contrario that there was no continuity and no pattern in this opposition. The
prevalence of the diplomatic game, the continuous interference of local rivalries and social
conflicts, and for a long time the shadow of Macedonia prevented the Greeks from unanimity of
purpose and even from stability of feelings. Polybius offers the most important evidence for this
state of affairs. He himself had been an opponent of Rome and was therefore taken hostage by the
Romans. Long familiarity with the conquerors and deep reflection had convinced him that it was
helpless to resist Rome. But this does not mean that he had discovered that the Romans were a good
thing for the Greeks. In his historical work, as far as we have it, he never says so. The way he tells
the events of the tragic years around 146 B.C., when both Corinth and Carthage were destroyed, is
particularly ambiguous.7
7
P-o 184: But this does ... ambiguous. <-> P-o 130: But in his historical work, as far as we have it, he never says that
the Romans were a good thing for the Greeks, and the way he tells the events of the tragic years around 146 B.C., when
both Corinth and Carthage were destroyed, is particularly ambiguous; P-o 130: ambiguous -> If in my subsequent
account we shall find little evidence of voices from the oppressed on Greek soil, we must remember that Polybius
himself leaves us in suspense.
II- But let us go back to the earlier stages of Hellenization. This cannot be done without recognizing that while
Jews, Egyptians, Syrians, etc., were engaged in trying to save themselves from complete Hellenization, the
Macedonians and the Greeks were involved in self-defence against the Romans. Indeed, if we went to be completely
fair, we have to recognize that there were moments in the third century B.C. in which the Romans themselves felt in
danger of succumbing either to Greco-Macedonians alone or to an alliance of Carthaginians and Greeks: the war of
Pyrrus and the alliance between Hannibal and Philip V of Macedon must be taken for what they were at their inception,
a very serious menace to Rome.
168
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
Polybius, properly read, can show what is different in the attitude of the metropolitan Greeks
from the attitude of the oriental nations who succumbed to the superiority of Macedonian and, later,
of Roman power. It was the feeling that the dispute was not between gods, but between men and
had to be transacted as well as one could in terms of prudence, shrewdness and patience. This did
not necessarily imply abandonment of any hope of independence: it did, how[5]ever, imply a
continuous appeal to realism against illusion.
If we read Polybius in this key, we can also identify the men whom he had in mind as his main
adversaries in Greece. By identifying his opponents, we can isolate a current of Greek political
thought which came very near to giving the Greeks some common ideality and purpose, though it
never quite succeeded: I mean the disciples and admirers of Demosthenes.
Let us take a look at one of the most famous, and yet most puzzling, surviving fragments of the
lost books of Polybius. After the great lacuna of book XVII, which seems to have been lost early in
the Middle Ages, we have some very significant fragments of book XVIII. Then Polybius (chapters
13-15) involves himself in a discussion of what is real treachery. With an eye at his own situation,
he vehemently denies that a politician who changes his allegiance must necessarily be considered a
traitor. He has no difficulty in quoting near contemporary events as telling examples of politicians
who proved wise in moving from one camp to the opposite: “If Aristaeus had not then in good time
made the Achaeans throw off their alliance with Philip and change it for that with Rome, the whole
nation would evidently have suffered utter destruction.” By a sudden switch, Polybius then turns to
the events of almost two hundred years before and attacks Demosthenes as the man who had
wrongly treated as traitors the politicians of the other Greek cities simply because they did not
follow Athens in her struggle against Philip II of Macedonia. Polybius does not reproach
Demosthenes for having misjudged the real interests of the Athenians. There may be an element of
this in his general evaluation of Demosthenes, but it is not the element which emerges from the
extant chapters. What he finds intolerable in Demosthenes’ attitudes is the pretension that the
interests of Athens were identical with those of the rest of Greece. As Polybius puts it: “Measuring
everything by the interests of his own city, thinking that the whole [6] of Greece should have its
eyes turned on Athens, and if people did not do so calling them traitors, Demosthenes seems to me
to have been very much mistaken and very far wide of the truth.” According to Polybius, the Greek
politicians who invited Philip II to enter the Peloponnesus and to humiliate Sparta “simply differed
in their own judgement of facts, thinking that the interests of Athens were not identical with those
of their countries” (transl. W. R. Paton, Loeb Libraryii).
Polybius would not have gone out of his way to attack these ghosts of the fourth century B.C. if
he had not felt that these ghosts were very present (and from his point of view very harmful) in the
contemporary scene. The fact is that the leader who had guided Athens and Thebes to the disaster of
Chaeronea in 338 and had been hounded out by Alexander the Great, had made a posthumous
spectacular return to Athens a few decades after his death. From Athens his reputation as a great
patriot had extended to any place where Greek was read; and by the middle of the third century, it
was difficult to distinguish his glory as the greatest orator of Greece from his exemplarity as a
courageous and far-sighted patriot. It will be enough to remind ourselves of some of the stages of
this come-back. In 280 the Athenians decreed to set up a statue of Demosthenes in the agora and to
give the eldest of his direct descendants the permanent right to free meals in the Prytanaeumiii – an
One fact has to be stated from the start without equivocation. Those who escaped Hellenization most
effectively were those who either avoided Greco-Macedonian rule or endured it for a short period. The Romans avoided
Macedonian rule by defeating Pyrrhus, the epigone of Alexander, who tried to extend Macedonian conquest to Italy.
Later in the same century, they avoided the rule of another foreigner, strongly supported by the Greco-Macedonians –
Hannibal. On the opposite side of the map of the ancient world, the Iranians soon slipped out of the Seleucid State and
re-established a state of their own, which stood up to Greco-Macedonians and, later, Romans, and was to yield only the
Arabs some ten centuries later. Even the Jews, after all, broke away from the Macedonians comparatively early, about
165 B.C., and had almost a century of uneasy independence before falling into Roman hands, del.; P-o 130 prosegue
con il resto del cap. II, il cap. III e il primo par. del IV, che nel passaggio al testo CL confluiscono in P-o 185 (2. The
East, cfr. infra).
169
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
honour he would share with the descendants of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, the traditional
liberators of Athens from the tyranny of the Pisistratids. The man who had brought about this
change of feelings was himself a nephew of Demosthenes, Demochares. Now it is interesting that
one of his enemies in Athens was the exile historian Timaeus: yet Timaeus was one of the first
Greek historians to praise Demosthenes and the other Athenian orators for their stand against the
deification of Alexander (Polyb. 12, 12bc). More or less at the same time Demos[7]thenes is
recognized by members of the peripatetic school traditionally hostile to him as the greatest Greek
orator, to be preferred to Isocrates. Such is the opinion of Hieronymus of Rhodes and is developed
by Cleochares of Myrleaiv into a glorification of the politician. With the consolidation of the
reputation of Demosthenes goes together the interest professional biographers – such as Hermippusv
and Satyrusvi – take in him. We do not expect idealization from them: they like sensational or
scandalous stories of any kind. But ultimately the biography of Demosthenes is made to conform
with the idealization of his politics and with the reputation of his oratory. Demosthenes is even
made a pupil of Plato – an unlikely thought. The glorification of Demosthenes was not, as we have
seen from Polybius, an unopposed development. Panaetius, the stoic philosopher of the second
century B.C., seems to have had reservations on Demosthenes the man in comparison with
Demosthenes the orator (Plutarch, Demosthenes 13). But in the second century B.C. Demosthenes
was already a model to the Roman Cato the Censor, and of course in the first century B.C. he
inspired Cicero. The admiration of the readers of the first century A.D., as we can gather from
Quintilian and Plutarch, was based on a long tradition. Curiously enough, modern scholars have
never clearly related this posthumous ascent of Demosthenes with the political resistance of the
Greeks against Macedonians and Romans. but this relation is stated by Polybius, who tried to
defend the realism of the opponents of Demosthenes insofar as he identified his own realism with
theirs. Consequently, nobody has commented on the paradox that Demosthenes should become a
model to Roman politicians in the centuries in which he was read by the Greeks to learn how to
resist the Romans.
The best book we have on the reputation of Demosthenes in Antiquity by Engelbert Drerup
(Demosthenes im Urteile des Altertums, 1923vii) was meant to support in the post-First World War
atmosphere the damning judgment on Demos[8]thenes Drerup had published in 1916 with the
explicit purpose of contributing to war propaganda on the German side. The title is good enough:
Aus einer alten Advokatenrepublik (Demosthenes und seine Zeit), Auch ein Kriegsbuch.
Unnecessary to say, the modern advocates against whom Drerup thought he was fighting were the
London, Paris and Rome advocates of 1916. “Advokaten gegen Könige” is the title of the
Introduction. There was no prospect of understanding the posthumous reputation of Demosthenes
from this point of view. On the other hand, not much was gained when P. Cloché, one of the most
serious students of Demosthenes, got involved in the task of proving to his own satisfaction that
Polybius’ criticism on Demosthenes bore scanty relation to the situation of the fourth century (“Ant.
Class.” 8, 1939, 361-370)viii. What matters is that the reputation of Demosthenes in the Hellenistic
age cannot be separated from the model of political resistance he represented against foreign
conquerors. In its turn, the existence of this model confirms the political character of his resistance.
Idealized or criticized, Demosthenes remains the example of the gifted orator who devoted his
life to keep his own country free.
If we want to identify a specific Greek tradition of resistance, this is clearly provided by that
literary monument – the corpus of the political speeches of Demosthenes, a corpus which was read,
commented upon and even supplemented during the Hellenistic period. Incidentally, we must
remember that the insertion of documents into the political speeches of Demosthenes which used to
be considered a product of editors of the Roman imperial age has now been shown by papyrological
evidence to have happened in the second or first century B.C. – at least in the most important case
170
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
of the documents added to the oration On the Crownix. These insertions were meant to satisfy the
curiosity of the readers of Demosthenes in an age of political struggles.8
[9] More in general, when the Greeks found themselves, in relation to the Macedonians and the
Romans, in a position comparable with that in which they had placed the oriental nations, there was
no dearth of rhetorical and rational arguments 9 on their side. Unlike the Egyptians or the
Babylonians10, the Greeks were trained in dialectic. Their philosophers and orators, whom they
used as diplomats,11 knew how to argue with the Romans even at the risk of being thrown out of
Rome. As a rule, both the Macedonians and the Romans 12 appreciated Greek education and
therefore were ready to be lectured – at least up to a point. The argument could be sublimated into
the philosophy of Panaetius which in its original formulation is lost, and into the historiography of
Polybius which has partly survived. That so much argument went on in rational or at least in
rhetorical terms may help to explain why there is relatively little trace in our Greek evidence13 of
mythical, religious and even utopian protest against Rome14. We must make due allowance for the
peculiarities of our evidence which is not likely to have preserved many ephemeral Greek
expressions of despair and protest against the Romans. But this applies also to the East. It is
therefore of some significance that the voices of ideological and religious protest against Macedonia
and Rome are much clearer in the East than in Greece proper. There are a few texts which seem to
come from metropolitan Greece and express religious condemnation of the Romans, and I shall try
to show by a quick analysis of them that they are not only rather exceptional, but also probably due
to some oriental influence.15
The only extensive text which can be described as evidence for religious and utopian resistance
to Rome in Greece is contained in the “strange stories” (<περὶ θαυµασίων>)16 by Phlegon of
Tralles, a freedman of the Emperor Adrian in the first part of the second century A.D. This text
deserves some careful consideration because, though it is obviously good evidence for ideological
[10] disapproval of Rome, it is not equally clear evidence for Greek17 disapproval of Rome. The
book has fortuitously survived in an incomplete form in one manuscript only, the Palatinus Graecus
of Heidelberg 398 of the tenth century. It collects miraculous events from older sources, and has
transmitted to us some Sibylline oracles, perhaps through the mediation of Posidonius. The section
which concerns us more specifically purports to derive from an account of events about 192-189
B.C. by the peripatetic philosopher Antisthenesx. This Antisthenes reports two connected episodes
of the war between Syria and Rome and more precisely of the aftermath of the battle of Termopylae
where the Romans decisively defeated Antiochus III and compelled him to flee back to Asia Minor.
An officer of Antiochus called Buplagos, who was left for dead on the battlefield of Thermopylae,
rose from the dead (as the writer says) and recited an oracle which promised revenge against the
Romans and their ultimate ruin. Then he died again for good. The Romans were terrified and made
various purifications and sent a delegation to question Apollo at Delphi. The answer was another
warning to Rome, though in a milder formulation. The Romans thereupon decided to suspend the
war in Europe and to offer propitiatory sacrifices in an alleged Panhellenic sanctuary of Naupactos
on Aetolian territory which is mentioned in no other source. During these religious ceremonies a
Roman general called Publius became mad and in his turn began to utter oracles. The first oracle in
verse confirmed the prophecy of the Syrian Buplagos and in even more definite terms promised that
8
P-o 184: Polybius, properly read, can show what is different in the attitude of the metropolitan Greeks ... of political
struggles; P-o 130: def.
9
P-o 184: rhetorical and rational arguments <-> P-o 130: rational argument.
10
P-o 184: the Egyptians or the Babylonians <-> P-o 130: the Egyptians.
11
P-o 184: whom they used as diplomats; P-o 130: def.
12
P-o 184: As a rule, both the Macedonians and the Romans <-> P-o 130: In fact, as a rule the Romans.
13
P-o 184: Greek evidence <-> P-o 130: evidence.
14
P-o 184: and even utopian protest against Rome <-> P-o 130: or even literary resistance to Rome.
15
P-o 184: There are a few texts ... oriental influence. P-o 130: def.
16
P-o 130: gap for Greek, mgsnmsl[Mom].
17
P-o 184: Greek, stl.ms.
171
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
an army would come from Asia to reduce Rome to slavery. The second oracle, in prose, simply
translated into a prophecy the story of the Roman expedition to Asia led by Lucius and Publius
Cornelius Africanus, which, as we know, represented the second stage of the war against Antiochus
III in 190. Being a prophecy post eventum, this had to be a prophecy of victory for the Romans; but
it was immediately followed by a third oracle in verse in which Publius announced [11] utter ruin
for Rome at a very uncertain point in the future connected with some miracle to be expected from a
statue of the god Helios in the city of Siracuse. Why a Sicilian city like Siracuse should be involved
in the future of the conflict between Rome and Asia is of course far from obvious. But General
Publius had yet another surprise in store. He now prophesied that he himself would be eaten by a
red wolf – which indeed very soon came about. The wolf, however, spared Publius’ head, which
was therefore left with the opportunity of uttering a last prophecy of doom for Rome: the avenging
army is again expected to come from Asia. Phlegon or his source Antisthenes coolly concludes the
story with a short and monumental sentence: “All that Publius had said happened”xi. I hope nobody
expected anything less.
Now of course nothing happened just in that way, but there was a moment, about 87 B.C., when
Mithridates Eupator marched from Asia to Greece and Athens opened his gates to him in which
such oracles against Rome might seem to become true. It is therefore possible, or even likely, that
oracles uttered against Rome in the time of Antiochus III were revived and refurbished about a
century later during the last attempt of the Greco-Oriental world to shake off the rule of Rome. The
link with Mithridates, which had already been suggested by E. Zeller long ago, is argued in detail
by Jörg-Dieter Gauger in a very acute article in Chiron 10, 1980, 225-263xii. But though I have no
difficulty in admitting that the oracles may have been re-used and perhaps slightly modified by the
followers of Mithridates, I do not see, unlike Gauger, any reason to doubt that all the oracles quoted
by Phlegon were actually formulated and circulated at the time in which they are placed by Phlegon
himself and presumably by his source, too.18 The period of Antiochus III also provides the most
likely identification for Publius, the Roman general. This looks prima facie like an allusion to
Publius Scipio Africanus, who in fact accompanied his brother Lucius [12] during part of the war
against Antiochus III. The Greeks were in the habit of calling a Roman by his praenomen.
The identification of the source of Phlegon, the philosopher Antisthenes, is a far less serious
matter. But it so happens that a historian Antisthenes of Rhodes is known to us from Polybius as his
senior contemporary (16, 14; 15). This Antisthenes of Rhodes may well be identical with the
Antisthenes who was the source of Phlegon. In any case we must envisage the series of oracles
transmitted by Phlegon as having been broadcast at various moments during the war between
Antiochus III and the Romans. The more the Romans won, the more the oracles foretold the future
defeat and doom of Rome. Some of the oracles presented the revenge against Rome as a direct
operation by the gods; some others expressed the hope that a king of Asia would came back to settle
accounts with the Romans. What seems to be remarkable in these texts is that the Greeks play no
part in them. Though they were the major victims of Rome, they apparently leave it to the kings of
Asia rather than to19 the Olympian gods to turn the tables. It may in fact be that these oracles were
forged in the circles of Antiochus III and reflected the orientalized atmosphere of Seleucid society
rather than the convictions of the Greeks. It seems, therefore, that these texts confirm our thesis that
the Greeks were reluctant to present their fights against Rome with religious undertones. If they
made these oracles their own they accepted by implication their message that the only hope for the
enemies of Rome was in a victorious return to Europe by a king of Asia. This is remarkable enough
when one thinks of the Greek tradition of opposition between Hellas or Europe and Asia. The
notion of a saviour king was of course widespread in Asia, or in Egypt, not necessarily with the
specific Messianic connotations with which we are familiar in Judaism. It is characteristic that the
oracles preserved by Phlegon do not promise a future triumph for Greece, but for Asia.
18
P-o 184: there was a moment ... his source, too. Cfr. Opposition, 683, dove si accenna a Flegone di Tralles come
cosa nota.
19
P-o 184: Asia rather than to <-> P-o 130: Asia to pray to.
172
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
Antisthenes’ story is perhaps the oldest prophecy of doom for Rome known [13] to us. Later, the
Sibylline Books – or, more precisely, that section of the Third Sibylline Book which repeated pagan
oracles – confirmed this message and the inherent promise of a return of Asia to power.
Contemporaries had indeed been aware since the beginning of the second Punic War that rule over
the whole world was at stake. Polybius 5, 103 reports for the year 217 B.C. the speech of the
Aetolian Agelaos in which this state of suspense is described with all the clarity one could wish.
Livy, in a section which may depend on Polybius, attributes the same awareness to Hannibal (Livy
30, 33, 10-11), while Plutarch in the Life of Flamininus 9 follows a source which attributes world
ambitions to Antiochus III. When Hannibal lost all hope for himself, he naturally turned to
Antiochus III as the only one left to stay the Romans in their advance to world empire. A Hamburg
papyrus published by R. Merkelbach in 1954 contains an obviously forged letter from Hannibal to
the Atheniansxiii in which the Carthaginian boasts of his victories in Italy and promises to give the
Romans a worse lesson than that which the Greeks had given to the ancestors of the Romans,
namely the Trojans. We should like to know when and why this letter was forged. What is
particularly interesting is that the forger used anti-Trojan motifs to please the Greeks and to offend
the Romans. Emilio Gabba, to whom we owe so much good work about the ideological warfare on
the second century B.C., has shown that the Trojan myth of the origins of Rome could be used to
offend the Romans (in M. Sordi, ed., I canali della propaganda nel mondo antico, Milano 1976)xiv.
Pyrrhus had already presented himself as a new Achilles come to take revenge on the Trojans (Paus.
I, 12, 1); others, beginning with Menecrates of Xanthos of uncertain date, but earlier than Dionysius
of Halicarnassus (I, 48, 3), had described Aeneas as a scoundrel who saved himself by betraying
Troy. Dionysius of Halicarnassus tried to put an end to those innuendoes with his theory that in
primitive Italy Aborigenes, Pelasgi, Arcades, even Trojans, had all been Greeks of a sort. Thus
Rome was a Greek city founded in a territory where Greeks abounded.
[14] If the wars of the Romans against Hannibal and Antiochus III had been conscious conflicts
of world ambition and therefore a fertile field for apocalyptic expectations, the policy of ruthless
extermination pursued by the Romans about 146 and the subsequent desperate attempts of the lower
classes of Greece, Sicily and Asia to extricate themselves from Roman rule gave new, though more
limited, scope to ideological warfare. When Polybius pictured Scipio Aemilianus meditating and
crying over the succession of empires while Carthage was burning, he gave an indication of
contemporary feelingxv. The late additions to his work which we can date more or less securely after
146 seem to indicate that he himself was personally very uneasy about what the Romans were doing
(cf. 36, 9, 3-4). I must maintain my friendly disagreement with Professor F. W. Walbank on this
point (cf. his paper in Historiographia antiqua, Leeven 1977, 138-62 xvi ). About 132 B.C.
Aristonicus, the anti-Roman leader in Asia Minor, and his philosophic adviser Blossius of Cumae
adopted the City of the Sun as their symbolic term of reference. What they meant must remain
uncertain. They certainly freed slaves and promised greater social justice (T. W. Africa, Int. Rev.
Social History 6, 1961, 110-124xvii). The same applies to the two slave wars in Sicily of 135-131
and 106-100 B.C., in which oriental cults and practices played a role. Eunus, the organizer of the
first revolt, was relying on the help of the Syrian goddess and displayed the arts of prophecy and
wonder-working we would expect in a desperate charismatic leader: Posidonius, the probable
source of our source Diodorus, treated him as a charlatan.20
About 88-86 B.C., King Mithridates of Pontus was the last anti-Roman leader to raise
widespread hopes of liberation in Greece and Asia Minor. When the philosopher Athenion appeared
in Athens as the messenger of the king he was greeted as the messenger of the New Dionysus. In
his speech, immortalized in purple pages by Posidonius and saved for us by Athenaeus (F. Gr. Hist.
87 F 36), [15] Athenion graphically described the coming universal rule of Mithridates. Athenion
was not the only philosopher to be attracted by the call to fight the Romans. After his mysterious
disappearance, the Epicurean philosopher Aristion became a much more effective leader in Athens
20
P-o 184: Eunus ... as a charlatan. = Opposition, 683.
173
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
and contributed to the wave of successes for Mithridates. The rebellion against Rome spread
throghout Greece (Appian., Mithr. 28-29). Sulla had to take Athens by siege. We can easily believe
that the upper classes of Greece and Asia Minor did not like the dangers which the combination of
Mithridates’ war and social unrest brought about. They may have breathed more freely when it was
all over, but this does not yet mean that they liked the Romans. As the title of the New Dionysus
and several fragments of Sibylline oracles seem to prove, there had been a religious background to
Mithridates’ war in Greece. A small portion of this background was certainly Greek. But most of it
was oriental, and there is a clear oriental flavour in the description of young Mithridates preparing
for his mission in isolation as we find it in the summary of Trogus Pompeius by Justinxviii .
Though21 neither the Parthians when they defeated Crassus nor Cleopatra’s Egyptians when they
supported Antony were ever a serious menace to the power of Rome as a whole, one may well say
that at no moment between 70 and 20 B.C. did the prophets of doom remain silent inside the
Empire. Etruscan prophets of the end of the “saeculum” encouraged the Catilinarians (Cicero, In
Cat. 3, 9, 19). Sallust, or the author of the second letter to Caesar, recognized the possibility of the
end of Rome (II, 3, 6), and of course Horace foresaw the bones of Romulus being scattered about
the Forum and a journey for the reprieved towards the Islands of the Blessed. Caesar was suspected
of having entertained the notion of abandoning Rome, and Livy must have remembered something
like that when he showed Camillus refusing to move away from Rome after the Gallic disaster (5,
51-54). No doubt people felt that there were enemies of the em[16]pire other than the visible ones
beyond the borders.22
However, by eliminating the Seleucid State, Pompey had done two things which proved more
momentous than he could possibly have expected. He introduced Judaea into the Roman Empire
and made the Parthians the only viable alternative to the Romans for those who disliked them.
Nothing is more significant in this connection than the letter Sallust attributes to Mithridates
Eupator in which he tries to induce King Arsaces of Parthia to join him in the war against Rome in
69 B.C. Sallust makes Mithridates say to Arsaces: “The Romans have one inveterate motive for
making war upon all nations, people and kings, namely a deep-seated desire for dominion and for
riches” (5). “I pray you then to consider whether you believe than when we have been crushed you
will be better able to resist the Romans or that there will be an end to the war” (16). How acutely
the men of the Caesarian and Augustan age felt that Parthia was the last bastion against Rome is
shown by the whole plan of the history of Trogus Pompeius, where Rome and Parthia are the
ultimate antagonists. This is of course confirmed by Livy’s attack on the “levissimi ex Graecis”
who sympathize with the enemies of Rome and finally by all the anti-Parthian rhetoric of Augustan
poetry.
i
DEININGER 1971.
Polybius, The Histories, with an Engl. transl. by W. R. Paton, 6 voll., London – Cambridge (Mass) 1922-1927.
iii
[Plut.] Vit. X or., 874a.
iv
Phot. 176.121b 9-16; Herod. 3,97 Spengel.
v
Frr. 71-75 Wehrli.
vi
F. 22 Schorn (= [Plut] Vit. X or. 847a-b = FrHG 162 F 7).
vii
DRERUP 1923.
viii
CLOCHE 1939.
ix
Cfr. CANFORA 1967; ID. 1974, vol. I, Discorsi all’assemblea, 94. Se DROYSEN 1893, 248-50, argomentava
come Cicerone non leggesse ancora le aggiunte nell’orazione Sulla corona, traendo la conlusione che i documenti
allegati fossero entrati nel testo nell’arco di tempo che lo separava da Plutarco (conclusione seguita da Drerup e
Pasquali, cfr PASQUALI 1934, p. 275 e n. 4) i papiri hanno mostrato come già circolassero edizioni corredate da
documenti. Nel caso dell’orazione Sulla Corona, parr. 167-68, il papiro di Ossirinco 1377 (I sec. a.C.) fornisce il testo
della risposta ai Tebani, mentre il papiro Rylands 57 (II/III sec. d.C.) la omette.
x
Phlegon, de Mirab. 3.1
ii
21
22
P-o 130: Though <- num. V, del.
P-o 184: Etruscan prophets at the end ... beyond the borders. = = Opposition, 683.
174
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
I. The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – Greece
xi
Phlegon, de Mirab. 3.15
GAUGER 1980.
xiii
Merkelbach, R., in SNELL 1954, n. 129. Cit. anche in How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans (=Reconcile).
xiv
GABBA 1976. Per un fondamentale contributo momiglianeo sulla questione relativa all’utilizzo della variante
troiana del mito delle origini di Roma per offendere i Romani si rimanda a How to reconcile Greeks and Trojans
(=Reconcile).
xv
Cfr. GL 1980 I (Universal History), c. 1, e Alien Wisdom, cap. II.
xvi
WALBANK 1977.
xvii
AFRICA 1961.
xviii
Pompei Trogi Hist. Phil. Epit. 37, 2 Seel.
xii
175
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
II
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism *1
2 – The East2
The Greco-Macedonian3 conquest of the Near East, as I have said, meant the establishment of a
new leading class of conquerors, the foundation of new cities governed in the traditional Greek
way, and the establishment of the Greek language and Greek culture as the standard modes of
communication and evaluation. It presented the old native ruling classes with the alternative either
of slow assimilation to the Greco-Macedonian ruling class or of a not so slow decline in status and
ultimate elimination. There was resistance everywhere to the Greek supremacy, as there was later to
Roman supremacy. Those who had lacked the military strength to defeat the Macedonian phalanx
before it was too late could resort to guerrillas and insurrections – for a time. When even that
proved of no avail, they could stick to their native language, literature and religion as another form
of protest; but this as a rule meant going underground in face of a materially and intellectually
superior power. In moments of special tension, for instance during insurrections, native religion
could be channelled or manipulated to produce symbols of protest and hope against hope: and
foreign symbols of protest were syncretistically borrowed and assimilated when the native [2] ones
were not sufficient.
The Egyptians are the most evident example of an old culture which was degraded and
devitalized by Macedonian conquest. It is also the culture which, thanks to the papyri, we know
best: the underdogs bark more clearly from Oxyrhynchus, Tebtunis and other spots of the Egyptian
land than from any other Hellenistic territory. The Egyptians were more or less endemically
rebellious, especially in the second century B.C. They even succeeded on two or three occasions in
putting up a king of their own against the reigning Ptolemy. The peasant knew how to run away in
protest from their residences: their flight is dignified by the technical term anachoresisi. But the
conquerors were invariably capable of re-establishing their own superiority. Notwithstanding the
freshness and variety of the literature in demotic,4 the Egyptian language had less prestige than the
language of the conquerors5 and got a new lease of life only when pure Hellenism was replaced by
Christianity, which gave native languages a new place throughout the Near East. If the wealthy
natives had almost automatically reduced their chances of competition because of their insufficient
command of the Greek language, and Greek manners and thought, their less wealthy brethren were
in no better position. The conquerors were not all upper class; they became competitors in those
agricultural and artisan jobs to which the natives had so far had almost exclusive access. The
Greeks had also some notions of efficiency which they used to good effect to annoy the natives.
Like the Jews, the Egyptians were hampered in their dealings with the Greeks by old taboos. As
Herodotus tells us (II, 41), they would not use a knife touched by the Greeks, let alone kiss a Greek.
Like the Jews, the Egyptians were horrified by the Greek habit of exposing children (Diod. I, 80).
If there were good reasons for rebellion, there were even stronger reasons, in the given
circumstances, for compromise. The Ptolemies wanted, and obtained, religious recognition as the
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 185, ds. originale della versione CL 1981 II. Si riportano in apparato le divergenze
con P-o 130, fascicolo di 30 ff. che offre un testo GL ampliato anteriore alla bipartizione CL (quando non diversamente
indicato, il testo di P-o 185 può considerarsi coincidente) e, all’occorrenza, di P-o 184, testo base di CL 1981 I
(Greece) derivato invece dalla prima parte di P-o 130. Si segnalano inoltre eventuali paralleli con Some Preliminary
Remarks on the “Religious Opposition” to the Roman Empire (= bibl. 712), citato come Opposition, specificando se i
passi sono identici (= =), quasi uguali (=) o solo da mettere in relazione, ma con differenze significative (cfr).
1
P-o 130: Chicago I + II (April) = Grinfield I (Feb. 1981) with new additions tsfmsr[AMM];
2
P-o 184: 1 – Greece; P-o 130: I.
3
Ts. da P-o 130, cap. II (cfr. Introduzione, par. 3).
4
P-o 185: Notwithstanding ... demotic, ds.; P-o 130: def.
5
P-o 185: had less prestige than the language of the conquerors <-> P-o 130: lost its attraction for the native educated
classes outside the temples.
176
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
legitimate sovereigns of the land.6 Even the temples, notwithstanding immemorial wealth and great
prestige, had a precarious life. Their wealth in [3] itself led to prudence and to accommodation. On
the Ptolemaic side, there was readiness to extend protection in exchange for collaboration. Besides,
the Greeks were as a rule tolerant towards foreign gods. A series of royal orders show the Ptolemies
returning sacred land, granting immunities to temples and protecting their precinct and their
peasants against the encroachment of soldiers and functionaries. The Rosetta stone of 196 B.C.
(OGIS 90) – a decree of the Egyptian priests assembled at Memphis – is the classical example of
how the Ptolemies managed to buy the collaboration of the native clergy by concessions and
privileges.
In Babylonia Macedonian rule ceased earlier (about 130 B.C.) and was replaced by the Parthians,
not by the Romans. Of course, native texts in Greek are far less abundant in Mesopotamia than in
Egypt, but there is a large amount of cuneiform texts, not all of which have been exploited. Great
temples were perhaps even more in danger in Mesopotamia than in Egypt. They had memories of
confrontation with the Persian rulers which were probably worse than those of Egyptian temples (if
we discount the stories of Cambyses’ persecution of Egyptian religion). Xerxes had actually
destroyed the great temple of Marduk in Babylonia and taken away the statue of the godii. The
Seleucids in their turn were not above sacking Asiatic temples to replenish their own coffers. The
landed and mercantile aristocracy of Mesopotamia, which included Jews and Iranian, depended on
the stability of the institutions and on the goodwill of the king’s officials to avoid loss of trade and,
worse, confiscation. According to Polybius (30, 25, 16), a secretary of Antiochus IV put his
personal slaves into a royal parade, each slave with a silver plate of one thousand drachmas in his
hand. One wonders how much confiscation, bribery and extortion were necessary to reach such a
distinction. Unlike Egypt, the lands of Hellenized Asia, including Mesopotamia, were full of cities
of old and recent foundation. The villages tended to be [4] assigned to neighbouring cities, which in
itself implied subordination of the rural natives to the Hellenic or Hellenized bourgeoisie. This
leaves open the question of how willingly even the native bourgeoisie accepted Hellenization.
No doubt class interests separated the well-to-do from the poor and affected both the nature and
the limits of the opposition to the Hellenistic rulers. The social cleavage became even more the
determining factor when, confronted by the Romans, the Greco-Macedonians themselves turned
from conquerors into conquered. Old political divisions and increasingly divergent social interests
prevented the Greco-Macedonians from ever presenting a common front against the Romans. This
applies especially to the Greeks of Greece, though it may well help to explain the collapse of Egypt
and Syria. To return to what I said at the beginning, inside each Greek state the Romans exercised a
patchy, but ultimately effective, practice of dividing the poor from the rich and the pro-Roman rich
from the anti-Roman rich. In the end, they collected enough pro-Roman members of the upper class
to rule through them. If we want a symbolic text, let us take the inscription of Dyme of 115 B.C.
(Syll.3, 684)iii, which records what was probably a local episode without major repercussions. The
local authorities of Dyme in Achaia and the proconsul of Macedonia Q. Fabius Maximus Eburnus
joined hands in getting rid of local revolutionaries who had destroyed the local archives and
clamoured for remission of debts. Such collaboration, however, was not easily or invariably
achieved. The Romans had to seize a thousand young hostages from the Achaean league in 168 and,
worse, to destroy Corinth in 146 before they could sit down in relative tranquillity for a few
decades. Even so, it was enough that Mithridates Eupator should blow his trumpet about 88 B.C. to
have the Greeks turning anti-Roman by the thousand; and they cannot all have been poor, as they
certainly were not all uneducated. More conspicuously, the Romans failed to counterpose one class
to another in [5] Carthage and had to resort to the wholesale destruction and massacre which
marked the end of civilised Carthage.
There is a last general remark to make. For some, or rather most, of the ethnic group involved in
our story, conquest by foreign powers was not an unusual experience. It is not by chance that
6
P-o 185: The Ptolemies ... of the land; P-o 130: def.
177
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
Herodotus, Ctesias and other Greek historians, either coming from Asia Minor or reflecting on
events of that region, spoke of the succession of world empires. Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia
either conquered or interfered with Western Asia. Hellenistic historians could add Alexander and,
later, the Romans. Having shared the same experiences, the Jews, like the author of the Book of
Daniel, were ready to accept and develop that scheme for their purposes. These conquests had
succeeded each other rather rapidly. About two centuries separated Cyrus from Alexander, less than
one hundred and fifty years separated Alexander from the Roman Flamininus. In the near East,
being conquered was not such an unusual experience. The situation was different in Western
Europe where, apart from the limited territories colonized by the Greeks or controlled by the
Carthaginians, the Roman conquest may well have been the first conquest by an organized, selfconscious, imperial power. We know, however, very little, or nothing, of what the Celtic expansion
had represented to those regions a few centuries earlier. What matters to us, for the purpose of the
present discussion, is that the people of Western Europe were in any case the most unlikely to
record in transmissible forms what they felt when the Romans came. Later, some Romans like
Tacitus tried to fill the lacuna by lending words to conquered native leaders such as Calgacus of
Britain. This is the classical case of bad conscience: Tacitus the imperialist felt his own liberty
endangered by the very success of the imperialism for which he worked.
Fond as we may be of comparison, we cannot quite compare the Lydians, the Asiatic Greeks, the
Jews, the Syrians and the Egyptians with those Indians of [6] South America whose reaction to the
Spanish conquest have been so intelligently studied in recent years by several scholars such as
Miguel Léon-Portilla and Nathan Wachtel, whose book titles significantly echo each other: Vision
de los vencidos (1959), La vision des vaincus (1971)iv. The Indians, of course, had earlier known
expanding empires of their own. The Spaniards derived advantage from offering support to those
discontented with the Atzec rule of Mexico and the Inca domination of Peru. Yet the arrival from
the sea of strange ships, strange beings of uncertain status – perhaps men, perhaps gods – of animals
and weapons never seen before was a shock not comparable with anything experienced by Near
Eastern nations, even by the Egyptians when they were invaded by Alexander: after all, they had
been seeing Greeks for centuries. The trauma experienced by the Indians of America has no parallel
in the history of the classical world that I know of. It is therefore all the more remarkable that there
are points of similarity in the religious reactions. The dreams, prodigies and prophecies reported by
natives as belonging to the years before and after the Spanish conquest resemble some of the
dreams, prodigies and prophecies we shall have to report. The symbolism of human anxiety and
defeat seems after all not to be unlimited. Monsters, comets, fires, prophecies post eventum pervade
the evidence of the visions of the conquered in South America (as reported by the reliable Friar
Bernardino da Sahagun in his Historia general de las cosas de Nueva Españav): they appear also in
apocalyptic and non-apocalyptic books of the Hellenistic age.
The earliest7 document of religious resistance to Alexander which I happen to know comes from
Babylonia and was published for the first time in 1975 by A. K. Grayson from a cuneiform tablet in
the British Museum (Babylonian Historical-Literary Texts, 26-37). The text has the form of a
prophecy which foresees a series of events affecting Babylonia from the rise of the neo-Babylonian
empire [7] to the Hellenistic age. In my opinion, which differs considerably from that of the editor,
Grayson, and subsequent interpreters, this prophetic chronicle, like certain sections of Daniel, is
more than a collection of prophecies post eventum. At a certain point it jumps into real prophecy
and tries to predict what has still to happen: as in Daniel, the true prophecy turns out to be a false
prophecy, because the seer fails in his guess. In this Babylonian text, the prophecy of the past,
which of course is correct, includes, and ends with, Alexander’s conquest of Babylon (330). After
that, there is a brief account of the return and victory of the legitimate king of the land – which, in
my opinion, is a real prophecy and also represents the real purpose of the text. Like most real
7
P-o 130: The earliest <- num. III, del.
178
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
prophecies, it goes wrong. The combination of prophecy post eventum and prophecy ante eventum
was meant to persuade the reader that the writer was a good prophet: the reader was consequently
invited to believe and hope that the Macedonian rule would not last long. I am not sure whether the
king who is expected to return is King Darius himself or one of the later pretenders. We must
remember that in Cappadocia a certain Ariarathes who claimed to be a member of the Persian royal
family stood up against the Macedonians from 331 to 322 and had to be dealt with by Perdiccas and
Eumenes after Alexander’s death (Diod. 18, 6; 31, 19, 4). The chronicle becomes very fragmentary
and obscure in the last section, and I cannot pretend to understand the details of what it says. If,
however, I am basically correct in considering this section a genuine prophecy, the text as a whole
must be taken as a message trying to encourage the Babylonians to expect and therefore to help the
return of a native king.
In Egypt a comparable text is, of course, the Potter’s Oracle, which we know much better after
the publication of Pap. Oxyrhynchus 2332 and its republication by L. Koenen in Zeitschr. f.
Papyrologie und Epigraphik 2, 1968, 178-209 (an appendix ib. 13, 1974, 313-319)vi. The Potter’s
Oracle has reached us in dif[8]ferent versions and was still read in Roman imperial times. It
presents itself as a Greek translation from an Egyptian original: the potter’s prophecy is addressed
to King Amenophis; but it seems doubtful whether there ever was an Egyptian original. The potter
himself was probably an incarnation of the potter god Chnum. The oracle, as it is, presupposes the
existence of the city of Alexandria and the cult of Serapis. It is anti-Greek and seems to foresee, and
hope for, the dissolution of Greek rule through internal struggles. Certain indications in the text
seem to allude more precisely to events of the second century B.C., such as Antiochus IV’s invasion
of Egypt about 170-168 and the troubles with the natives of about 131-127 under Ptolemy
Euergetes II. In any case, the return of a previous king, presumably a native, is promised as a gift by
the Sun-God Re.
If the oracle was still read with pleasure in imperial times, it must have acquired an anti-Roman
connotation. There can be no doubt about the anti-Roman bias of a text which is closely connected
with, and possibly inspired by, the Potter’s Oracle, namely the apocalyptic section of the so-called
Asclepius in the Corpus Hermeticum. As is well-known, the Asclepius in its original Greek form
was read by Lactantius: it must be earlier than the fourth century A.D. The Latin translation, which
alone preserves for us the text in full, has some allusions to the Christian persecutions of pagans
which must have been interpolated after Lactantius and before St. Augustine. If we accept chapter
27 of the Asclepius as the conclusive part of this apocalypse, the demiurgos is expected to restore to
power the ancient Egyptian gods who had retired to a Libyan mountain while the foreigners ruled
Egypt. Jewish apocalyptic influences, perhaps transmitted by Sibylline texts, combine with the
tradition of Egyptian prophecy to convey an image of present desecration by barbarians which the
“god first in power and demiurgos of one god” (deus primipotens et unius gubernator dei) will
paradoxically heal by restoring the ancient gods and collecting all the right [9] people of the world
in a sort of Egyptian counterpart to Messianic Jerusalem.
The traffic between Jewish apocalyptic and Egyptian prophecy was perhaps not one-way only. It
has been suggested that the Lamb of St. John’s Revelation has a predecessor in the Lamb which
gives the name to another Egyptian oracle. The present text of the Lamb’s oracle is dated under
Augustus (4/5 A.D.), but refers to the reign of King Bocchoris of the XXIV dynasty (about 715
B.C.). The Lamb announces that a disaster will break over Egypt after nine hundred years, and it
also pronounces that ultimately God will care again for the Egyptians and will give them back the
sacred objects the Assyrian had taken away. The historical allusions may not be too clear, and the
nine hundred years may be just a round figure. I am also doubtful about the connection between the
Egyptian Lamb and St. John’s Lamb. But it seems beyond doubt that in the Lamb’s prophecy the
Assyrians symbolize all the foreign invaders. We are reminded of the symbolic value of the
Assyrians in the Books of Judith and Tobit.8 In other Egyptian texts the hatred of foreign rulers and
8
P-o 185: the Potter’s Oracle, which we know much better ... and Tobit. = = Opposition, 687-8.
179
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
the nostalgia for power and independence have less conventional patterns. One of the lunar omina
of the Vienna Demotic Papyrus published by R. A. Parker in 1959vii seems to allude to a rebellion
of Egyptian soldiers (p. 47).9 The so-called Demotic chronicle re-edited by W. Spiegelberg in 1914
and commented on historically by Ed. Meyer in the Sitz. Berlin Akademie, 1915, 287-304viii,
presents in the form of an oracle uttered under the reign of Tachos in 362/1 B.C. a sketch of recent
Egyptian history up to the Macedonian conquest. The interpretation of details is not easy. It has
been made the object of a careful investigation by Janet H. Johnson of Chicago University since her
first paper in Enchoria 4, 1974ix. She seems inclined to conclude that the allusions to the Greeks
were interpolated into an originally anti-Persian text. 10 An experienced demoticist, 11 Edda
Bresciani, in offering a translation of the text (Letteratura e poesia dell’antico Egitto, 1969, 551560), stated that the prophecy ends by announcing the advent of a Ptolemy who will bring peace.
But it seems far more probable that the oracle in its present form12 announces, or hopes for, an
Egypt without Greeks in which a native (presumably a priest) from Heracleopolis becomes King
and Isis is happy. The [10] Chronicle itself must have been written in the priestly circles of
Heracleopolis during the Ptolemaic period at an uncertain date, probably between 217 and 168 B.C.
In other texts the last native king, Nectanebus, who about 342 B.C. had to yield to the Persians
and flee to Ethiopia, plays the role of the returning native king. In the best known version of the
romance of Alexander – the so-called A-version edited by W. Krollx – Nectanebus displays the arts
of a magician and astrologer in seducing Olympia, impersonating the god Ammon and becoming
the father of Alexander the Great. A papyrus published by U. Wilcken in Urkunden der PtolomäerZeit (U.P.Z), I, 81xi, relates a dream of Nectanebus and breaks off when a love adventure is just
beginning. This papyrus of the second century B.C. is of special interest because it shows traces of
translation from Egyptian and therefore confirms that Nectanebus was pushed into the Alexander
legend by Egyptian story-tellers.
As I have already mentioned, memories of past greatness supported the expectation or hope of
future revenge. Already in Herodotus the semi-mythical King Sesostris is presented as superior to
Darius the Persian, who rather good-naturedly conceded the point (II, 110). But no Greek writer
before Alexander really attributed to Egypt a period of universal empire to be compared with the
Assyrian or the Persian Empire. It was left to a Greek writing in Egypt about 300 B.C. – Hecataeus
of Abdera – to elevate Sesostris to the dignity of a universal ruler. In Hecataeus’ account which we
have in Diodorus’ summary (I, 53), Sesostris’ father gave his son the education befitting a future
cosmocrator, and Sesostris proved to be the model emperor of the world. Hecataeus of Abdera was
in the habit of idealizing barbarians. It does not matter very much whether the Egyptians put ideas
into his head or vice versa. Three centuries later, Strabo (17, 816) was told with the help of suitable
inscriptions that the Egyptians had once governed the Scythians, Bactrians, Indians and Greeks: the
story [11] was repeated, more or less in the same terms, by another priest when Germanicus visited
Egypt (Tacitus, Ann. II, 60). But a contemporary of Hecataeus, Megasthenes, who learned that
Sesostris had penetrated India well beyond the conquests of Alexander, was rather sceptical (Strabo,
15, 686). This perhaps contributed to the relative moderation of Manetho, who attributed to a king
Ramses the conquest merely of Cyprus, Media and Assyria (Josephus, C. Apionem I, 99). By
contrast the Asclepius, chap. 27, describes the period of Egyptian decline as the one in which all
those previously conquered barbarians (including Scythians and Indians) will invade Egypt. Other
stories of old times, without any precise political implications, were kept alive or revived simply
because they belonged to the national tradition. But it is indicative of the penetrating power of the
Greeks that such old stories absorbed elements of the dominant culture. The story of the visit of
Setne to the Netherworld in which he is guided by his son Si-Osire (a story which offers, as is well
known, a parallel to the parable of Lazarus and the rich man in Luke 16, 19-31) includes details of
9
10
11
12
P-o 185: One of the lunar omina ... of Egyptian soldiers (p. 47), ds.; P-o 130: def.
P-o 185: She seems ... anti-Persian text, ds.; P-o 130: def.
P-o 130: demoticist -> like, del.
P-o 185: in its present form, ds.; P-o 130: def.
180
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
evident Greek origin, such as Tantalus’ penalty (see M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature III,
125 ff.). Even more clearly, the struggle for the cuirass of Inaros, preserved in the Krall papyrus of
Vienna and now more fully available in the reconstruction of the text made by Edda Bresciani
(1966), is an imitation of the struggle for Achilles’ armour. Homerically, Osiris sends two demons
to make trouble. Another story about Amazons imitates the motif of Penthesilea’s love for Achilles,
but has a happy ending (Bresciani, Letteratura e poesia dell’antico Egitto, 673-4).
At this point it becomes inevitable to give at least passing consideration to a more general
question. We have seen Greek tales like the Alexander Romance with Egyptian elements, and we
have found Egyptian stories showing Greek influence. But the links between Egyptian and Greek
novelistic materials are not limited to [12] details. Twenty-five years ago, the late Professor John
Barns, the Oxford Egyptologist, made some important points in his communication to the Eighth
Papyrological Congress under the title “Egypt and the Greek Romance” (Akten d. 8 Kongr. für
Papyr. 1956xii). He was then working on a Demotic papyrus of the first or second century A.D.,
which told the story concerning the Egyptian King Djoxr of the third dynasty and his famous vizier
Imuthes. The story involves an Assyrian sorceress-queen and immediately reminds us of the oldest
Greek novel to have come down to us (at least partially) in a papyrus of the first century A.D., the
story of King Ninus and Queen Semiramis. Egypt had an immemorial tradition of using historical
characters for fictional tales. Did the Egyptians transmit this habit to the Greeks? And did they
transmit with this habit also nationalistic elements? There are plenty of religious elements of
Egyptian origin in Greek novels, and it would not be unnatural to attribute them to the influence of
Egyptian novels. K. Kerenyi in his book of 1927 and R. Merkelbach in his even more [15]
authoritative work of 1962, Roman und Mysterium in der Antikexiii, have maintained that the Greek
romance developed from the sacred story of Isis and Osiris. In 1967, Ben Edwin Perry dismissed
the whole theory in a few words: “this is all a nonsense to me” (The Ancient Romancesxiv, p. 336, n.
17), and he was in good company. But the masterly first edition by Albert Henrichs of a new
papyrus fragment of the novel “Phoenician Stories” by Lollianus in 1972xv brought a new argument
in favour of the religious and Egyptian origins of the Greek novel. Lollianus, to all appearances a
writer of the second century A.D., includes a ritual murder in his novel as a central episode.
Henrichs with good reason sees it as a ritual practice by Egyptian boukoloi, the Egyptian peasant
rebels well known to us from the historical evidence of the second century A.D. and especially from
Cassius Dio, 71, 4. Here again there would be a link with Egypt and Egyptian secret rituals.
[13] Notwithstanding all this, I cannot say that even after the discovery of Lollianus’ novel
(which is called Phoenician, not Egyptian, stories) we are any nearer to a demonstration that the
Greek novel started in Egypt under native influences. The fact is that Oriental stories are already to
be found in the earlier Greek historians, such as Herodotus and Ctesias. These stories were often
reported not because they were believed to be true, but because they were amusing. Slowly, under
the chief influence of Thucydides, true stories and fictional stories parted company, but the
separation was never absolute. In the Hellenistic period we have both erotic fictional stories
involving persons who did exists and true historical works including fictions and Utopias. As we
know, the Greeks did not even achieve a terminological distinction between history and novel. In
such a situation it is impossible to give priority to the Egyptian elements in Greek novels. They are
prominent, but they do not predominate, nor indeed determine the genre. It is arbitrary to reduce the
love stories of Greek novels to the prototype of the story of Isis and Osiris. It is also unlikely that
writers like Lollianus would attribute much religious value to the tales of secret rituals which they
were wont to include in their books. They just aimed at dramatic effect. In the particular case of
Lollianus, he was obviously exploiting contemporary curiosity in the peasant rebels of the Nile
Delta with their gruesome rites. If we cannot talk of an exclusively Egyptian origin of the Greek
novel, we can talk even less of Egyptian resistance literature embedded in the Greek novel. What is
Egyptian in the Greek novels is enough to confirm the vitality of the old nation which after all
impressed the world with the cult of Isis, but it does not notably enlarge the field of Egyptian
181
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
resistance literature (cf. the remarks by J. J. Winkler, “Lollianus, and the Desperadoes”, Journ. Hell.
Stud. 100, 1980, 155-181).
[14] No13 other ancient culture was so effectively humiliated and slowly reduced to silence as
Egyptian culture. The Greek conquerors neither cared for its language nor for its social order. They
did not escape the attraction of some individual gods (such as Isis) or of some customs (such as
marriages between full brothers and sisters), but relentlessly controlled the Egyptian countryside
from the Greek city of Alexandria. Rooted in a wisdom and in a ritual which could hardly analyse
the facts of foreign rule or involve the rulers in a rational discussion, the Egyptians who cared for
the past found their model in Prince Khamvas, the fourth son of Ramses II, “who had spent his time
in the study of ancient monuments and books” (M. Lichtheim, III, 127)xvi.14
The only conspicuous document of hostility among Persian religious groups to the Roman rulers
seems in fact to be specifically anti-Roman and to have been divulgated in the first century B.C. It
is the so-called oracle of Hystaspes. Before we turn to it as my final point in this argument, some
background clarification seems to be required.
We often hear of Iranian opposition to the Greeks during the Hellenistic period. But we see more
of that in modern than in ancient texts. Greeks in the fourth century B.C., like Plato in Laws 3, 693
A, had a sound contempt for the Persians of their day. It deserves to be reciprocated. But our
Persian evidence is deplorably late and garbled. The Dînkart of the ninth century talks of the
accursed villain Alexander who stole the Avesta and had it translated into Greek (E. M. West,
Pahlavi Texts IV, p. xxxixvii ). Alexander or the Macedonians may or may not be symbolized in the
fourth branch of the tree of the Kingdom in the Brahman Yasht, I, 3-5, which is in itself a medieval
text, though it must represent a much older tradition. A Manichean fragment from Sogdiana (which
is taken by W. B. Henning, “The Murder of the Magi”, JRAS, 1944, 133-44, to be a translation from
an earlier Middle Persian or Parthian document) ascribes the murder of the [15] Magi to King
Alexander.
No doubt there were colonies of Persians in Asia Minor with their Magi. When they moved in is
a question by itself. The locus classicus on these colonies is a letter by S. Basil (258) as late as the
fourth century A.D. In the second century A.D., Pausanias (5, 27, 5) was able to witness religious
ceremonies in temples of Persian gods in Lydia where the gods were invoked in a barbarian
language which the Greeks could not understand. Whether and how these colonies of Persian – or
Aramaic –speaking Iranians were centres of anti-Greek or anti-Roman feelings does not emerge
from the available evidence. But Hystaspes’ text is enough to show that somebody was exploiting
Persian lore to beat the Romans, if not the Greeks.
Hystaspes’ text was read in imperial times in two versions: the evidence is easily avalaible in
Cumont-Bidez, Les Mages hellenisésxviii . One version was clearly Christianized and was known
directly or indirectly to Clement of Alexandria in the second century (Strom. 615; 43, 1) and to the
Theosophy attributed to Aristocritus, perhaps fifth century A.D. (see Buresch, Klaros 1889, 95xix).
Clement, in fact, ascribes a quotation of Hystaspes to St. Paul: he must have found a reference to it
in some apocryphical text attributed to him. In this Christianized version Hystaspes alludes to
Christ. The other version, though utilized by Lactantius in his Institutiones and read by him in a
Christian key, was un-Christian. It predicted the destruction of the Roman empire at the end of the
sixth millennium and the return of the East to power. The collapse of Rome would be followed by
anarchy and natural disasters, after which the world would enjoy peace and prosperity for one
thousand years, presumably under Eastern kings. At the end of the seventh millennium (as in St.
John’s Apocalypse) the world will be renewed by God, and the just will enjoy perpetual happiness.
[16] In Hystaspes’ text, the prophecy of the fall of Rome takes the form of a dream by a king of
Media, Hystaspes, who lived before the Trojan war. The dream itself is interpreted by a child:
“Romanum nomen, quo nunc regitur orbis, tolletur a terra et imperium in Asiam revertitur ac rursus
13
P-o 130: No <- num. IV, del.
P-o 130: segue il testo passato in P-o 184, dal f. 9 (When the Greeks found themselves in relation to the Romans) al
16 (rhetoric of Augustan poetry).
14
182
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
Oriens dominabitur atque Occidens serviet ...” (Inst., 7, 15). The opposition between East and West,
in other words between Parthia and Rome, could not be clearer. Though Bidez and Cumont (Mages,
II, 367) have stated that this dream, like Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in Daniel, presupposes the theory
of the four monarchies, I do not find any evidence for this. If there were anti-Greek implications in
an older version of the text, they have disappeared with this hypothetical older version. In the
version transmitted by Lactantius, the king of Media represents the original Eastern rule and the
Romans the present Western rule. This is the ordinary dichotomy of Persian historical thinking,
even in late texts. According the Zamasp-Nâmak, a Pahlavi text of the Sassanian period studied by
E. Benveniste (Rev. hist. rel. 106, 1932, 337-80xx), the empire of Iran will pass to its enemies, but
later will return to Iran. The dichotomy was accepted by St. Augustine when he opposed the new
Babylon, Rome, to the old Babylon in Book XVIII of De civitate dei. No wonder that the
circulation of the prophecy of Hystaspes had been prohibited in Rome some time before Justin the
Martyr published his apology in the middle of the second century A.D. (Apol. 1, 44, 12). Justin,
however, goes so far as to assert that the death penalty had been enacted in the past against those
who read such an oracle. This is more than we would reasonably expect and does not seem to be
comparable with the death penalty established by an unknown emperor for those who consulted
astrologers in order to know the future of living emperors (Paul, Sent. 5, 21, 3).15 The text itself, in
its pre-Christian version, cannot be earlier than the beginning of serious conflicts [17] between the
Romans and the Parthians in the first century B.C. We reach the same chronological limits if we
connect it with Mithridates’ wars. Mithridates, incidentally, claimed descent from the Achaemenids.
In any case, the text owes its preservation and apparently its diffusion to the Christians, who
interpreted it in a Christian key and even interpolated prophecies about Christ into it. There was an
anti-Roman tradition that died hard among Christians. It has a Jewish origin, as St. John’s
Revelation shows, but was reinforced by other currents, one of which evidently came from Persia
or, better, Parthia. We are beginning to recognize that though the Jewish evaluation of the hostile
imperial world (whether Greco-Macedonian or Roman) was in many ways different, it had much in
common with what other enemies of Greek and Roman imperialism felt about the same subject.
I would16 like to conclude this lecture by turning to another strange text which purpots to present
the case for Phoenicia as a very old and respectable civilization underrated by the Greeks. The
claim was made by a Phoenician from Biblos named Philo about the end of the first century or the
beginning of the second century A.D. Philo of Byblos was a polymath who had a very long life and
survived the Emperor Hadrian, about whose reign he wrote. He also wrote on cities and their great
men and about how to acquire and select books: titles which are enough to endear him to any of us.
But Philo attracted the attention of the pagan Porphyry and then – through Porphyry – of the
Christian Eusebius with two works, one longer one (of at least eight books) on the Phoenicians and
another shorter one on the Jewsxxi. Thanks to Eusebius, we know at least the outlines of the work on
the Phoenicians, whereas we have very scanty information about the book on the Jews (the
fragments in Jacoby Fr. Gr. Hist. 790). The [18] Phoenician History was not a political history of
the Phoenicians. It was rather an account of the ancient Phoenician doctrines about cosmology,
theology and the origins of culture. It is presented as a translation of an earlier work by
Sanchuniathon, who, according to Porphyry followed by Eusebius (Praep. Evang. 1, 9, 20-22), had
lived before the Trojan War in the days of Semiramis, queen of Assyria. As Porphyry cannot have
invented the date of Sanchuniathon, we must assume that he found it in Philo. In any case, Philo
stated explicitly that Sanchuniathon, a man of great learning and curiosity, had derived his facts
from Taatos, whom the Egyptians called Thout and the Greeks Hermes – a god, and a very learned
god at that.
In a more critical age the claim to have translated a pre-Trojan War book which in its turn
depended on the lore of a god was enough to discredit Philo. In the nineteenth century and in the
15
16
P-o 185: the death penalty ... living emperors, cfr. Opposition, 684.
P-o 130: I would <- num. VI, del.
183
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
early twentieth century, Philo was suspected of being either dishonest enough to have invented
Sanchuniathon or stupid enough to have believed in a forgery which laid claim to venerable
antiquity. But we are no longer in a critical age, and some rather irrelevant circumstances have
helped Philo and Sanchuniathon back to the respectability they had lost. The discovery of the
Ugaritic texts in the ‘thirties seemed to confirm both the authenticity of Philo’s information and its
remote antiquity. As the mythological texts of Ugarit go back to the second millennium B.C., why
should Philo not have a source going back to the Trojan War? This was O. Eissfeldt’s opinion
(since his 1939 book on Ras Shamra und Sanchunjathonxxii ). Professor W. F. Albright, though a
great follower and admirer of Eissfeldt, contented himself with a date for Sanchuniathon of the sixth
century B.C., which had no justification as it corresponded neither to the date of the Ras Shamra
texts nor to the date claimed by Porphyry – and therefore presumably by Philo – for Sanchuniathon.
In fact, [19] Albright gave himself away by claiming too much. He knew that “Sanchuniathon was a
refugee from Tyre who settled in Berytus about the second quarter of the sixth century B.C.”
(Yahweh and the Gods of Canaan, London 1968, 195).
The truth is that the similarities between the Ugaritic texts and Philo are not so close as to
provide any support for an archaic date of Philo’s material. The structure of his book is utterly
different from that of the Ugaritic texts. As James Barr in a salutary warning remarked: “the
systematic structure of a theogony with multiple generations, as found in Philo, is strange to the
world of Ugaritic myth” (‘Philo of Biblos and his Phoenician History’, Bull. John Rylands ... 57,
1974, 53xxiii ). However, the Ras Shamra texts have confirmed what an internal analysis of Philo had
already shown earlier – namely, that Philo was acquainted with authentic cosmological and
theological doctrines of the Phoenicians, for instance with the struggle between Baal and Yam (the
sea). But there are two specific arguments, each of which should be sufficient to discredit the
alleged remote antiquity of Philo’s sources.
The first argument (which so far seems never to have been formulated) is that Philo made two
different claims about Sanchuniathon, one in the History of the Phoenician, the other (to all
appearances) in the book on the Jews. About the Phoenicians he maintained, as I have said, that
Sanchuniathon followed the god Thoth. About the Jews he claimed for Sanchuniathon sources of
less divine origin. He stated that Sanchuniathon had derived his information about the Jews from
memoranda put together by Hierombalos, a priest of the god Ievo, who had dedicated his history to
the King of Berytus, Abibalos. Abibalos and other experts had testified that Hierombalos was a
truthful historian.
Now it is not difficult to see why Philo claimed a different type of sources for Sanchuniathon in
the case of his Jewish History. The evidence for [20] Phoenicia had of course to derive from the
highest possible authority. Who better than the god Thot, the inventor of writing, the secretary of
the gods? As for Jewish history, Philo was evidently out to contradict the pretension of the Jews and
to establish instead the priority of the Phoenicians as the founders of civilization. Let us not forget
that Philo was a contemporary of Flavius Josephus who was working in the opposite direction to try
to capture priority for the Jews. If writers like Josephus had the Bible as the major document about
the Jewish past, Philo of Byblos had to find evidence old enough and respectable enough to
discredit the Bible, or at least the Pentateuch. It is stated that he knew of Moses, whom he
considered a leper (Photius, Bibl. 279). He seems to have hit upon the idea of providing
Sanchuniathon with a priestly source, the history by Hierombalos priest of Ievo, the authenticity of
which was guaranteed by a Phoenician king. If the god Ievo, whose priest Hierombalos was, is
identical with Yahve (as seems probable), Moses had a dangerous rival among his own kin; and the
good faith of Hierombalos had been ascertained by a contemporary Phoenician king. We are
reminded of Josephus’ boast that his work on the Jewish War had been declared reliable by no one
less than the Emperor Titus – and Josephus, too, was, after all, of priestly extraction.
Be that as it may, it is obvious that Philo of Byblos had selected the sources of his source
Sanchuniathon with some care, that is, according to a shrewd evaluation of his own polemical aims.
If absolute authority was obtained for the Phoenician traditions by connecting them with the best
184
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
informed god, the claims of the Bible were neutralized by producing another priestly version of the
Jewish traditions.
But Philo was not primarily interested in polemizing with the Jews. He wanted to eliminate the
rival claims of the Jews only so as to proceed without [21] rivals to a systematic demonstration of
the superiority of the Phoenicians over the Greeks. His claims against the Greeks are stated in
unambiguous words quoted by Eusebius in Praeparatio Evangelica 1, 10, 44: “The Greeks who
surpass all men in their natural cleverness first appropriated most of these tales. They then
dramatized them in various ways with additional literary arguments and intending to beguile with
the delights of myths, they embellished them in all sort of ways. Whence Hesiod and the highly
touted cyclic poets fabricated their own versions and made excerpts of Theogonies and Giants’
Battles and Titans’ Battles which they carried about and with which they defeated the truth. Our
ears have for ages become habituated to and predisposed by their fictions” (transl. H. W. Attridge
and R. A. Oden, Philo of Byblos, The Phoenician History, Washington 1980).
This brings us to the second argument which, unlike the first, is almost conventional. Though
Philo of Byblos presents Sanchuniathon as attacking Hesiod and the cyclic poets, there is no
question that Sanchuniathon combines17 Greek and Phoenician traditions and furthermore interprets
by that characteristic method of Hellenistic theology, the reduction of gods to deified human
benefactors, which has become known as Euhemerism. Such a method could hardly have been
introduced in Phoenicia prior to the Greek occupation towards the end of the fourth century B.C.
We are therefore back with our old dilemma. Either Sanchuniathon is a figment of Philo’s
imagination, and we have saved Philo’s reputation as a clever man; or we must consider him the
dupe of a forger of the Hellenistic age who claimed for himself remote antiquity and for his sources
an even more august status. Indeed, we are reminded of that banal forgery of the early first century
A.D., the history of the Trojan War attributed to Dictys Cretensis, a writer in the Phoenician
language contemporary with the Trojan War itself. [22] Dictys may have been the model for
Sanchuniathon.
Whether a rogue18 or a dupe, Philo of Biblos had made his point. He had claimed against the
Greeks that Phoenicia had been the cradle of civilization. People there had discovered the various
arts, even the most elementary ones of making fire, fishing, hunting, making bricks, etc.
Being a Phoenician counterpart to Flavius Josephus, Philo is most useful in helping us to
understand the kind of intellectual claims against the Greeks which continued to be put forward for
Orientals during the Roman Empire.
It is obvious – so obvious that one is almost embarrassed in having to say it – that Philo of
Byblos cannot give us authentic pieces of cosmology of the second millennium B.C. His primary
value is that of evidence for his own time. He is a Hellenized Phoenician living in the Roman
Empire who emphasizes the value of his native tradition against Greeks and Jews, more especially
against Greeks. He could not do that without having a tradition behind. He was obviously in contact
with the priestly circles of his own country, knew their lore and, in this sense, preserves for us
authentic pieces of Phoenician religious and cosmological thought. But it is most unlikely that he
had any access to books written during the second millennium B.C. before or during the Trojan
War. It was a common literary device to attribute to ancient books what one thought for himself or
learnt from one’s own neighbours. In Roman imperial times there were in circulation enough books
purporting to be written in pre-Trojan times to fill up a library. Let us call it the Library of preTrojan Fathers. The type of indigenous knowledge Philo had is comparable with that displayed by
Lucian in his description of the native cult of the Syrian goddess with the only difference that
Lucian does not claim to have read pre-Trojan Fathers. Lucian, too, however, in his own ironical
way, plays a trick on his [23] readers. He wrote on the Syrian goddess in the Ionian dialect which he
never used in his other works to imitate Herodotus and give the impression that he combined the
qualities of a learned native and of an experienced traveller.
17
18
P-o 185: combines <-> P-o 130: contaminates, ms[Mom].
P-o 185: a clever man <-> P-o 130: a rogue, ms[Mom].
185
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
With Philo of Byblos I have exhausted the oriental texts, apart from the Jewish ones, which I
want to analyze and characterize however briefly. They have in common the idealization of the
religious and cultural tradition of the country concerned. They use it to express dissatisfaction with
and protest against Greco-Macedonian and Roman hegemony. The expectation of, or at least the
hope for, the end of foreign rule is often explicitly stated and can be presupposed even when it is
not stated, though we know that idealization of the past is not always equivalent to desire to have it
back. What is characteristic is the elimination of the political problem as such. There is never a
serious discussion of how the country should be governed if free – and of what sort of international
order it should become part. Cosmology and theology replace politics of the common Greek type,
the one to be found at one level in the marketplace and at another level in the theoretical books of
the philosophers.
As I have already said in my previous lecture, to return to Greece, either under the shadow of
Macedonian or under the shadow of Roman hegemony, is to meet politics again. I am speaking here
chiefly of metropolitan Greece. The case of the Greeks living in the cities of Asia Minor, not to say
of Egypt, is more complicated. Insofar as these Greeks had migrated to the East and had become the
ruling class of the Hellenistic monarchies, they were almost entirely absorbed in the task of any
conquering minority, that of organizing and controlling the conquered territory. However, the mere
fact of having Greek cities within the territorial monarchies kept local politics alive, and local
politics [24] could easily clash with monarchic politics. The amount of autonomy each city was
allowed to retain was a matter of negotiations, maneauvring and ultimately of effective resistance to
encroachment. Alexandria in Egypt and Antioch in Syria became famous for being unruly. They
became even more so of course when the Roman monarchy replaced the Macedonian monarchies,
and the local populations of the cities of the East had to adapt themselves to a new regime. But mob
agitations do not normally lead to authentic political movements for independence or selfgovernment. In this sense, the Greeks who had settled in the Eastern monarchies gave up, ipso
facto, any claim to independent political life and subordinated their interests to those of the ruling
monarchies at least as long as the ruling monarchies were Greco-Macedonian. The situation was
radically different in metropolitan Greece from Thessaly to Laconia. There the political
confrontation between foreign rulers and native Greeks never quite stopped, even in the first
century of the Roman empire, and it was certainly very intense during the third and second
centuries B.C. when Macedonia and, later, Rome did their best to control Greece: indeed, for about
fifty years between 220 circa and 168 B.C. Macedonia and Rome went to war against each other in
order to decide who should control Greece. The situation of the Greeks of Southern Italy and Sicily
was similar to that of the metropolitan Greeks. They fought for their independence against the
Romans. If I leave them aside, it is only because they were rapidly eliminated as independent
powers by the overwhelming superiority of the Romans.19 The game was played according to all the
Greeks rules, but it was played only too briefly.
* * *
I hope I have made good my claim that when we find in Greek territory texts which turn politics
into something like praeternatural events or utopias, we are not only outside the great tradition of
Demosthenic resistance, but probably also under the influence of models of ideological protest
coming from the East.
I do not want to make a rigid distinction between the apocalyptic mood characteristic of the East
and the political argument characteristic of the Greeks. But I believe that the distinction is real and
rooted in the difference between the two cultural traditions and the two political situations. The
Greeks had a longer time to argue and to fight than the Eastern nations.20
As we are about to consider certain Jewish attitudes towards Greeks and Romans, it is useful to
remind ourselves that there is one aspect of the relations of the Jews both with the Greeks and with
19
P-o 185: If I leave them ... of the Romans, mgsupms[Mom] con segr.
P-o 185: It is obvious – so obvious that one is almost embarassed in having to say it ... Eastern nations, ds.; P-o 130:
def.
20
186
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
the Romans which does not exist in the corresponding case of Phoenicia, and indeed to a large
extent of Egypt and Asia Minor. The Jews had real wars of their own against Greeks and Romans.
The fall of Jerusalem may remind us of the fall of Corinth and of Carthage two centuries before; it
has no parallel in the history of Phoenicia or of Egypt. No Phoenician writer, such as Philo of
Byblos, nor any Egyptian writer like Apion (the immediate opponent of Flavius Josephus) could tell
of any war against the Romans; and he would have found it difficult to report a total native war (not
a partial rebellion) against the Greeks.
In my next two lectures I shall try to interpret some documents of Jewish origin in the light of
what we have learnt (or tried to learn) about the two different model of religious resistance and of
political resistance – one prevalently Oriental, the other prevalently Greek. Though undoubtedly
religious resistance prevails among Jews, as among the other Eastern nations, politics diplomacy
and conventional warfare occupy a place in Jewish texts, like the Books of Maccabees and later the
works of Flavius Josephus, which is not to be found in other Eastern texts and corresponds to the
reality of Jewish life in its relation to Ptolemies, Seleucids and Romans.21
Appendice al testo
Introduction GL 1981 I22
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is not for me to judge my youngers and betters. They did me the honour of extending my
Grinfield lectureship from two to four years and therefore presented me with the dilemma of either
diluting the three lectures I had already prepared into nine lectures or inventing six new lectures.
My English not being good enough for a dilution of such proportions (such things must be left to
the natives)23 I had really no choice24.
I have therefore decided to devote the two intermediate years to a more detailed exploration of
two aspects of Jewish historical thinking within its Greco-Roman context: first universal history, as
typified by the book of Daniel; and secondly, what one might call the historiography of resistance
from Esther and Judith to Philo, the IV Maccabees and Flavius Josephus, and perhaps the Seder
‘Olam Rabbah25.
My purpose (as defined in my first lecture last year) remains the study of certain intellectual
developments which contributed to making Judaism the only creative native culture in territories
controlled by the Greeks after 250 B.C.
i
Per il riferimento all’anachoresis vd. PRÉAUX 1939, 500-502; ROSTOVTZEFF 1957, II 758 s.v. Anachoresis
(entrambi volumi posseduti da Momigliano nella sua libreria).
ii
Hdt. I 183.
iii
SIG3 684 = CIG I 1543. Per i riferimenti bibliografici si rimanda a SHERK 1969, 246-8, no. 43.
iv
LEON-PORTILLA 1959 ; WACHTEL 1971.
v
Bernardino da Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (Med. Palat. 218-220). Per
un’edizione moderna con trad.ingl. si rimanda a ANDERSON – DIBBLE 1950-82.
vi
KOENEN 1968 e ID. 1974; cfr. ora anche ID. 1984.
vii
PARKER 1959.
viii
SPIEGELBERG 1914; MEYER 1915.
21
P-o 185: In my next ... and Romans, ds.; P-o 130: def.
F. a righe, msb[Mom], allegato a P-o 129; riportato anche in P-o 138, come c.c. ms., anteriore alla correzione, del f.
precedente.
23
(Such things… natives), def. in P-o 138.
24
P-o 129: no choice -> That is why I think that all University lecturers should be obliged by law to lecture in a foreign
language of their choice, msb, del.; P-o 138: corr. def.
25
Rabbah, def. in P-o 138.
22
187
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
The Intellectual and Religious Resistance to Greco-Macedonian and Roman Imperialism – The East
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
JOHNSON 1974.
KROLL 1926.
WILCKEN 1922-23, I B. n. 81, Der Traum des Nektonabos, pp. 369-74.
BARN 1956.
KERÉNYI 1927; MERKELBACH 1962.
PERRY 1967.
HENRICHS 1972.
LICHTHEIM 1973-80; v. III (The Late Period) 127.
WEST 1892, xxxi.
CUMONT-BIDEZ 20073 (I ed. 1934), II 357-77.
BURESCH 1889.
BENVENISTE 1932.
Per un contributo momiglianeo sulla questione cfr. Il libro sugli Ebrei di Filone di Biblos (in MOMIGLIANO
1980a).
xxii
xxiii
EISSFELDT 1939. Cfr. anche ID. 1952B e ID. 1952C.
BARR 1974.
188
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
CL 1981 III Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
Sedi e date:
GL 1981 II (28 gennaio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 424).
CL 1981 III (aprile/maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 424)
Documenti:
a) GL 1981 II
P-o 131, P-o 143 (b), P-o 144 (b), P-o 156, P-o 187: dss.
b) CL 1981 III
P-o 143 (a), P-o 144 (a): aggiunte mss.
P-o 149, P-o 150, P-o 186 nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 143, 144 (a-b).
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Di questa lecture l’AAM conserva otto documenti: cinque dss. riferibili alla lezione Grinfield,
due dei quali (P-o 143, 144) provvisti di aggiunte preparatorie al testo di Chicago, e tre
riconducibili a questa seconda versione. Come nel caso delle altre conferenze del ciclo The Jewish
Historiography of Resistance, viene proposto il testo CL 1981, punto di arrivo – seppur provvisorio
– di un’elaborata revisione di cui l’apparato cerca di rendere conto. Preso come base è il testo che si
presenta identico in P-o 149 e 150, due fascicoli dss. di 24 cc. conservati nel folder XVIII
dell’archivio1, che differiscono soltanto perché le correzioni mss. autografe presenti nel primo
ricompaiono dss. nel secondo. Lo stesso testo, benché a uno stadio meno elaborato, è proposto da Po 186, una c.c. di P-o 150 realizzata prima che il modello venisse corretto.
Il confronto con le precedenti versioni mostra come il testo CL sia percorso da una serie di
minuti interventi linguistici in generale volti a migliorare sfumature sintattiche. Compaiono però
anche occasionali sviste di copiatura rispetto a P-o 144 (come un salto di riga alla c. 14): uno, e non
il maggiore, dei motivi che inducono a considerare quest’ultimo fascicolo come di notevole
importanza per la ricostruzione del processo di costruzione del testo “definitivo”. Testimone ds.
della versione GL, è arricchito all’inizio da 2 cc. mss. da Momigliano ([1]-2) e dal foglio 17 bis, per
un totale di 24 carte. Accenti e segni di pausa lo qualificano come reading copy GL,
presumibilmente recuperata come base per il ripensamento della versione per Chicago. Il
documento presenta numerose correzioni mss. a penna, sia autografe che di AMM. Le annotazioni
di quest’ultima, condotte in due fasi (penna rossa e penna blu) e di natura formale e stilitica, non
vengono riportate in apparato ma messe direttamente a testo, essendo peraltro completamente
accolte dalla versione CL. Si segnalano invece in apparato gli interventi di Momigliano legati a
necessità esplicative prodotte dall’occasione (ad es.: “Targumim” = translation into Aramaic).
L’apparato testimonia inoltre alcuni brevi passi di P-o 144, tutti mss. da Momigliano, che non sono
stati ripresi dal testo di CL o, se ripresi, hanno subito riduzioni e modifiche (cfr. e.g. la menzione
della possibilità che il rotolo del tempio contenga allusioni al libro di Ester, c.6).
Un altro documento significativo è P-o 143, testimone GL con aggiunte CL, che risulta
pressoché identico nella parte ds. a P-o 144 (per quanto il f. 17 non coincida esattamente e manchi
un refuso presente in P-o 144 e P-o 131, Asmonean al posto di Hasmonean). Le correzioni di P-o
143, mss. da Momigliano, riprendono quasi totalmente gli interventi fatti su P-o 144, e sono
segnalate solo in caso di discordanza tra le versioni. Benché un rapporto di discendenza fra i due
documenti non possa essere davvero postulato (P-o 143 presenta talvolta interventi posteriori), P-o
144 viene privilegiato in apparato sia perché reading copy Grinfield, sia perché consente di
distinguere tra gli interventi mss. di Momigliano e di AMM, testimoniando lo svolgimento di una
1
La cartella contiene anche questa nota ms. di Momigliano (allegata da R. Di Donato con la precisazione “found
elsewhere”): “Provisional text for all the lectures in Chicago revised to 9.5.81. If I die this may be reconsidered for
publication after revision and checking, declaring circumstances”.
189
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
“prima mano” di correzione. Un’annotazione di Momigliano sul margine inferiore del primo foglio
prova, inoltre, un ulteriore ritorno dello studioso su questo documento2.
Si segnalano infine in apparato le divergenze rispetto a P-o 144 e 143 di P-o 131, privo di
aggiunte mss. e testimone della versione GL, che appare complessivamente identico a P-o 144 per
la parte ds. e per le correzioni di tipo formale (prevalentemente di mano di Momigliano).
2. Argomento della lecture
Malgrado le relative difficoltà di contestualizzazione geografica e cronologica, per la
comprensione del pensiero resistenziale giudaico in età ellenistica assolvono una funzione
fondamentale i libri biblici di Ester, Giuditta e Tobia. Sembra possibile rintracciare connotati
ellenistici nel primo, in cui l’ambientazione persiana ha i caratteri del territorio semimitico e la
verosimiglianza cronologica è estramamente labile. Lo sviluppo narrativo privo di implicazioni
religiose, in cui un’ostilità generica tra pagani ed Ebrei non è mai postulata, fa della storia
essenzialmente una questione di solidarietà nazionale in contesto diasporico piuttosto che
un’espressione di opposizione all’esperienza dell’ellenizzazione forzata. Il fatto che la festa di
Purim, di cui Ester narra l’eziologia, sia descritta in II Maccabei, sembra confermare infatti
l’anteriorità del libro rispetto alla politica di Antioco IV e alla guerra maccabaica.
Ben diversa situazione presuppongono invece le aggiunte al testo greco di Ester (pervenuto in
due distinte redazioni), probabile traduzione di un testo ebraico accresciuto. Il fatto che una delle
due redazioni fosse stata realizzata con certezza a Gerusalemme prima di essere portata ad
Alessandria fa del testo rimaneggiato un esempio del tentativo degli Ebrei palestinesi di mantenere
a Gerusalemme il centro religioso e intellettuale del giudaismo della diaspora. La componente
devozionale e legale delle aggiunte è un indizio dell’attualizzazione cui il testo originario fu
sottoposto per adeguarlo al revival religioso maccabaico.
È un giudaismo militante antigreco ad animare invece il libro di Giuditta, collocato anch’esso
sullo sfondo di una mitica Assiria (simbolico “oppressore dell’est”), tra numerosi nonsense storici.
Qui la resistenza militare dei cittadini di Betulia lascia trapelare forti paralleli con le vicende delle
Termopili così come narrate nel VII libro delle Storie di Erodoto: ipotesi corroborata anche dalla
probabile conoscenza dell’autore di Giuditta di un’ulteriore fonte greca sulla resistenza ai Persiani,
la cronaca di Lindo (99 a.C.). A sostegno di una datazione sotto gli Asmonei (II-I sec.a.C.) vanno
anche le simpatie dell’autore per l’indipendenza della Giudea e l’attenzione alla purità.
Al centro del libro di Tobia, infine, c’è piuttosto un messaggio di unità, solidarietà e speranza
mandato probabilmente dalla diaspora persiana al resto degli Ebrei: testo poliedrico dalle evidenti
influenze iraniche, in cui la pietà non rappresenta solo una questione di purità rituale ma risulta
attiva e partecipata, è proiettato su uno sfondo di finale provvidenza divina. Benché manchino
criteri esatti di datazione, è improbabile collocare dopo la distruzione del Secondo Tempio questa
“storia borghese”, dove non c’è segno di imminente catastrofe e in cui l’attesa messianica lascia
trapelare il radicamento dell’autore in una cultura pia e superstiziosa.
3. Note di contenuto: i temi della lecture e il rapporto con i testi editi.
Nel percorso di definizione delle origini della letteratura giudaica di resistenza, superate le
premesse di approfondimento del contesto greco (CL 1981 I) e genericamente orientale (CL 1982
II), Some Exemplary marca il passaggio e la progressiva focalizzazione verso quello che potrebbe
essere considerato un primo modo ebraico di fare letteratura di opposizione. Si tratta quindi, in un
certo senso, di un testo di arrivo e di partenza. È un testo di arrivo se colto in prospettiva di quegli
interrogativi sulla produzione resistenziale giudaica formulati già nel 1977, quando nel saggio
Eastern Elements in Post-Exilic Jewish, and Greek, Historiography (=Eastern Elements)
Momigliano si interrogava “whether the reform in Jewish historiography should be placed against
the background of positive and negative reactions to Persia”, valutando la natura dei libri di
2
“This text contains an addition on p. 18 which is not to be found in the Chicago new typescript. Add it!”
190
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
Giuditta ed Ester come prodotti della diaspora su sfondo del dominio persiano al pari di varie tra le
storie contenute nel primo libro di Erodoto, in Ctesia e nella Ciropedia di Senofonte (pp. 25-27).
Some Exemplary riconferma e approfondisce l’intuizione di partenza, ricalibrandone però il taglio
di ricerca in direzione di quella pratica al ricorso a materiale ellenistico in chiave profondamente
antigreca che rappresenta d’altronde il fil rouge dell’indagine sulla specificità culturale del
giudaismo-ellenistico a partire da Prologue in Germany (GL 1979 I) fino alle conclusioni raggiunte
in The Decline of History and Apocalypse (GL 1982 III).
Tale fenomeno è esemplificato con particolare chiarezza in Giuditta, libro in cui l’autore mutua
l’espressione di ostilità nei confronti di un nemico (un’Assiria priva di contorni storici definiti,
sovrapponibile ai Greco-Macedoni) da una fonte eminentemente greca, il settimo libro delle storie
di Erodoto3. La tesi, già esposta da Momigliano presso il Warburg Institute il 23.3.81 in una
conferenza dal titolo The Books of Esther and Judith and Herodotus, verrà riproposta all’interno del
saggio licenziato nello stesso anno, Biblical Studies and Classical Studies. Simple Reflections upon
Historical Method (= Biblical Studies). Svariati sono i punti di contatto individuati tra il testo greco
e quello biblico: la corrispondenza topografica del passaggio alle Termopili con lo stretto passo
montano che, in Giuditta, conduce alla città assediata di Betulia; il parallelo tra il discorso di
Demarato, che illustra a Serse le qualità guerresche degli Spartani che non conoscono altri padroni
se non la loro legge, e quello di Achior, che spiega ad Oloferne come gli Ebrei non possano essere
sconfitti se non peccano contro il loro dio; e ancora Giuditta, che ingannevolmente si presta a
rivelare il segreto passaggio montano agli Assiri, come in Erodoto Efialte fa con i Persiani.
Con Giuditta sono altri due i libri biblici raggruppati da Momigliano in quest’analisi: Ester (con
ulteriore distinzione tra il testo ebraico, “uncomplicated matter of national solidarity”, e la versione
greca dalle aggiunte improntate al rinnovato fervore religioso determinato dalla rivolta maccabaica)
e Tobit, messaggio di unità e speranza mandato dalla diaspora persiana al resto degli Ebrei. Ciò che
consente l’isolamento dei tre testi, dalla controversa collocabilità (sia geografica che cronologica) e
notevolmente diversi tra loro, è d’altra parte la considerazione della loro distanza concettuale dalla
produzione maccabaica, vero e proprio punto di arrivo dell’intera riflessione condotta in The Jewish
Historiography of Resistance. È in questo senso che Some Exemplary può essere definito anche, in
certa misura, un testo di partenza: nei libri su cui si sofferma non compare e non agisce ancora
quella nozione determinante di “apostasia”, di scelta tra obbedienza e disobbedienza a Dio, che sarà
invece al cuore dei Maccabei, e finirà per determinare una divaricazione secolare tra le possibilità di
connotazione degli Ebrei come gruppo etnico e come gruppo religioso aperto alla modifica per il
tramite della conversione (per cui cfr. infra, CL 1981 IV, From Maccabees).
3
Oltre a una plausibile dipendenza dalla Cronaca di Lindo (o fonti affini), già segnalata nel 1959 da M. Hadas, per cui
cfr. infra, c. 17 e nota ad loc.
191
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
III*4
Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World5
I
In my first two lectures I tried to define two different models of resistance against GrecoMacedonian and Roman imperialism. The first model is of religious protest and of hope for divine
liberation. The second model had its roots in the Demosthenic tradition of diplomatic and political
agitation against Philip II and Alexander the Great of Macedonia. These two models are, of course,
not mutually exclusive, but I pointed out some of the reasons – partly founded on tradition, partly
on circumstances – why the religious model prevailed in the East, while the political model
prevailed in Greece.
The East was conquered so rapidly by Alexander and later by the Romans as to have little chance
for diplomatic and military resistance. The kingdom of Pergamum was actually bequeathed to
Rome by its last king, Attalus III. However, several peripheric territories of the Seleucide State
reconquered independence at various periods. One of them, Iran, under the leadership of the
Parthians and later of the Persians, kept its independence for about one thousand6 years, until the
Arab conquest. Though the story of the relations between the Parthians and Hellenism is a complex
one, we may trust the Parthians to use their celebrated cavalry to defend themselves. Other native
states which emerged for longer or shorter periods of independence are Cappadocia, Commagene
and Judaea. The one we know best is, of course, Judaea. The Jews of Palestine were not more able
than the oriental nations to resist Alexander, [2] later legends notwithstanding. But in the second
century B.C. they managed by a combination of daring wars and able diplomacy to gain relative
independence from the Seleucids. Even later, when the Romans reduced Judaea to a province, there
were long intervals in which native kings (Herod and Agrippa I) were entrusted by the Romans with
the government or at least with the administration. The texts we shall examine reflect these different
situations and oscillate between the religious and the political pole. They also reflect the differences
between the Jews of Palestina and those of the diaspora. The limits of my time will prevent me – at
least this year – from extending my examination to Flavius Josephusi. But what I am saying should
contribute to a better understanding of Flavius Josephus too.7
Whoever8 tries to form an idea of what was going on in Jewish minds in the last three centuries
before Christ has to come to terms with some discouraging features of the evidence. We do not
know the date or the place of composition of most of the famous Jewish books which we
customarily consider Hellenistic. Though modern scholars are almost certainly justified in attaching
this label of “Hellenistic” to the books of Esther, Judith, Tobit and Ecclesiastes, we can only make
guesses about their exact date and place of composition. Even texts delimited in time and location
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 149 (identico a P-o 150, ma con annotazioni mss.), fascicolo di 24 c. dss. che
documenta la nuova e definitiva versione CL 1981. Eventuali discordanze con P-o 186, testimone ds. CL anteriore alla
correzione del testo, vengono riportate in apparato. Si segnalano inoltre eventuali discrepanze rispetto a P-o 144,
testimone ds. di una versione GL arricchita da aggiunte CL e da una ricca serie di minuti interventi stilistici di mano di
AMM (complessivamente messi a testo senza segnalazione in apparato, cfr. Introduzione, par. 1), e rispetto a P-o 143
(pressoché identico, almeno nella parte ds., a P-o 144) . Si riportano infine eventuali divergenze tra P-o 144 e P-o 131,
documento GL privo di aggiunte mss.
4
P-o 149: Copy X, tsf1,mgsn; Chic. & Grinfield 1981, mgdxms[Mom]; P-o 186: pp. 1, 2 top, and 24 new (and not in
Grinfield II, 1981) – Chic. 1981 – 1980 del. – dec. 1981, , tsf1ms[AMM].
5
P-o 144: This text contains an addendum on p. 18 which is not to be found in the Chicago new typescript. Add it!,
mginfmsb[Mom].
6
P-o 149, 186: for about one thousand; P-o 144: to almost 1000.
7
P-o 144: In my first two lectures ... Josephus too; P-o 131: def.
8
P-o 144: Revised copy, tsf1msb[Mom]; Lecture III <-> II, msr – Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World; P-o
143, f. 1: id.; Grinfield 28.1.81, msb[AMM] – NB. P 17 to be replaced [to be, del.] by new version (as in carbon copy
27.1.81) mgsupmsl[AMM].
192
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
by the subjects with which they deal – say the four Maccabean books – are in fact much more
difficult to date than we should be inclined to expect. On reflection these difficulties are perhaps not
too surprising. In the Hellenistic period Jews lived as minorities in a variety of countries from
Persia and Media to Italy and North Africa; they spoke and wrote different languages. They had
varying degrees of intellectual and social intimacy with the Jews of Palestine, who, at least round
Jerusalem, represented the majority of the population and felt they were living in a country of their
own – guaranteed, under certain conditions, by God and [3] recognized, under certain limits, by
governmental acts of the Persian kings and their Macedonian successors. Many Jews moved from
country to country and must have been fluent in both Greek and Aramaic – though we may ask
what Greek and what Aramaic. The notion of a diaspora mentality in comparison with a Jewish
Palestinian mentality is of course not false, but is insufficient to enable us to classify books. If we
want to get nearer to an exact appreciation of what the Jews felt and did when the Persian Empire
collapsed and they found themselves in a world which experienced the impact of Greek ideas,
institutions and fashions, even when it escaped Greco-Macedonian rule, we must allow the texts to
speak for themselves, without much worrying about their date and place of composition. Let us
begin by taking Esther, Judith, and Tobit in almost casual order, because we have no sufficient clue
to their date and place. Tentative dating must come later.
II
The book of Esther – a book of superb literary beautyii – may well combine three motifs which
had originally been independent: the theme of the queen who disobeys the king’s order and is
punished; the theme of the queen who gets rid of a hostile prime minister; and, finally, the theme of
the rivalry between two courtiers, the bad one and the good one. After all, neither Esther nor
Mordechai are Jewish names. Esther, apparently, is Ishtar, the name of the Babylonian goddess, and
Mordechai is obviously connected with Marduk, the Babylonian god. Nor has the institution of the
festival which concludes the story any intrinsically Jewish character: it is a carnival. But all this
belongs to the prehistory of the book, as we have it. This prehistory is no doubt a good research
ground for students of folklore. The [4] present text is a Jewish story with Jewish protagonists; and
the Jewish protagonists are no more embarrassed by carrying names of Babylonian gods than their
correligionists called Isidore were and are embarrassed by being identified as a gift from an
Egyptian goddess. The story, as we have it, defies any attempt to separate the three sections on
which it is built. It is meant to explain and to justify the existence and character of a festival called
Purim, of which nobody knew the real origin. The story of the recusant Queen Vashti is not only
necessary to explain why the King needs a new queen. It introduces us to the reckless and
unreligious society within which Esther and Mordechai will emerge as two heroes. What guides the
King and his counsellors in their reaction to Vashti’s pride is male pride supported by drunken
obstinacy. If the queen is allowed to get away, who will keep the women of the realm quiet? When
they arrive on the scene, Esther and her guardian, Mordechai, seem to fit easily into this society.
Esther enters the competition for the succession to Vashti without any higher motive. If her adviser,
Mordechai, had one, he keeps it to himself. As soon as success is achieved, moral dilemmas and
duties impose themselves upon the two adventurers. The writer is quite determined not to allow the
story to become religious, but he knows with whom he has to deal. Mordechai discovers a
conspiracy and saves the King. He refuses to perform proskynesis (3.2, “to bow down and do
obeisance”) before the new minister Haman. The writer does not provide an explanation for
Mordechai’s behaviour, but lets us know emphatically that Mordechai is a Jew. When this fact is
reported to Haman, it is enough to involve all the Jews in the fate he prepares, with the King’s
consent, for the disrespectful Mordechai.
If the connection between the refusal to perform proskynesis and the Jewish origins of
Mordechai is left vague, there is no vagueness in the order which Mordechai sends to Esther as soon
as he knows about the persecution of the Jews: [5] “Do not imagine that you alone of all the Jews
193
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
will escape because you are in the royal palace”. Esther knows that she must risk her life to save her
people. She asks Mordechai and the other Jews to fast with her for three days before she faces her
ordeal. Her words “and if I perish I perish”9 iii have been central to the book for its Jewish readers
throghout the centuries. The Midrash Rabbah on Exodus 30, 4 compares Esther to Moses because
she risked her life for the people of Israel. All the Jewish past imposes itself on the protagonists.
But the writer considers it superfluous to explain why Esther fasts three days and wants the Jews to
fast with her. A few pages earlier, he had found it unnecessary to explain the implication of the
genealogy connecting Mordechai with Kish, the father of Saul, whereas Haman is a descendant of
Agag, the king of the Amalekites whom Saul had defeated and spared contrary to Samuel’s advice
(I Sam. 15: 7-9). All the subsequent developments keep on10 this line which avoids making explicit
the religious implications of the Jewish victory over Haman and his partisans. At the level on which
the story is told, there is no supernatural element. Mordechai wins because his merit in discovering
the conspiracy against the king is recognized in time. He wins above all because ha can rely on
Esther’s support, and finally because his position persuades the provincial governors to collaborate
with him. There are gentiles who become Jews in order to be on the winning side. We must not
press such a sober writer to tell us more than he intended. He certainly does not presuppose a
general hostility between gentiles and Jews. When the King and Haman sat down to dinner after
having decided about the extermination of the Jews, the city of Susa was perplexed (3, 15) navōchā – the Hebrew term being used almost in the connotation made famous by Maimonidesiv.
The war is confined between the Jews and the followers of Haman. I am sure that when the writer
mentions the fact that the victorious Jews “did not touch the plunder” [6] (9, 10) he knows his
readers will remember that Saul committed the sin of touching the plunder in his war against
Haman’s ancestors. Furthermore, it is self-evident that the Jews are loyal to the king, and his best
support. Even when they knew they had been condemned they did not rebel against the king.
Bickerman has reminded us that in the XVII century Bossuet find it scandalous that the victims of
St. Bartholomew did not imitate Esther’s Jews in their loyalty to the kingv. The story is an
uncomplicated matter of national solidarity. The beautiful Esther became a heroine because, after
having married a king, she did not forget her kin and was prepared to die for them. The writer
seems to say that before and after royal banquets you have to fast three days to recover your
courage – and you must be sure that your people are with you. The rest is written in the Bible, of
which the author of the book of Esther never expected to become part. The Qumran sectarians, who
were not conspicuous for leaving things unsaid, perhaps11 found this book distasteful – to judge
from its absence so far in their library. But we must not make too much of this absence.12
Esther’s story may have Hellenistic connotations. The refusal of proskynesis is Greek, as
Herodotus <already>13 knew (7, 136). The refusal had become an issue again under Alexander. It
could hardly be appreciated outside the sphere of Greek culture. If the author has to explain that
what the Persian king writes and seals with his seal cannot be declared void (8, 8; cf. 1, 19), he
seems to imply that the readers of his book do not live under Persian kings. Like the BabylonianPersian landscape of the book of Daniel, the Persia of Esther, with its center14 in Susa, is a semimythical territory. Incidentally, Daniel is the only other source we have for the information that the
kings of Persia cannot change their own laws. There is again not much to choose between Daniel
and Esther in the matter of exact chronology. If Ahasueros is King [7] Xerxes, Mordechai, having
been deported by Nebuchadnezzar in 597 B.C., would have been about one hundred and twenty
9
P-o 144: אָבָ ֽדְ תִּ י. אָבדְ תִּ י
֖ ַ ְו ַכ ֲא ֶ ֥שׁר, mginf con segr, msb; P-o 149, 186, 131: def.
P-o 149, 186: on; P-o 144, 131: to.
11
P-o 144: perhaps <-> naturally, msb[Mom].
12
P-o 144: absence. -> There is however the question whether the Book of Esther is quoted in the Temple Scroll
without being mentioned by name. This question implies three other questions: whether the two passages involved are
correctly interpretated, whether the Temple Scroll was originally written for the Qumran sect and when it was written,
interl. e mgdxmsb[Mom], del.
13
Docc.: always.
14
P-o 149, 186: center; P-o 144, 131: centre.
10
194
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
years old when Xerxes came to power, about 485 B.C., and he had still the best of his life before
him. Palestine simply does not figure in the book, though it would have been affected by
Ahasueros’ policies, whether anti-Jewish or pro-Jewish. What the author tells us is a diaspora story
set in an unreal Persia where kings do not know whom they marry. One minister may hate the Jews,
and the next minister may be a Jew. A return of the Jews to Judaea is not on the cards – either for
the Persian kings or the Jews themselves. If there is any reality behind this façade, it is rather that of
the diaspora of early Hellenism – preferably in Persia or Media, but possibly in Mesopotamia or
Syria – when there was no problem of a return to Palestine, no clash with the king of the land and
no struggle in definite religious terms. The Jews had their enemies, as any ethnic group is bound to
have, but they also had their friends; and the king had to choose. On the other hand, the book of
Esther ignores the novel experience of having a king (Antiochus IV) who demands the
Hellenization of the Jewish cult in Jerusalem. In fact, the festival of Mordechai is already
presupposed as existing (that is, practised in Palestine) in II Maccabees 15, 36, which can hardly
have been written after 124 B.C. In Esther, you are persecuted and may be killed for being a Jew,
but there is no temptation to avoid the consequences by becoming an apostate, which is the novelty
of the time of Antiochus IV. Esther takes her Jewishness so much for granted that she has no need
to mention her God. We may conclude that the present Hebrew text of Esther was certainly written
in ignorance of the Maccabean revolution, and probably composed before that revolution happened.
It may reflect a situation of the diaspora about which we have no other information: some conflicts
between ethnic groups, in which religion was involved only indirectly.15 The vitality [8] of the book
is in the way it tells a story of elementary ethnic solidarity.16
III
We must now turn to the additions to the Hebrew Esther in its Greek translation or translations,
because they presuppose a different situation. An examination in detail would have to take full
cognizance of all the variants of the Greek text or texts. The LXX text or B-text differs from the socalled Lucianic recension (A-text) to such an extent that one may speak of two separate versions
from the Hebrew and even of two different Hebrew texts behind the two versions. Torreyvi, to
whom I shall return, advanced the notion of two Aramaic originals behind the Greek texts.17
Furthermore, Flavius Josephus used for his Jewish Antiquities a Greek text which is not identifiable
beyond doubt either with the B-text or with the A-text. True enough, Josephus is noted for the
liberties he took with the text of the Bible. Other translations do not help much. Jerome’s Vulgate is
very free, and the two Targumim18 add much Haggadic material19. For our purpose, it is enough to
say that all the important Greek additions to the Hebrew text figure both in the B-text and in the Atext. Most of these additions seem to have been written originally in Hebrew and translated into
Greek, but the two royal letters which the Greek text adds seem originally to have been written in
Greek. This state of affairs can be explained in many ways, but as the additions which seem to have
been translated from Hebrew do not differ in Greek style from the rest of the B-text, the most
economic explanation is that the LXX or B translator translated a Hebrew text which already had
most of the additions. The two royal letters (composed in Greek) would have a different origin, but
could still have been introduced into the B-text by the translator responsible for it.
[9] Now we happen by a piece of luck to know the name and some of the circumstances of one
Greek translator. He was a certain Lysimachus who worked in Jerusalem and whose Greek
15
P-o 144: was involved only indirectly; P-o 149, 186: was indirectly involved.
P-o 144: It may reflect ... ethnic solidarity, interl. e mgsn, msb[Mom]; The vitality of the book ... ethnic solidarity <->
The vitality of the book is not in what it tells, but in the way it tells it. Like many other novels it owes its survival to
both its style and to having a happy ends, msb[Mom], del.
17
P-o 144: Torrey ... Greek texts, mgdx con segr, msb[Mom].
18
P-o 144: Targumim, the two translations into Aramaic, interl.msr[Mom].
19
P-o 144: Haggadic material, that is further novelistic material, mgdxcon segr, msr[Mom].
16
195
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
translation was brought to Egypt by a certain Dositheus in the fourth year of the reign of an
uncertain Ptolemy and an uncertain Cleopatra. We are told all this by the colophon of several
manuscripts of Esther both in the B-text and in the A-text, which means that if we are inclined to
assume two different translators for the two texts, we cannot say whether Lysimachus is the
translator of B-text or of A-text. This colophon deserves to be quoted in full, at least in translation:
“In the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra Dositheus who said that he was a priest
and a Levite, and his son Ptolemy brought the above book of Purim which they said was authentic
and had been translated by Lysimachus son of Ptolemy, a member of the Jerusalem community”.
Three dates are compatible with the fourth year of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, either 114 B.C. under
Ptolemy VIII Soter or 77 under Ptolemy XII or 48 under Ptolemy XIV. What is interesting is that
the translation was made in Jerusalem and brought to Egypt by two people in an official capacity.
What Dositheus meant by declaring himself a priest and a Levite is anybody’s guess: he may simply
have explained that as a Levite he was a sort of a priest. But the man who took down his declaration
evidently thought that the priestly qualification added value to Dositheus’ declaration of
authenticity for the translation. In Jerusalem, somebody was interested in having the text of Esther
translated into Greek and sent to Egypt; and in Egypt there was somebody happy to receive the text
with its declaration of authenticity.
We are reminded that the grandson of Jesus ben Sira declared that in the thirty-eighth year of
King Ptolemy VII Euergetes II – that is, in 132 B.C. – he came to Egypt from Palestine and there
translated his grand[10]father’s book, Ecclesiasticus. We are also reminded that the present II
Maccabees, which is an epitome of a larger book by Jason of Cyrene, was composed in Jerusalem
and despatched with an official letter of introduction the date of which is 124 B.C. In all three cases,
we have a work made known to the Egyptian Jews by agents coming from Palestine. Ecclesiasticus
and the book of Esther are translated into Greek by Palestinian Jews: Jason’s work, which was in
Greek, is summarized in Greek by somebody in Palestine apparently for the precise purpose of
making it available to the Egyptian Jews. Ecclesiasticus is translated into Greek to make available
to Egyptian Jews a recent piece of Palestinian wisdom which emphasizes the dignity of the High
Priests of Jerusalem. The book of Esther and II Maccabees are sent in Greek to Egypt in order to
encourage the Egyptian Jews to celebrate religious festivals held in Palestine: this is explicitly said
in II Maccabeesvii and seems to be implied by the colophon of the Greek Esther. We get an
interesting sample of the activity of the Jerusalem Jews who were determined to keep Jerusalem as
the religious and intellectual centre of Judaism in relation to the diaspora. Even if the book of Esther
had originally been written in the Eastern diaspora – say in Susa – it reached Egypt via Jerusalem
after having been translated into Greek in Palestine.
But this is not all. The original book of Esther, as ultimately preserved in Hebrew and canonized,
was, as I have said, a diaspora book, insofar as it did not contemplate any Jewish State, any temple,
or any situation arising from a territory where the majority was Jewish. It expressed the feelings of
Jewish minorities strong enough to have ambitions, but unsure of their position and dependent on
royal support. It might appeal as such to the Egyptian Jews but it had no anti-Hellenic or antiMacedonian allusion. 20 However, by the time Esther had been translated into Greek, 21 the
Maccabean revolution had [11] brought about a religious revival: the “hassidim” supporting the
Maccabees and the Pharisees emerging from the Maccabean victory had a more precise faith in
immortality, a more intense experience of prayer and, generally, a more direct contact with the God
of the Fathers than the Jews pictured in the original book of Esther. The book of Daniel shows that
an apocalyptic element contributed to the faith of some, if not all, the fighters in Palestine about 165
B.C. The book of Esther in its Greek version tries to do justice to this religious revival, if not to the
political revolution which went with it. It adds apocalyptic and devotional features to the Hebrew
text, and these additions may conceivably already have existed in a different version of the Hebrew
20
21
P-o 144: but it had no ... allusion, mgsup con segr, msr[Mom].
P-o 144: by the time ... into Greek, mgsn con segr, msb[Mom].
196
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
text which has not reached us –22 a textus auctus which did not succeed in replacing the original for
the Hebrew readers. The Greek text furthermore defined the legal aspects of the conflict better by
introducing legal texts which are clearly invented. The apocalyptic atmosphere is created by the
dream of Mordechai at the beginning – a fight between two dragons – and by the interpretation of
the same dream at the end. The God of the Fathers, who was only implicitly present in the original
Hebrew text, is now prayed to by Esther and Mordechai, and their prayers are given in extenso.
Esther’s prayer is also meant to allay the fears of the orthodox that she might have forgotten the
purity laws about marriage and food23: “From the day I arrived here until now, your maid servant
has not delighted in anything except you, Lord, the god of Abraham” (Addition C. 29). Here we
have the post-Maccabean interpolator at work.24
I wish we could be certain it was this post-Maccabean interpolator who turned Haman into a
treacherous Macedonian who, while serving Persia, wanted or tried to give the rule of Persia to the
Macedonians (E. 10). This is perhaps the most sensational change introduced into the original text
of Esther, because [12] it destroys the presupposition of the original text that the fight between
Mordechai and Haman continues the battle between Saul and the Amalekites. But the presentation
of Haman as a Macedonian is not constant in the Greek text. Haman is called Macedonian in the Atext of Addition A, that is Mordechai’s dream, 1.17; in the B-text of 9.24, where it replaces
“Agagite” of the Masoretic Hebrew text, and finally in the B-text of Addition E, 1.10 (Second
Royal Letter). We simply do not know when somebody hit into25 the idea of turning Haman into a
Macedonian.26 There is a slight presumption that the qualification of Macedonian for Haman
penetrated first into the Septuagint text or B-text and passed from there into the so-called “Lucianic
recension” or A-text.
Even after having passed through Palestinian hands after the Maccabean revolution, the story of
Esther could not be turned into an episode of a war for the purity of the Jerusalem cult and for
political autonomy. But the new version introduced a note of religious militancy which the original
text lacked. At least at a certain stage the enemy, Haman, was definitely identified as a Macedonian.
On the other hand, the king was even more emphatically described as pro-Jewish. In a sentence of
the second royal edict, which is not present in all27 manuscripts and therefore may be a secondary
supplement, the king is made to recognize the festival of Purim as a royal holiday. As it happened,
the increased militancy and religiosity of the refurbished text or texts corresponded not only to the
mood of the Palestinian senders but also to that of the Jewish-Egyptian recipients. In those years,
the Jews of Egypt took a conspicuous part in internal dynastic struggles. About 103 B.C., they were
the only ones to remain faithful to Cleopatra III in her conflict with Ptolemy IX Lathyros. At the
same time, they showed signs of their increased religious [13] fervour. Although a Hebrew temple
of dubious status was established in Egypt by the exiled descendants of the high priest Onias, there
is also increased evidence of devotion to Jerusalem, of study of the Jewish law, and of conflicts
with the Samaritans. Aristobulos’ literary activity and perhaps Aristeas’ letter belong to the second
part of the second century B.C.
What I have said is perhaps enough to explain why I consider very improbable the theory
enunciated by28 Ch. C. Torrey in a paper in Harv. Theol. Rev. 37, 1944, 1-40, that the Greek Esther
represents the Greek translation of an original Aramaic book of Esther, while the Hebrew text
would be a shortened secularized version: Torrey was a great scholar, but he seems to have been
driven to his unlikely theory by the desire to meet Luther’s criticism of the heathenism of the book
of Esther in its Hebrew formviii. Though we are yet very far from seeing clearly into the history of
22
P-o 144: in a different ... reached us , interl.msr[Mom].
P-o 144: I quote from Esther’s prayer, interl.msr[Mom].
24
P-o 144: Here we have ... at work, interl.msb[Mom].
25
P-o 149, 186: onto; P-o 144, 131: into.
26
P-o 144: He does not seem to be the original translator and to have tampered with a pre-existing translation, mgsn
con segr, msb[Mom]; 149, 186: def.
27
P-o 144, 131: Greek; P-o 149, 186: def.
28
P-o 144: the late Professor, interl.msr[Mom]; P-o 131, 149, 186: def.
23
197
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
Esther’s story, this story can tell us something of what Jewish resistance and survival came to mean
in different sections of the diaspora and in post-Maccabean Jerusalem. The original Hebrew text is a
diaspora story of ethnic conflicts in which religion is not absent, but implicit. Under the influence of
the events of the anti-Hellenic movement in Palestine which we call the Maccabean revolution, the
Greek version or versions of the book of Esther were provided with a new explicit religious selfconsciousness and militancy.29
IV
We are now ready to face an even more mysterious text, the book of Judithix.
The historical nonsense in this book is extraordinary. A non-existent king of Assyria in Nineveh,
Nebuchadnezzar, who is contemporary with a non-existent King Arphaxad of Media, decides to
take revenge on all the nations [14] who did not help him to fight Arphaxad. He chooses as his own
general Holofernes, who happens to have a Persian name and reminds us of an Orophernes allied to
Demetrius I of Syria, who about 158 B.C. became King of Cappadocia. Among the intended
victims of the expedition of Holofernes are the Jews, who – another extraordinary piece of
information – had just come up from their captivity and were busy at putting their temple in order.
We need hardly remind ourselves that Nineveh was destroyed in 612 B.C., while the first temple
was destroyed in 586 and rebuilt about seventy years later.30 No state of Assyria existed when the
temple was rebuilt. The scenery of the book is unreal. According to Judith, the children of Israel
were then governed by the high priest and the gerousia (4, 18; 11, 4; 15, 8). It is worth noting that
our first evidence for the gerousia in Jerusalem is in the letter of Antiochus III to Ptolemy (Ant. 12,
142) of about 198 B.C. – about four hundred years later than the alleged date of the events in
Judith.31 Now Holofernes came with his army from the North. Nobody resisted him, except, of
course, the Jews, who, however, devoted more time to fasting and prayer than to organizing their
line of defence. Joakim, the high priest, had at least the sense to write to those “who dwelt in
Bethulia and Betomesthaim, which is over against Esdraelon toward the plain which is nearby
Dothan, telling them to get possession of the passes into the hill country because through them was
the entrance into Judaea, and it was easy to prevent them from approaching, for the approach was
narrow, with room for but two men at the most” (4, 6-9, transl. M. S. Enslinx).
As Bethulia turns out to be the Jewish Thermopylae, it is worth pointing out that we do not know
where it was, and it is rather doubtful that the writer intended to help us to know. It is an old theory
that Bethulia could be the Samaritan Shechem, basically because the Samaritan Shechem was
unmentionable in honest Jewish circles. Some support was sought for this theory in the fact [15]
that the heroine Judith, a denizen of Bethulia, belonged to the tribe of Simeon (9, 2), which,
according to one of the possible interpretations of the mysterious story of Dinah in Genesis 3432,
took possession of the city of Shechem when the Shechemites were exterminated. But it still
remains mysterious why the author of the book of Judith should want to allude to Shechem in such
a devious way: the more so as Shechem is explicitly mentioned in the same book, though in another
context (5, 16)33. What may well be true is that a certain nostalgia and revaluation of the destroyed
Kingdom of the North appears in this and other Hellenistic texts (we shall meet another example in
the book of Tobit). This nostalgia, however, can be detected more in the mention of the longvanished tribe of Simeon than in the name Bethulia.
There is no need to repeat at length the story of what happened in and near the Jewish Termopylae.
The Assyrians cannot pass, but manage to cut the water supply. Therefore the inhabitants of
Bethulia give themselves five days before surrendering. They are in fact testing God and
challenging Him to help His people (7, 30). At this point, Judith makes her first appearance, with all
29
30
31
32
33
P-o 144: The original Hebrew text ... and militancy, interl. e mginf, msb[Mom].
P-o 144: Judith’s story is clearly placed in Never-Never Land, interl. e mgdx msn[Mom]; P-o 131, 149, 186: def.
P-o 149, 186: date of the events in Judith; P-o 131, 144: date of our events.
P-o 144: one of the possible ... Genesis 34 <-> Jewish tradition, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 144: the more so as Shechem ... (5, 16), interl.msn[Mom].
198
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
her genealogy which, remarkably, leaves out the name of Simeon, but gives the names of the son of
Simeon and of the father of Simeon – Israel himself (8, 1). The name of Simeon is, however,
explicitly mentioned in a later passage (9, 2). It may have been a calculated omission to flatter the
reader’s historical knowledge. What Judith proposes is to present herself to Holofernes as a traitress
who “will show him a way whereby he shall go and master all the hill country, and there shall not
be lost of his men one person or one life” (10, 13). It is unnecessary to add that when she is
introduced to Holofernes Judith has something more urgent to do than playing Ephialtes, the traitor
of the Greek Termopylae34, to the new, or rather older, Xerxes. The citizens of Bethulia have no
need to surrender after the fifth day; the enemy has run away. [16] I have said enough to ask
straightaway the obvious question which has never been asked (at least to my knowledge): how
exactly did the author of Judith know his Herodotus? For clearly he knew him. The answer does not
lie in details, which may be controversial. I do not know, for instance, whether the description of
the walls of Ecbatana at the beginning of the book imitates the description of the walls of Babylon
in Herodotus I, 178. But one structural similarity is decisive. As we well remember, according to
Herodotus Xerxes at the beginning of his expedition asks the Greek, or rather Spartan, Demaratus,
whether the Greeks will rexist him. Demaratus, after some hesitation, tells what he thinks to be the
truth: the Greeks, or rather the Spartans, will resist. Indeed, the Spartans are the best warriors,
because they obey their laws (7, 101-4). Demaratus gives a warning. The next crucial episode is
Thermopylae, where the Spartans would have been able to resist but for the betrayal of Ephialtes or
of somebody else. In any case, the Spartans35 ultimately win, as Demaratus had foreseen.36
In the book of Judith, Holofernes has his Demaratus in Achior “the chief of all the sons of
Ammon” (5, 5). Achior on request37 warns Holofernes that the Jews are unconquerable as long as
they obey their own law. Holofernes’ reaction is to hand over Achior in contempt to the defenders
of Bethulia: he boasts that38 the Assyrians will get Achior back as soon as they get Bethulia.
Bethulia of course is not captured, and Achior, though an Ammonite, becomes a Jew – which
makes his similarity with Demaratus, a Spartan among Spartans, even more conspicuous (14, 10).
There is, of course, something more than simple imitation of Demaratus in Achior’s speech and
later in his conversion. The author of Judith knew only too well that according to Deuteronomy 23,
4 an Ammonite or a Moabite shall not enter into the assembly of Yahweh, even to the tenth
generation. But the author of Judith was determined to make the point that an [17] Ammonite can
enter into the assembly of Yahweh. The author of the book of Ruth had previously made the point
that a Moabite can enter into the assembly of Yahweh – and with what results, if David was a
descendant of the Moabite Ruth39. These writers – the authors of Ruth and Judith – considered the
old taboo absurd and were not afraid of challenging what passed for Mosaic law. Rabbinic opinion
of the first century A.D. was still divided about the acceptance of Ammonite proselytes, as the
discussion between Rabban Gamaliel and Rabbi Joshua in Mishnah Yadaim 4, 4 and Tosefta 2, 1740
shows. It is interesting that the liberal opinion prevailed. So much said, the fact remains that Achior
played the part of Demaratus in the Jewish Thermopylae. The book of Judith has the structure of the
second part of Herodotus VII insofar as it moves from the speech of warning to the episode of
Thermopylae. The Jewish writer, who is not bound by history, can demonstrate the truth of the
warning much more quickly and radically than Herodotus could. While the Greeks have a traitor in
their midst, the Jews have a woman who acts as if she were a traitor, but does so in order to be their
saviour.
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
P-o 144: the traitor ... Termopylae, interl.msr[Mom].
P-o 149, 186: Spartans; P-o 131, 144: Greeks.
P-o 144: In any case ... foreseen, interl.msb[Mom]
P-o 144: on request, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 144: he boasts that, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 131, 144: of the Moabite Ruth; P-o 149, 186: of Ruth.
P-o 149, 186: Tosefta 2, 17; P-o 131, 144: Tosefta, Yad. 2, 17.
199
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
I am confident in my assertion that the author of Judith must have known Herodotus – because it
has long been recognized that he knew also another story of the Greek resistance to Persia.
In 1959 Moses Hadas41 in his Hellenistic Culturexi (p. 166) noticed that the five days which the
thirsty men of Bethulia give themselves before surrendering have an exact counterpart in the story
of Darius’ expedition.42 According to the chronicle of Lindos, which was put together in 99 B.C.
from previous recordsxii, the Lindians on43 the island of Rhodes were besieged by Datis, admiral of
Darius, and were suffering from an acute water shortage. They had only enough left for five days,
when one of their leaders in a dream was promised relief by the goddess Athena herself. The
Lindians had so much confidence in their [18] goddess that they told Datis that they would
surrender after five days if the goddess had not helped them. Sure enough, rain came in time, and
with perfect consideration of the circumstances, because the Persians had none of the water. The
good-natured Datis sent presents to the goddess and declared publicly: “These men are protected by
the gods”. It would appear that the Jewish author of Judith had looked carefully at stories of the
Greek resistance to the Persians before composing his own story.
Judith appears to have been written in Hebrew before being translated into Greek, though in the
absence of obvious mistranslations it is always difficult to distinguish between what is a translation
from a Hebrew text and what is a Greek original by an author who thought in Hebrew. I must add
here that Père44 A. M. Dubarle’s attempt to prove that extant medieval tales of Judith in Hebrew
represent the original text of Judith and not retranslations 45 from Greek or Latin is clearly
misconceived, though done with great learning and ingenuity (Judith, Formes et sens des diverses
traditions, Rome I-II, 1966xiii)46.
What matters to us is that47 there would have been no difficulty for a Jew acquainted with the
Greek language to know Herodotus in Palestine or elsewhere at any moment during the last three
centuries B.C. To be more precise about the date of Judith is obviously difficult. The silence of
Josephus about the story of Judith has hardly any chronological significance, because his
contemporary Clement of Rome knew it. Josephus may simply have distrusted or disliked the whole
story: if so, other Jews (as I shall soon say) shared his feelings.48 Two remarks, however, help to
restrict the chronological limits. If the author of Judith got the detail about the five days of water
from a chronicle of Rhodes (not necessarily from the extant chronicle of Lindos of 99 B.C.), we
should probably have to place him in the second or first century B.C., when such a combination of
Greek erudition and Jewish patriotism is more plausible. Another consideration seems to push us
into the period of the Hasmonean49 rule in Judaea. Our story, which is firmly [19] placed in
Palestine, celebrates the victory over an invader. The author seems to be aware of and sympathetic
with50 the newly acquired independence of Judaea. Furthermore, Judith, the new Jael, has the
concern for ritual purity which we expect from a Pharisee of the post-Maccabean period. The
Assyrians were by now a mythical name to indicate those for whom51 the prophets had predicted
doom. It was a good name to conjure up in a patriotic story. Whereas Esther was of limited value in
Palestine in the second and first centuries B.C. and had to be refurbished, Judith was obviously
41
P-o 144: In 1959 Moses Hadas <-> In 1957 Y. M. Grintz in his commentary in Hebrew on the Book of Judith and
two years later Moses Hadas, msb[Mom].
42
P-o 144: Darius’ expedition. -> The citizens of Lindos gave themselves five days before surrendering to Darius in
an analogous situation, del.
43
P-o 149, 186: on; P-o 144: of; P-o 143: in.
44
P-o 144: Père, mgdxmsb[Mom].
45
P-o 149, 186: retroversions; P-o 131, 144: retranslations <-> retoversions.
46
P-o 144: (Judith, Formes ... 1966) <-> (1966), interl.msb[Mom].
47
P-o 149, 186: What matters ... is that; P-o 131, 144: def.
48
P-o 149, 186: if so, other ... his feelings; P-o 131, 144: def.
49
P-o 144, 131: Hasmonean <-> Asmonean, msb[Mom]; P-o 143: Hasmonean.
50
P-o 149, 150, 186: with; P-o 131, 143, 144: to.
51
P-o 131, 143, 144: whom; P-o 149, 150, 186: which.
200
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
topical – not least52 because she reminded the reader of Deborah and Jaelxiv. The author stressed the
similarity with Deborah (that with Jael was obvious) by making Judith sing her own songxv.
A certain revival of Israelite (as53 opposed to Judaic) patriotism may well have encouraged the
choice of Assyria as the enemy. But the author was acquainted with Herodotus, knew other stories
about the Persian wars and altogether appreciated the patriotic literature of the Greeks in relation to
Persia as something akin to his own feelings. As a good Jew, he would never turn the Persians into
villains, but could see that the Greeks would. Furthermore, our author may have heard or read
novels or romances of the Greek type where patriotism and eroticism intermingled. Wilamowitz
observed long ago that Judith had parallels in heroines of Greek erotic storiesxvi. Plutarch derives
from Polybius in the Mulierum Virtutes, 258 E, the story of the Galatian woman Chiomara who
brought to her husband the head of the Roman who had dishonoured her. He also tells twice the
story of the Galatian widow Camma who exploited her beauty to attract an enemy to his death (Mul.
Virt. 257 E; Amat. 768, the source of Tennyson’s “The Cup”)54.
Thus Judith was more modern, more Greek55 and more warlike than Esther, and by the mere fact
of being warlike, she gained56 some of the attractions of the courageous women of the age of
Judges. She was both ruthless and pious, and [20] she clearly competed with the Greeks as depicted
by Herodotus. It is obviously the last point which deserves57 our critical attention. It says something
that a Jewish author, most probably writing in Hebrew, discovered for himself Herodotus’ book VII
and modeled on it the structure of his story. He obviously envisaged the Jews, like the Greeks of
old, fighting for their freedom and obeying their58 own law. He could not extend the comparison to
the point of considering the Persians as enemies. As I said, a Jew59 felt his debt of gratitude to
Persian kings, especially to Cyrus, the anointed of60 Yahwe. But the Assyrians were a symbolic
name for oppressors throughout the Eastern World. It was left to the reader to decide whom he
would recognize in the Assyrians. My suggestion is that in the historical circumstances in which the
author of Judith wrote, the Assyrians stood for the Greco-Macedonian regime of the Seleucids, and
perhaps more precisely of Antiochus IV. If this is correct, it immediately defines the limits within
which the model of Herodotus was valid. It emphasized the fact that both the Greeks of old (or
perhaps the Spartans) and the Jews of any time received their strength from their determination to
obey61 their respective laws62. But beyond this point, the author of Judith recovered his freedom. He
developed his story midway between the Biblical tradition of the woman leader risking her life in a
daring adventure and the contemporary Hellenistic fashion for courageous women who, by killing
their seducers, have revenge of the enemies of their own country.
We are left with the question whether this story – which used both Herodotean and Hellenistic
motifs in a frame of impeccable pharisaic orthodoxy – was ever successful among the Jews. Did
they recognize either Greeks or Romans behind the symbolic Assyrians? Did they like Judith? We
would expect that thay did, but the surprise is that63 the evidence is not unequivocal. In the third
century A.D.,64 Origen was aware that the Jews of his time no longer [21] read the book of Tobit or
the book of Judith. In fact, Origen did not find a Hebrew text of these books. (Ep. ad Africanum
52
P-o 131, 144: not least; P-o 149, 186: none the less.
P-o 149, 186: as, interl.ds.
54
P-o 149, 186: (Mul… Cup”); P-o 131, 144: Tennyson turned the latter story into his play The Cup (Mulier. Virt. 257
E; Amat. 768 B).
55
P-o 149, 186: more Greek; P-o 131, 144: def.
56
P-o 149, 186: gained; P-o 131, 144: acquired.
57
P-o 149, 186: which deserves; P-o 131, 144: to deserve.
58
P-o 149, 186: their; P-o 131, 144: to their.
59
P-o 143: As I said, a Jew <-> P-o 144: As a Jew he, msr[Mom].
60
P-o 149, 186: anointed of; P-o 131, 144: anointed by.
61
P-o 143: obey <-> P-o 144: obey to, msr[Mom].
62
P-o 144: received their strength ... respective laws <-> were ready to fight and die for their law, msr[Mom].
63
P-o 143: We would expect ... is that, interl.msr[Mom]; P-o 144: def.
64
P-o 144: In the third century A.D., intelr.msb[Mom].
53
201
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
13). The Aramaic text used by Jerome may have been65 a translation from the Greek or, less
probably, a Targum from Hebrew.66 On the other hand, as I mentioned, there are Hebrew stories,
midrashim, of uncertain date and origin67 about her, and she is even mentioned in the liturgy of
Shabbat Hanukkah together with the wise Ammonite Achior. In one of these midrashim Holofernes
is turned into a Greek kingxvii – just as Haman was turned into a Macedonian.68 A peculiarity of
such texts is precisely to connect Judith with the Maccabees. But it was the book of Esther, not that
of Judith, that was canonized. The lesser heroism of simple devotion to one’s own people finally
obtained the higher prize. Origen knew what he was doing by putting together the book of Tobit
with the book of Judith as two books which had lost popularity among the Jews of his time and
were not to be found in the Hebrew language. We may now take a look at the book of Tobit and
conclude this lecture with it.
Qumran fragments, which have remained too long unpublished, seem to make it probable that
the original text of Tobit was in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew (J. T. Milik, Rev. Bibl. 73, 1966,
522-530xviii ).69 In a few cases, the absurdities of the Greek can be conjecturally corrected by
postulating mistranslation from a Semitic70 text. One case is 6, 18 where Raphael, the archangel in
disguise, promises Tobias that the children he, Tobias, will have from Sara will be brothers to him,
Tobias – which is strange. But a retranslation into Hebrew shows that without a change even of one
letter the phrase can be made to mean: “The children of you, Tobias, from Sarah shall be to me,
Raphael, as brothers”, which is more reasonable.
Judith and Tobit are both placed in the Assyrian period. Tobit lives in Nineveh, he belongs to the
tribe of Naphtali, and before being deported there he was an exception in the northern kingdom for
his devotion to the [22] Temple of Jerusalem. Here again, we meet nostalgia for an Israel reconciled
with Judah. The story concludes with a resounding declaration of faith by the dying Tobit in
Nineveh in the future of the Jewish remnant and in the reconstruction of the Temple in71 Jerusalem.
It is obvious to me that the theory that this part of the story is a later addition to the text will not do.
Pious Jews cannot be left to die in Nineveh without some reference to the future of the city. If Tobit
dies in Nineveh, he has to command his son to leave Nineveh as soon as he has buried his father
and his mother there. Tobias is told to find a safe place in Media, that is in that Persian Empire to
which the Jews always looked in gratitude and hope, even when it became the Parthian Empire. By
keeping chapters 13 and 14 as an integral part of the story, the meaning of the book as a whole
becomes clearer. The book of Tobit is altogether manysided. To begin with, Tobit’s piety is not
only a question of ritual purity: it is shown by burying the dead children of Israel, feeding the
hungry, being the first to speak in an encounter with any visitor – just as Yohanan ben Zakkai used
to greet first even a heathen in the marketplace (Talmud Bab. Berakhot 17a; cf. Abot 4, 20).
Furthermore, Tobit is the72 wise man in the classic oriental fashion. Therefore, our novelist has the
right instinct in making him a kinsman of the typical wise man Ahiqar, which implies annexing
Ahiqar, not of Hebrew stock in his original context, to the tribe of Naphtali. Ahiqar is not the only
one to be Judaized. The story goes on with the seven archangels, one of whom is Raphael, and the
evil demon Asmodeus: they look suspiciously Iranian in their pedigree. And there is a great deal of
65
P-o 144: may have been <-> was probably, inter.msb[Mom].
P-o 144: The Aramaic text ... from Hebrew, interl.msb[Mom]; less probably ... Hebrew <-> a survival of older times,
interl.msb[Mom].
67
P-o 131, 144: and origin; P-o 149, 186: def.
68
P-o 144: In one of these ... Macedonian, interl.msb[Mom].
69
P-o 149, 186: Qumran fragments... 522-530); P-o 144: Qumran fragments, which have remained too long
unpublished, seem to make it certain that the original text of Tobit was in Aramaic rather than in Hebrew (I rely on the
preliminary communication of J. T. Milik, Rev. Biblique 73, 1966, 522-530) <-> P-o 143, 131: It is even more probable
in the case of Tobit than in the case of Judith that the original text was in Hebrew, mginfmsb[Mom] [La notazione su
Qumran in P-o 144 è probabilmente l’addendum da riportare nel testo CL per cui cfr. apparato alla lecture, n. 5].
70
P-o 144: Semitic <-> Hebrew, mgdxmsb[Mom].
71
P-o 149, 186: in; P-o 131, 144: of.
72
P-o 149, 186: the; P-o 131, 144: a.
66
202
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
straight international magic in the operations which repel Asmodeus and later give Tobit back his
eyesight. But what could be a pleasant, slightly self-satisfied story of risks overcome and goodness
rewarded gets a different dimension by being set against a background of exile, uncertainty about
the future, divine punishment and ultimate [23] divine providence not only for the remnants of
Israel, but “for all the nations in the whole world” who “shall turn and fear God in truth” (14, 6).
Tobit, who had experienced deportation and various other vicissitudes, has to enjoin his son to find
another country to live in. It will be another exile, but in the end there will be the rebuilding of
Jerusalem, and the Messianic hope for all mankind. We have no reason to think that the writer
composed his piece after the destruction of the Second Temple. There is no sign of recent
catastrophe in this bourgeois story. But of course the writer knew his prophets and their promises
which went beyond the rebuilding of the Temple into a Messianic age. By putting his story in the
Assyrian age, he could play freely with history. One can hardly maintain that he was wellacquainted with it. The Vaticanus (B) and the Alexandrinus (A)73 give as the names of the kings of
Babylonia and Media who will destroy Nineveh Nebuchadnezzar and Assueros, where we would
expect Nabopolassar and Cyaxares. The Sinaiticus hardly improves the matter by having Ahiqar or
Achiacharos as King of Media.
I do not know of really exact criteria for dating this text. It was well known to Christian writers
of the early second century A.D. It contains in the present Greek text a reference to a Macedonian
month (2, 12), but if the original was Aramaic or Hebrew74 this tells us little about its place and
date. It is just possible that the allusion to Sennacherib (1, 18), who slew Jews and did not allow
them to be buried, is an anticipation of similar conduct by Antiochus IV according to II Macc. 9, 15.
But what is perhaps nearer to an indication of place and date is that the author, though looking at
Jerusalem from afar, has high Messianic expectations. This would befit a man of the Eastern
diaspora who had received news of the restoration of the cult of the Temple in Antiochus’ days.
Whatever its date, the book of Tobit contains a message of love for and faith in Jerusalem by a
distant Jew rooted in a rather conventionally pious [24] and superstitious culture. The difference
between Tobit and Esther is clear. The author of Esther does not love Jerusalem. The author of
Tobit does. For the Jews who cried over the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 and even more in
Hadrian’s time, there was too little consolation in this book75: so Origen could register their
indifference to it. But in earlier times, when Jerusalem was prosperous, this story of piety and faith
which purported to come from a northern Israelite76, even before Nineveh was destroyed, must have
been a very good story to read. It did its bit to keep the Jews together from Parthia to Rome, when
the diaspora might well have separated itself from Jerusalem and become itself fragmented.77
In conclusion, the book of Esther was originally a diaspora story without reference to Hellenism:
78
it was partially brought up to date in a Greek translation made in Jerusalem. The book of Judith
was the expression in disguise79 of a militant anti-Greek Judaism which derived some inspiration
from the Greek Herodotus. The book of Tobit was ultimately a message of unity80, solidarity and
hope, either sent81 or purported to be sent from the remote Persian diaspora to the rest of the Jews.82
i
A Flavio Giuseppe Momigliano aveva già dedicato una lecture (GL 1980 III, Flavius Josephus) olte che due
contributi autonomi contemporanei ad essa: Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s visit to Jerusalem (= Alexander’s visit)
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
P-o 144: (A) -> manuscripts, del.
P-o 149, 186: was Aramaic or Hebrew; P-o 131, 144: was Hebrew.
P-o 144: too little ... this book, interl.msb[Mom] <-> little the book could offer.
P-o 144: Israelite <-> Jew, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 144: when the diaspora ... itself fragmented, mginfmsb[Mom].
P-o 143: it <-> P-o 144: which.
P-o 144: in disguise, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 144: of unity, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 143: either sent <-> P-o 144: either actually sent.
P-o 144: In conclusion ... of the Jews, msb>r[Mom].
203
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
III. Some Exemplary Stories from the Jewish World
del 1979, incentrato sul particolare episodio dell’ingresso di Alessandro al Tempio e sulla profezia di vittoria che lì
ricevette, e Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide (= Ciò che Flavio), del 1980, dedicato agli errori di prospettiva dello
storico antico nella valutazione della portata delle due correnti più significative del giudaismo del suo tempo,
l’apocalittica e la sinagoga. Va inoltre menzionato il precedente contributo Un’apologia del giudaismo: il «Contro
Apione» di Flavio Giuseppe, del 1931 (= Apologia), così come la valutazione dell’affidabilità di Flavio Giuseppe come
fonte delle correnti interne del giudaismo che avrà luogo nella prima parte di GL 1982 II (The Jewish Sects). Some
Exemplary, c. 2, non è tuttavia l’unico punto in cui Momigliano annuncia il suo proposito – destinato però a rimanere
tale e a non trovare l’auspicato sbocco sistematico e, forse, monografico – di riflettere ancora sul ruolo e sulla figura di
Flavio Giuseppe, nei cui confronti Momigliano pare avvertire nelle ultime conferenze come un debito di indagine non
sanato, la percezione di una necessità di continuare ad approfondire il suo ruolo storico e civile. In proposito, cfr. GL
1982 I (Jews and Gentiles) c.4, in cui lo storico viene definito “both the greatest Jewish representative of the
historiography of the oppressed and a chief witness for that disenchantment of the Jews with history which was to
continue down to modern times for more than 1500 years”.
ii
Nella biblioteca personale di Momigliano sono molte le edizioni di Ester e gli studi critici relativi a un libro
che doveva evidentemente rivestire per lo storico un interesse non solo scientifico. Significativo come sulla sua copia di
The Five Megilloth (hebr. text, Engl. transl. and comm., ed. by A. Cohen, Hindehad, Soncino, 1944) acquistata nel
dicembre 1961, compaia come indicazione autografa di collocazione “Bedroom, fireplace”.
iii
Ester 4.16.
iv
Grazie alla Guida dei Perplessi, “Moreh nevuchim” nella traduzione in ebraico di Samuel ben Judah ibn
Tibbon. Si segnala la presenza della più popolare edizione inglese della Guida dei Perplessi di Maimonide nella
Biblioteca Momigliano: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, transl. by Shlomo Pines, introd. essay by Leo
Strauss, Chicago-Toronto 1963; nel 1982, lo studioso acquista inoltre A Maimonides reader, ed. with intr. and notes by
I. Twersky, New York 1972.
v
Cfr. BICKERMAN 1967A, 191: “In his fifth ‘Avertissement’ to the Protestants (1690) he [Bossuet] contrasts the
conduct of the Jews with the later plots against Louis XIV. The Jews, even in danger of extermination, did not
undertake anything against their lawful sovereign”.
vi
TORREY 1940.
vii
II Macc. 1, 9, 18; 2, 16.
viii
Per la presenza di Ester in Lutero cfr. BICKERMAN 1967A, 212-213 e n. 48.
ix
Per un ulteriore contributo di Momigliano sul tema in analisi in questo paragrafo (particolarmente sull’assedio
di Betulia), cfr. le due pagine finali di Biblical Studies and Classical Studies: Simple Reflections upon Historical
Method (=Biblical Studies).
x
ENSLIN-ZEITLIN 1972.
xi
HADAS 1959. Momigliano aveva recensito questo testo in RSI 73 (1961), 147-149 (=Terzo, 765-767), e ne
possedeva in biblioteca, oltre all’edizione originale, anche la ristampa americana (New York, Norton 1972). Il
riferimento soppresso (vd. apparato) è invece a Grintz, Y. M., Sefer Yehudith, Jerusalem 1957.
xii
FrGH 532 F 4, Lindian Chronicle D (Fouilles de l’Acropole 2 1941).
xiii
DUBARLE 1966.
xiv
Giudici 4-5.
xv
Giudici 5.
xvi
Nell’ambito di una valutazione complessiva delle Jüdische Erzälungen (tra cui annovera anche parti di
Daniele, Ester, Tobia) come koiné romanzesca ellenistica, Wilamowitz afferma, in modo piuttosto reciso : "Und Judith
mit ihrer blutigen Selbsthingabe könnte doch wohl ohne weiteres in einer Novellensammlung wie der des Parthenios
Platz finden." (WILAMOWITZ 1905, 122).
xvii
M‘sh Yhwdyt, midrash che inizia con «e fu nei giorni di Oloferne re di Yawan (= Ionia) », wyhy bymy ‘lypwrny
mlk ywn. Per l’intero testo ebraico si rimanda a ENSLIN – ZEITLIN 1972, 182-190; per altri midrashim in trad. ingl., vd.
C. MOORE 1985, Appendix II, 103-108.
xviii
MILIK 1966.
204
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
CL 1981 IV From the World of Maccabees to Philo
Sedi e date:
GL 1981 II (4 febbraio, cfr. P-o 134, GRANATA 2006, 424)
CL 1981 III (aprile-maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 424)
Documenti:
a) GL 1981 III
P-o 132 ms.
P-o 158 xerox della top c. di P-o 132
P-o 133, P-o 134, P-o 145 (a), c.c. della top c. di P-o 132
b) CL 1981 IV
P-o 145 (b) aggiunte mss.
P-o 146 xerox di P-o 145 (a-b)
P-o 188 nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 145,146, top c.
P-o 151, P-o 157 xerox di P-o 188
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
Della lecture, presentata nel febbraio del 1981 come terza Grinfield e poi, con qualche lieve
variazione, riproposta tra l’aprile e il maggio dello stesso anno come quarta lecture a Chicago,
l’AAM conserva, tra manoscritti e dattiloscritti, nove documenti.
Una prima stesura è testimoniata da P-o 132, una versione ms. (datata al 24 dicembre 1980) in
cui il titolo, preceduto dall’indicazione “Lecture III”, rimanda all’articolazione del ciclo Grinfield;
dalla copia xerox della trascrizione ds., P-o 158 (fascicolo di 19 cc. che reca sulla prima
l’annotazione “unrevised copy”) e dalle 3 c.c. della stessa top c., P-o 133, 134, 135. Tra queste, P-o
133 si presenta come un documento corredato da minime correzioni mss. di AMM, essenzialmente
frutto di una rilettura finale tesa ad apportare piccoli ritocchi che passeranno (con pochissime
eccezioni) nella versione CL.
Rilevante nel processo di elaborazione della versione di Chicago è la reading copy P-o 145,
documento composito di cui la parte ds. (nucleo a) coincide con P-o 133, ma che vede l’aggiunta,
oltre alle consuete annotazioni per la lettura e a qualche correzione, di integrazioni mss. per la
nuova versione in forma di appunti sui margini liberi del ds. (quando la lunghezza lo consente) o di
fogli a parte (4 bis, 18 bis).
Discendono da P-o 145 P-o 146, una copia xerox priva di annotazioni mss., e P-o 188, ds. di 23
cc. testimone della definitiva versione CL. Il nuovo testo è arricchito da citazioni bibliografiche
circostanziate e presenta un ricorso alla punteggiatura (soprattutto virgole) più abbondante rispetto
alla versione GL, oltre all’utilizzo di qualche vocabolo dalla grafia americana1. Rispetto a P-o 145,
piccoli aggiustamenti (ad es. la modifica dell’inizio del terzo paragrafo, cfr. c. 2) sembrano rivelare
un testo destinato a dei lettori più che a un auditorio. Di P-o 188 si conservano due copie xerox
identiche e prive di annotazioni, P-o 157 e 1512: allo scopo, puramente formale, di individuare un
testo base per l’edizione si fa riferimento (salvo rari casi, opportunamente segnalati, in cui la
variante accolta proviene da altro documento) a P-o 151, la cui annotazione ms., sulla c. 1, di AMM
“Chic. & Grinfield 1981” ne qualifica la destinazione.
2. Argomento della lecture
Dei libri ebraici analizzati nella precedente lecture nessuno condivide con il corpus maccabaico
l’esperienza nodale della resistenza al pericolo di apostasia: ai protagonisti, minacciati in quanto
1
Cfr. ad es. la sostituzione di centre con center (c. 6 n. 20), honour con honor (c. 13 n. 59) o favourite con favorite (c.
14 n. 65).
2
Di cui la prima erroneamente catalogata da GRANATA 2006 come c.c. Da precisare è anche il rapporto di filiazione tra
le due copie: P-o 151 è catalogata in AAM come copia xerox di P-o 157, quindi copia della copia di 188. Benché le due
versioni siano del tutto identiche e prive di annotazioni mss. autonome (quelle presenti sono tutte fotocopiate) la
presenza di piccole macchie di inchiostro su P-o 188 (pp. 16,17) e fissate diversamente sulle due xerox induce a pensare
che anche 151 sia una copia diretta di P-o 188.
205
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
gruppo etnico, non è mai richiesto di abbandonare l’ebraismo. Ѐ sotto Antioco IV che la tentazione
esercitata sul giudaismo dalla cultura greca assume per la prima volta la forma della coercizione. A
portare alla luce il problema è il libro di Daniele (164 a.C. ca), che distanziandosi dalle generiche
promesse dell’oracolistica sul trionfo degli dèi nativi propone per primo una scelta tra obbedienza e
disobbedienza a Dio che sarà al cuore di I Maccabei (104 a.C ca.).
II Maccabei, epitome dell’opera storica di Giasone da Cirene, si distingue da I Maccabei per
l’enfasi miracolistica e la centralità che assegna nella sezione incipitaria al Tempio di
Gerusalemme. L’insistenza sulla pratica di Giuda Maccabeo di custodirvi libri sacri appare un tipico
tratto ellenistico, riconducibile alla volontà dell’autore di impressionare gli Ebrei di Alessandria.
Non soprende che in tale clima celebrativo alcuni Ebrei della diaspora avvertissero la necessità di
giustificarsi agli occhi della Palestina: III Maccabei rappresenta il tentativo di ambientare in Egitto
una saga locale degna di confronto. L’assenza di generalizzazioni antigreche lascia supporre che il
libro preceda il peggioramento dei rapporti tra Greci ed Egizi provocato dall’arrivo dei Romani. IV
Maccabei (20-50 d.C. ca.) testimonia invece un’altra forma di resistenza giudaica, la celebrazione
dei martiri di età maccabaica. Profondamente ellenizzato nella forma, il sermone sembra essere
stato scritto per gli Ebrei di Antiochia, città in cui il culto cristiano dei sette martiri maccabaici ebbe
origine da precedenti giudaici.
Il confronto del corpus maccabaico con i libri ellenistici che ignorano il pericolo di apostasia
(Ester, Giuditta, Tobia) mette quindi in luce come la politica di Antioco IV abbia determinato una
divaricazione tra due possibilità di connotazione degli Ebrei, intesi non più solo come gruppo etnico
ma anche come gruppo etnico-religioso aperto alla modifica per il tramite della conversione. Le
rappresentazioni non risultano tra loro mutuamente esclusive: Filone di Alessandria le riflette
entrambe (forse incosapevolmente) tra In Flaccum e Legatio ad Gaium. Se nel primo testo, pur
accusando gli Alessandrini di profanare le sinagoghe con immagini dell’imperatore, ne legge i
conflitti con gli Ebrei in chiave politica, nella Legatio riconduce invece l’ostilità degli Alessandrini
al fatto che gli Ebrei neghino onori divini all’imperatore. Sostenitore del potere romano, Filone
predilige in tal senso una strategia di modifica dello status del giudaismo dal ruolo di nazione
interna all’impero a quello di gruppo religioso, accentuandone l’elemento di non conflittualità con il
potere. Il suo è un tentativo di compromesso destinato a perdere di senso nell’arco di una
generazione dalla distruzione del Tempio: i grandi fattori del giudaismo post 70 d.C. diventeranno
la reazione al dominio romano e alla ‘terza via’ del Cristianesimo.
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi.
Il percorso di indagine sulla nascita e l’evoluzione della letteratura resistenziale giudaica si
chiude, per così dire, con un ritorno alle origini: i libri dei Maccabei, ovvero l’argomento della
monografia pubblicata nel 1930 da un giovanissimo Momigliano con il titolo di Prime linee di
storia della tradizione Maccabaica (=Prime linee) e riedita successivamente nel 1931 e nel 1968.
Il costante ritorno ai problemi posti da struttura e tematiche mostra come l’attenzione ai libri
(particolarmente al primo e a secondo) sia destinata a rimanere viva negli anni: se dopo la
pubblicazione nel 1932 de I Tobiadi nella preistoria del mondo maccabaico (=Tobiadi) una lunga
pausa dall’argomento pare suggerire una perdita di interesse, il progressivo avvicinamento al
giudaismo-ellenistico che prelude alle prime composizioni di lectures sul tema produce nuove
pubblicazioni in merito: nel 1975 esce The Second Book of Maccabees (=Second Maccabees), in cui
si analizzano la natura dell’epitome, i documenti inclusi in essa e i rapporti con l’originale, e nel
1977 The Date of the First Book of Maccabees (=First Maccabees), focalizzato invece – come già il
titolo suggerisce – sui problemi relativi alla datazione del primo libro, individuata da Momigliano
tra il 135 e il 129 a.C. (cfr. c. 7). Chiude la serie un ulteriore titolo, The Romans and the Maccabees
(= Romans-Maccabees), pubblicato postumo nel 1988.
From Maccabees attinge dal materiale di tutti questi saggi e fonda su di esso la propria
argomentazione per tracciare la fine di una riflessione che, dalle generiche premesse di contesto
incentrate su letteratura resistenziale greca (CL 1981 I) ed orientale (CL 1981 II), ha condotto
206
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
all’individuazione di una specificità della letteratura ebraica resistenziale che nei libri maccabaici, e
in Daniele prima ancora, trova la propria realizzazione più matura. Rispetto al nucleo di libri
ellenistici isolati in CL 1981 III (Some Exemplary), ossia Ester, Giuditta e Tobia, è solo a partire
dalla reazione alla dominazione di Antioco IV che trova infatti espressione in letteratura la nuova
esperienza giudaica della scelta tra apostasia e rovina (o eventualmente tra apostasia e guerra):
profondamente vincolata alla fascinazione esercitata dalla cultura greca, essa implica – a differenza
dell’antico politeismo semitico – un tradimento che va al di là della sfera religiosa, toccando aspetti
del vivere e del pensare intrinsecamente connessi allo stile di vita greco.
Se l’input in direzione della comprensione della radicalità del problema è dato da Daniele, che
per primo mette al centro della propria predicazione la scelta tra obbedire e disobbedire a Dio,
appare chiaro come la lecture finisca per rappresentare su un piano strutturale un punto di
intersezione profondo tra il percorso delineato attraverso il terzo ciclo, The Jewish Historiography
of Resistance, e il principale nucleo argomentativo del secondo, Daniel and the Origins of
Universal History, identificabile nell’individuazione di una specificità della formulazione
storiografica postulata da Daniele e mutuata verosimilmente da modelli greci. From Maccabees è,
in altre parole, un punto di convergenza tra i due percorsi, nella misura in cui mette in luce un
rapporto di interdipendenza tra la prospettiva resistenziale maccabaica e la formulazione sui generis
dell’universalismo greco in Daniele. Non a caso si apprezzano nella lecture numerosi richiami ai
contenuti della GL 1980 II, Daniel and the World Empires (definita solo “elsewhere” alla c. 5, ma
probabilmente in considerazione della pubblicazione in parallelo di ulteriori contributi sul tema);
così come non pare azzardato vedere nella lettura momiglianea di Daniele come profeta ‘duro’, che
rifugge le facili consolazioni (“Daniel refuses to give hope to whoever wants hope”, c. 5), una presa
di distanza nei confronti di quella singolare, ‘rosea’ valutazione identificata come peculiare di
Flavio Giuseppe in GL 1980 III, Flavius Josephus (“there cannot have been many who saw Daniel
in the rosy colours in which Josephus saw him”, c. 9). Il disegno complessivo è ormai chiaro, e i
quattro cicli sul giudaismo ellenistico intrinsecamente legati. Dopo una conclusione dell’indagine
dedicata a Filone e al suo tentativo di compromesso con il potere politico romano – destinato a
fallire con la distruzione del Tempio del 70 d.C. – la conclusione di From Maccabees appare già
proiettata verso l’ultima serie di lectures. “But the choice is now primarily with the individual Jew:
and the choice is between Greek life and Jewish life” (c.24), è una sintetica anticipazione
dell’indagine dell’ultimo ciclo, dedicata all’individuazione di quei punti di contatto tra giudaismo
ed ellenismo attraverso i quali la componente resistenziale oltrepasserà il confine della produzione
storiografica, assumendo una valenza più diffusamente culturale.
207
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
IV*3
From the Books of Maccabees to Philo
I
In my previous lecture I analyzed4 three texts – the book of Esther, the book of Judith and the
book of Tobit. The book of Esther in its Hebrew form shows5 no love for Jerusalem, no interest in a
Jewish State and no care for Levitic purity. It represents the outlook of a Jewish group which is selfconscious, surrounded by hostility and only implicitly relying on God’s help. The Greek version of
Esther brings the Hebrew book up to date in the matter of purity requirements, as one would expect
from a book translated after 150 B.C., but does not modify the attitude of the original text to
Jerusalem, to the Temple or indeed to the future of the Jews. The book of Judith pays only
secondary attention to Jerusalem and the Temple as such, but is both formalistic in its attitude to the
Law and belligerant in relation to the enemies of Judaism. Interestingly enough, both formalism and
belligerency are identified with a woman: there were of course biblical precedents for both roles, if
we think of Ruth for the first role and of Deborah and Jael for the second. But the very fact of
making one woman the sole cause of the liberation of Israel creates difficulties if one tries to see in
the book of Judith the expression of that faith in God which led the Jewish peasants to fight with
Judas Maccabeus against the Syrians and to win against all expectations. I hesitate, therefore, to
treat this book as a Palestinian book and prefer to believe that the wars of the Maccabees affected it
from a distance: the book of Judith appears to me to have been written in the Diaspora. The book of
Tobit surely must also come from the Diaspora6; a moving document, as I see it, of the allegiance of
a remote group of Jews, or perhaps even of one individual Jew, to the Messianic [2] hopes
connected with the restoration of Jerusalem.
Thus none of these three books is Maccabean in the sense of facing – or rather having to face –
the peculiar experience of the Jews under Antiochus IV, that is, the danger of apostasy, whether
imposed by a foreign king or brought about by the propaganda of7 Jewish assimilationists attracted
by the beauty of Yawan. The Jews of Esther, Judith and Tobit felt the fear of persecution and
destruction, such as any ethnic group may feel. They were not faced by the choice between apostasy
and ruin. They were menaced qua Jews: they had not been asked to relinquish Judaism as they
understood it in order to survive. Characteristically enough, none of the three books I analyzed8
mentions the Greeks. They claim to describe situations of the Assyrian and Persian periods. Their
Hellenistic date can be discovered only by work of scholarly detection.
The books I am going to analyze in the following pages9 mention the Greeks by name and
oppose them, in so far as the Greeks interfere with Jewish law, but they do not condemn Greek
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 151, copia xerox (identica a P-o 157) di P-o 188, fascicolo di 23 cc. testimone
della nuova e definitiva versione CL 1981. Si segnalano inoltre in apparato le varianti presenti nel documento
composito P-o 145, una c.c. della versione GL corredata dalle aggiunte CL, e in P-o 133, ulteriore c.c. della versione
GL interessata da correzioni (per lo più formali) di AMM. Sono riportate infine all’occorrenza le lezioni alternative di
P-o 132, ms. alla base della versione GL, allo scopo di evidenziare l’evoluzione della lecture a partire dalla sua prima
stesura.
3
P-o 151: IV; P-o 145: IV <-> III, ms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: III; P-o 151: Chic. & Grinfield 1981, tsf1, mgdx
ms[AMM]; P-o 145: 25 Wed. Feb. 3-5 – 26 Thursd. 3, tsf1, mgsn; Reading copy, mgdx msb[Mom].
4
P-o 151: analyzed; P-o 132, 133, 145: analysed.
5
P-o 151: shows; P-o 132: shows <-> has.
6
P-o 151: The book of Tobit ... Diaspora; P-o 133, 145: The book of Tobit ... Diaspora <-> From the Diaspora surely
must come the Book of Tobit, ms[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
7
P-o 132: the propaganda of, interl.msn.
8
P-o 145: I analyzed -> last week, msb[Mom], del.
9
P-o 151: I am going ... pages; P-o 145: I shall analyse today, msb[Mom].
208
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
civilization as such.10 The new experience of Judaism in the Maccabean and post-Maccabean period
is the internal choice between apostasy and ruin – or alternatively between apostasy and war. The
temptation of “other gods” was of course as old as the Jewish people itself. But the old temptation
had never taken the precise form of an order from outside: it was, literally, a direct temptation by
the “other gods”. Now the Greeks – or at least kings who spoke Greek – seemed to require apostasy,
and there were Jews who were ready for it. Individual cases of apostasy among Jews in the service
of kings are already known for the third century. The classic example is the apostate Dositheusi who
saved the life of Ptolemy IV according to III Maccabees 1, 3.11 In so far as apostasy was a
temptation to betray the God of the Fathers, it re-introduced into Jewish history the old conflicts of
the First Temple, about which one had heard much less during the [3-4] Second Temple, which12
had arisen under the protection of the Persians. Thus Jewish history returned to God through
temptation. But we must be clear that it was temptation of a different kind from the previous one. It
was mainly a foreign temptation; and the foreigners had beautiful songs, beautiful games and above
all attractive thoughts. Ultimately, the confrontation which the Greeks were now creating, and to
which Esther, Judith and Tobit are still insensitive, went far beyond the religious sphere and
touched aspects of living and thinking which had hardly been problematic to previous generations
of Jews. Whether one took part in the life of the gymnasium or went to the theatre or simply read
Greek books, there were new issues.
The book which opens the new era of choice between apostasy and faithfulness is13 the book of
Daniel, which can be dated rather exactly about 16414 B.C. I am not concerned with the formation
of this book, which shows traces of a long evolution. As I have said elsewhereii, chapter 2, with its
characteristic formulation of the four world empires, is most probably to be dated about 250 B.C. If
chapter 6, where Darius the Mede is said to have imposed a cult exclusive15 to himself, belongs to
the earlier section of the book of Daniel, which is uncertain, it would be an interesting indication
that some Jews had been expecting new inducements to apostasy16 from the spreading of the royal
cult.17 Nor am I concerned here with the additions which are to be found in the two Greek
translations, the one of which we conventionally call the LXX and the other attributed to
Theodotion, which had largely replaced the LXX in the Christian Church by A.D. 250 (only the
Syro-Hexaplar text and the earliest quotations of the Vetus Latina follow the LXX). These Greek
additions to Daniel increase the number of dramatic or curious episodes in the lives18 of Daniel and
his companions. They also increase the share of prayers and hymns in the ritual of preparation of
men for martyrdom. But unlike the additions to the Greek Esther, these additions to Daniel (that [5]
is, the stories of Susanna, of Bel and the Snake, and the prayers of Azariah and his companions in
the furnace) do not contribute to the updating of the book either in political or even in religious
terms. They simply make the book more interesting and devout for the superficial reader and are
therefore difficult to date and to place. I can hardly believe that there are many students today
prepared to follow Nehemiah Brühl (Jahrbücher für Jüd. Geschichte und Literatur 3, 1877, 1-69)iii
in the idea that 19 Susanna’s story was invented to polemize against Sadducean methods of
questioning witnesses as soon as the authentic cult of Yahweh was restored in the Temple of
Jerusalem after its profanation by Antiochus IV. For our purpose what counts is the half-Hebrew,
10
P-o 145: Characteristically enough, none ... as such, mgsup,snms[Mom]; P-o 132, P-o 133: def; P-o 145: -> There is a
Jewish objection to Greek interference, but no Jewish objection to Greek civilization, mgsnmsb[Mom].
11
P-o 145: Individual cases of apostasy ... 1, 3, mgsnmsb[Mom]; P-o 132, P-o 133: def.
12
P-o 151: which; P-o 132, 133: that.
13
P-o 132: faithfulness is -> undoubtedly, del.
14
P-o 151: 164; P-o 132: 165; P-o 133, 145: 164 <-> 165, ms[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
15
P-o 151: a cult exclusive; P-o 145: an exclusive cult, msb[Mom].
16
P-o 151: new inducements to apostasy; P-o 145: troubles <-> new inducements to apostasy, msb[Mom].
17
P-o 145: If chapter 6, where ... royal cult, mginf,dxmsb[Mom]; P-o 132, P-o 133: def.
18
P-o 132, 133, 151: lives; P-o 145: life <-> lives, msb[Mom].
19
P-o 151: to follow ... in the idea that; P-o 132, 133: to believe with ... that; P-o 145: to follow ... in the idea that
msb[Mom] <-> to believe with ... that.
209
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
half-Aramaic book of Daniel20, which was hurriedly put together at that time. The hurry is manifest
in the loose composition of the book itself. It uses three not very well amalgamated kinds of
materials: first, the sayings of Daniel as an interpreter of somebody else’s vision; secondly, the
episodes of courage shown by him and his companions; thirdly, the personal visions of Daniel
himself regarding the future of Israel. Whether intentionally or not, the Jewish seer seems to have
two functions: he is capable of interpreting on request the signs given to non-Jews; at the same time
he has direct access to the future of his own people. As for the Jews, Daniel offers no collective
salvation; rather, he envisages redemption for those who understand and are the saints of the Most
High. Consequently, no political programme is proposed, not even open support for the Maccabean
rebels, though there is a notorious allusion in 11, 34 to the little help which is apparently expected
from them. Daniel makes the choice between obedience and disobedience to God the center21 of his
speculation on the whole of human history and connects the expectation of the realm of God with
this choice. Certainty is confined to the advent of the realm of God: there is no saying how many
will choose to enter it. Daniel refuses to give hope to whoever wants hope. There is a difference
between his prophecy and those prophecies, say the Egyptian Potter’s [6] Oracleiv, which promise
the end of foreign rule and the triumphs of the native gods. Daniel is not so much concerned with
the victory of the true God as with22 the experience of suffering23 which will bring it about (“they
shall fall by sword and flame, by captivity and plunder”, 11, 33).
The first and second books of Maccabees (the ones among the Maccabean books which tell the
history of this period) are in a hundred ways different from Daniel. They are not apocalyptic and to
a great extent eschew the dimension of universal empires in which Daniel places the conflict
between Antiochus IV and the Jews. There is just an allusion to the Macedonian world-empire at
the beginning of I Maccabees, without consequence for the rest of the book. But both I and II
Maccabees agree with Daniel in recognizing the new element introduced into Jewish history by
Antiochus. The war against the Greeks is not an automatic reaction against aggression: it is a
deliberate choice by certain Jews, not by all Jews. The war cry of Mattathias in I Macc. 2, 27
expresses this choice: “let everyone who is zealous for the Law and supports the covenant come out
with me”. In II Maccabees, even more conspicuously, the actual rebellion of the Maccabees is
preceded by the martyrdom of Eleazar and of the Seven Brothers. War is preceded (and therefore
characterized) by martyrdom. Daniel would have approved.
Before we proceed to a more detailed analysis of these two books, let me emphasize the very
elementary fact that what is surprising is that these books exist at all. As we have received them in a
Christian context (the Jews soon forgot them), we are not used to consider how exceptional it is to
have accounts of wars (and holy wars at that) written from the point of view of the enemies of the
Greco-Macedonian empires. They offer the rare opportunity of seeing the world from the other side;
and one must immediately add that the opportunity is not made easier by the complicating factor
that the authors of [7] the two books were in varying measure influenced by their enemies. Both
books are deeply Jewish and yet in a hundred details reflect the ways of thinking of the surrounding
Greeks. I am the last to claim to be able to disentangle what is Hebrew and what is Greek in the I
and II Maccabees: the entanglement involves not only moral and religious judgments, but the very
technique of describing a war, an art which the Greeks had been perfecting throughout the
centuries.24
The first book of Maccabees, as we all know, was originally written in Hebrew in conscious
imitation of the biblical historical books, especially of Samuel and Kings. It cannot be later, in its
20
P-o 145: of Daniel, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 132, P-o 133: def.
P-o 151: center; P-o 132, 133: centre.
22
P-o 132: Daniel is not so much concerned with the victory of the true God as with <-> In Daniel resistance is no
generic notion: it is related to.
23
P-o 132: suffering <-> martyrdom.
24
P-o 145: Before we proceed to a more detailed analysis ... the centuries, ts.msb[Mom] su f.4bis; P-o 132, P-o 133:
def.
21
210
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
original Hebrew text, than 104 B.C. I have in fact suggested in Mélanges Heurgon 1976 a date
between 135 and 129 B.C., mainly on the basis of the Roman data contained in chapter 8v. I
Maccabees reflects the period in which relations between Jews and Romans developed rather
idyllically in the common hostility to the Seleucids.
The chapter25 on the Romans is also the one for which it would be most difficult to find parallels
in biblical historiography. It is a sort of ethnographical characterization of the Romans of a type
which was current among Greek historians. This piece is very different from most of the rest, where
the style itself tries to establish continuity with earlier and more heroic stages of Hebrew history.
The dirge for Judas Maccabeus (9, 21) echoes David’s lamentation over Saul and Jonathan (II Sam.
1, 19; 27). When the author praises the government of the High Priest Simon as a time when
“Judaea was at peace ... old men sat in the streets talking together of their blessings, and the young
men dressed themselves in splendid military style” (14, 9), the echo of Zechariah 8, 4-5 must have
been obvious to his readers: “Once again shall old men and old women sit in their streets of
Jerusalem ... and the streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing”. The reader,
incidentally, must also have been aware of the novelty of the allusion to young men in robes of [8]
war (στολὰς πολέµου), which is far from Zechariah’s intentions and perhaps reflects Greek habits26.
In I Macc. 7, 7 there is even an explicit quotation of Psalm 79. But as the author has a sensitive eye
for each situation and can differentiate between the atmosphere of religious enthusiasm of the early
days of Judas Maccabeus and the more prosaic generations which followed, his account is hardly
meant to edify the reader. After all, he ends his story with a tale of murder and attempts to murder.
This, too, perhaps was biblical: the ruthless description of realities.
The second book of Maccabeesvi is a Greek summary of a book originally written in Greek: more
precisely, an epitome27 in the Hellenistic style of a work in five books by Jason of Cyrene. The
scope of the epitome (and presumably of Jason’s text) is narrower than that of I Maccabees. It ends
in 160 B.C. with Judas’ victory over Nicanor, which is the occasion for the creation of a new
festival. In curious contrast to this conclusion, II Maccabees begins with three letters from the Jews
of Jerusalem to the Jews of Egypt, the most recent of which is dated in 124 B.C.: these letters, and
especially the last28, commend the celebration, not of the day of Nicanor, but of the purification of
the Temple which belonged to a different month and had no military character29. There are various
possible explanations for this disharmony between the beginning and the end of the book (the
former commending what became known as the festival of Hanukkah, the latter emphasizing the
importance of a festival of victory called the day of Nicanor, placed suspiciously one day before the
festival of Purim, which, we must not forget, was also called the day of Mordecaivii ). The simplest
explanation, however, is that the author of II Maccabees30 preserved the end of the original history
by Jason of Cyrene, with its partiality for the festival of Nicanor’s day, but added of31 its own
initiative the letters at the beginning which modified the emphasis of Jason’s work and made [9] the
purification of the Temple the more32 important episode from the point of view of the Jewish
religious calendar. We may think33 that Jason of Cyrene wrote between 160 and 124 B.C., more
probably very near to 160 B.C., while the anonymous epitomist wrote in 124 B.C. to support the
Jews of Jerusalem, when they turned to the Jews of Egypt in a third34 effort to persuade them to
adopt the festival of the purification of the Temple. If this hypothesis is accepted, some
consequences follow for both the original work of Jason and its epitome. The emphasis on the
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
P-o 145: chapter -> 8, msb[Mom], del.
P-o 151: and ... habits; P-o 132, 133: def; P-o 145: and rather Greek, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 151: is a Greek summary ... epitome; P-o 132, 133: is a summary or epitome.
P-o 132: and especially the last, interl.
P-o 132: and had no military character, interl.
P-o 132: of II Maccabees <-> of the epitome which we call II Maccabees.
P-o 133, 145: on <-> of, ms[AMM].
P-o 151: more; P-o 132: most; P-o 133, 145: more <-> most, ms[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
P-o 132: We may think <-> It would follow.
P-o 132: third <-> new and determined.
211
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
prehistory of the persecution of Antiochus – including Heliodorus’ attempt to rob the Temple and
the struggles between the priestly factions of Jerusalem – may well35 go back to Jason. Jason must
also be responsible for the emphasis on miracles and on heroic deaths by martyrs of the faith. This
is not something that could be added gratuitously36 by the epitomist.
Such a combination of miracles and martyrdom is in itself unusual. Stories of miracles were
conventional in Hellenistic accounts or chronicles of temples: the chronicle of the temple of Athena
in Lindos is the standard example viii . More specifically, a god was expected to intervene
miraculously against the robbers of his own temple. Far less common, as far as I know, is the
description of episodes of martyrdom, though of course Greek philosophy, at least since Socrates,
knew and cultivated courage in the face of death as one of the supreme forms of personal virtue.
Jason of Cyrene seems to have superimposed on the conventional account of temple miracles an
unusual interest in episodes of martyrdom. Furthermore, his notion of martyrdom was not identical
with that of Greek philosophers but reflected new trends within the Jewish religion. It is also likely
that the striking isolation of Judas Maccabeus in the present II Maccabees reflects Jason’s view of
the hero whom he put at the center of his book. If Jason had given the father of Judas, Mattathias,
anything like the space he receives in I Maccabees, the epitomist would have been compelled to say
some[10]thing about him. Jason, therefore, not the epitomist, seems to be responsible for the bold
decision to suppress the deeds of Mattathias and to present instead episodes of martyrdom. The
origins of the rebellion are thus placed, not in the priestly family of Mattathias, but in the almost
anonymous sacrifice of pious individuals. Here again we see the confluence of two motifs. One is
the imitation of the biblical style of the book of Judges, where each individual chieftain creates the
new situation without much reference to his family. The other is the implicit preference given to37
individual martyrdom over38 priestly leadership.
The epitomist – that is, the author of the II Maccabees as we have it –39 seems to be a less bold
fellow. Where he explicitly speaks in his own name, as in chapter 6, 12-17, he contributes40 some
rather trivial philosophy of history: “The Lord did not see fit to deal with us as he does with the
other nations: with them he patiently holds his hand until they have reached the full extent of their
sins, but upon us he inflicted retribution before our sins reached their height”.
On other points all we can say is that II Maccabees is different from I Maccabees.41 The book
expresses belief in resurrection and in the efficacy of sacrifices for the dead (12, 45). Though the
book is about struggles against Greek or Macedonian enemies, there is a remarkable absence of
anti-Greek feelings: the news of the death of the High Priest Onias provokes indignation among
many Gentiles (4, 35); the citizens of Tyre feel sympathy with Jewish victims (4, 49), and the city
of Scythopolis is spared by Judas because its citizens had helped the Jews in previous times (13,
30). The common origin of Jews and Spartans stated in the book (5, 9) may simply be one of those
diplomatic devices characteristic of the age, but it provokes no qualms. The author is not, and does
not want to be taken for, a hater of the Greeks.42
[11] What quite clearly could not have existed in Jason because it is in the opening letters – that
is, outside the narrative of the book – is the emphasis on the purification of the Temple. This is a
new component in the epitome and had been absent from Jason’s original text.43 The third of these
three44 letters is at the same time the most Jewish and the most Greek piece – and altogether the
35
P-o 132: may well <-> must.
P-o 132: gratuitously <-> easily, interl.
37
P-o 132: preference given to <-> adequation of.
38
P-o 132: over <-> in comparison with ms[AMM].
39
P-o 132, 133: - that is ... we have it -, def; P-o 145: interl.ms[Mom].
40
P-o 151: contributes; P-o 132: makes; P-o 133, 145: contributes <-> makes, ms[AMM].
41
P-o 132: Maccabees. -> it is more difficult to distinguish the hand of the epitomator fom that of Jason, del.
42
P-o 145: The author is not ... of the Greeks, mginfms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
43
P-o 145: original text. -> The three opening letters are the most Jewish – and most puzzling – section of the II
Maccabees, interl.ms[Mom], del.
44
P-o 145: three -> opening, msn[Mom], del.
36
212
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
most puzzling.45 While the first46 of the letters is dated in 124 B.C., and the second (quoted by the
first) in 143 B.C.47, the third48 appears to have been written by the senate (gerousia) of Jerusalem
and by Judas Maccabeus himself either in the year of the purification of the Temple after its
desecration by Antiochus IV or on the first anniversary of the purification; that is, either in 164 B.C.
or in 163 B.C. This letter, as we have it, connects the purification with previous actions in the same
direction by King49 Solomon and by50 Nehemiah. With some51 ability, the writer leaves the nature
of this connection rather obscure, while implying a miraculous element in the events of 164 B.C. by
their very comparison with the miracles of earlier times, which he describes at length. The compiler
of the letter goes on to establish another point of similarity between Judas Maccabeus and
Nehemiah: both collected sacred books in the Temple. The letter in fact includes an offer to the
Egyptian Jews to provide copies of these books, if they want them: “These books are in our
possession and if you need any of them send messengers for them” (2, 15). Pride in a central library
and readiness to provide copies of rare books are, needless to say, typical features of Hellenistic
culture. The composer of the letter knows how to impress the Jews of Egypt. If we remember that
the one Egyptian Jew who is selected for specific mention among the addressees of this letter is the
apologist Aristobulus, who is probably our earliest source for the story of the semi-miraculous
translation of the Pentateuch into Greek by the Septuagint, the detail of the Temple library in our
letter becomes [12] even more significant. One of the most important elements of the LXX story is
that both the text for translation and the translators had been provided by the Jerusalem Temple.
Our letter seems to tell Aristobulus and his fellow-Jews of Alexandria that books are still obtainable
from Jerusalem for further translations. The sophisticated Jews of Alexandria are reassured that the
Jews of Jerusalem are not behind the times in the matter of libraries.52 Thus the three letters at the
beginning of II Maccabees taken together combine the purpose of keeping the Egyptian Jews well
informed about Palestinian events with the purpose of reaffirming the authority53 of Palestinian
Judaism both in the matter of festivals and of sacred books. The ultimate implication is that the
Diaspora Jews must follow the example of the Palestinian Jews.
Two questions are obviously raised by these prefatory54 letters and more specifically by the one
attributed to the senate and Judas Maccabeus in 164 or 163 B.C. Were these letters inserted into the
present text by the compiler of the epitome? And – a more delicate question – is the long letter of
164 B.C. (in its entirety or in its central excursus about miracles) a forgery concocted in Jerusalem
to reinforce the two more recent letters, which are almost certainly authentic? There is no certain55
answer to these questions, as far as I know. As I have already hinted, my subjective impression is
that it was the compiler himself who inserted the three letters into his text as a sort of suitable
proem56. It is also my impression that the letter attributed to the gerousia and to Judas with a date of
164 or 163 B.C. is too good to be true: I prefer to think of it as a text compiled during one of the
later attempts 57 to persuade the Egyptian Jews to adopt the Hanukkah festival. But I must
immediately add that my friend Professor Ben-Zion Wacholder, whose judgement I deeply respect,
has expressed exactly the opposite point of view in the Union College Cincinnati Annual (UCCA)
49 (1978), pp. 89-133ix. He sees in the [13] letter a first-class authentic document of the beliefs and
45
P-o 145: The third of these three ... the most puzzling, mgsupmsn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
P-o 151: first; P-o 132, 133: third; P-o 145: first <-> third, msn[Mom].
47
P-o 145: and the second quoted by the first in 143 B.C., mgsnmsn[Mom]; P-o 132,133: def.
48
P-o 151: third; P-o 132, P-o 133: first; P-o 145: third <-> first, ms[Mom].
49
P-o 145: King, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
50
P-o 154: by, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133, 151: by, def.
51
P-o 132: some <-> singular, msn.
52
P-o 132, 133: def; P-o 154: The sophisticated Jews of Alexandria ... of libraries, mginfmsn[Mom].
53
P-o 132: authority <-> centrality, ms[AMM].
54
P-o 151: prefatory; P-o 132: prefatorial <-> initial, ms.[AMM]; P-o 133, 145: prefatory <-> prefatorial, ms[AMM].
55
P-o 151: certain; P-o 132: dogmatic; P-o 133, 145: certain <-> dogmatic, ms[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
56
P-o 151: proem; P-o 132: proemium.
57
P-o 132: during one of the later attempts <-> about 124 B.C. when it was decided in Jerusalem to make a final
attempt.
46
213
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
intellectual ambitions of Judas Maccabeus in 163 B.C.: Judas Maccabeus would have been58 a
collector of books on behalf of the Temple. I suspect on the contrary that Judas Maccabeus was
turned into a book-collector by somebody who wanted to impress and please the Jews of
Alexandria.59
The exceptional character of I and II Maccabees is in any case established by their very nature as
accounts of a successful resistance. Though far from enthusiastic about the story they tell, both
books end in the legitimate constatation that the Jews have regained their freedom. As I Maccabees
says, in quoting the text of the inscription in honor60 of Simon: “he with his brothers and his father’s
family had stood firm, fought off the enemies of Israel, and ensured his nation’s freedom” (14, 26).
II Maccabees quietly concludes with the memorable words: “and from that time Jerusalem has
remained in the possession of the Hebrews” (15, 37). But if freedom was already a problematic
notion for the Greeks, it was even more so for the Jews. For Herodotus, and perhaps more generally
for the Greeks, gaining or regaining freedom did not immediately pose the problem of what you
will do with your freedom to please your gods. For the Jews, acquiring freedom could not be an end
in itself. It raised immediately a double series of questions: on the temporal61 level, how a Jewish
state could remain Jewish if it had to defend itself62; and on the divine level, how it could serve God
truly if it remained Jewish. For the Greeks successful defense63 or recovery of freedom was
evidence for the superiority of one’s own political institutions. For the Jews worldly success, as the
case of Solomon had proved, was no longer equivalent to64 conformity with God’s will.
[14]
II
Before the Palestinian Jews were made aware of their dilemma by an unexpected factor – Roman
conquest – the Jews of the Diaspora found themselves in a curious situation in relation to their
brethren in Palestine. They were committed to support the cult of Jerusalem and consequently did
not remain indifferent to events in Palestine; but they needed the Temple less and less and even
found it possible to pray in languages other than Hebrew or Aramaic. In this slightly ambiguous
situation it is perhaps not surprising that some Diaspora Jews should feel impelled to justify before
God (and perhaps before their Palestinian brethren) their own life outside Palestine. One way was to
show that Diaspora Jews had their own troubles and were protected by God no less than Palestinian
Jews. The third book of Maccabees is an attempt by Egyptian Jews to create a local saga worthy of
comparison with the Maccabean saga. The present text does not allude explicitly to the Maccabees,
but we must remember that something is missing at the beginning. Whoever gave the book its
present title must have felt that there was an analogy between the story told in it and the feats of the
Maccabees.
As in the book of Esther and in II Maccabees, the point of departure of the III Maccabees65 is an
existing festival. It was celebrated every year for seven days by the Jews of Alexandria and, at a
different date, by the Jews of the rest of Egypt. III Maccabees provides an explanation for this
festival. It tells us that during his victorious campaign of 217 B.C. against Syria Ptolemy IV
Philopator tried to gain admittance to the sancta sanctorum of the Temple of Jerusalem but was
prevented from entering it. In revenge he decided to Hellenize the Jews of Alexandria and to offer
them citizenship in exchange for their participation in the cult of Dionysus (whom we know
58
P-o 145: have been -> himself, interl.ms[Mom], del.
P-o 145: Judas Maccabeus would have been ... the Jews of Alexandria, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
60
P-o 151: honor; P-o 132, 133: honour.
61
P-o 132: temporal <-> earthly, ms[AMM].
62
P-o 132: if it had to defend itself <-> within the demanding Hellenistic system by which it was surrounded.
63
P-o 151: defense; P-o 132: defence.
64
P-o 151: was no longer equivalent to; P-o 132: was never equivalent to <-> never made superfluous other tests to
assess; P-o 133: was never equivalent to.
65
P-o 145: of the III Maccabees, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
59
214
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
independently to have been the favorite66 god of this king). As the Alexandrian Jews refused to
yeld, the king proceeded [15] to direct persecution. By a strange non sequitur67 which the writer
cannot justify, Ptolemy IV went beyond punishing the Alexandrian Jews: he ordered the transport
of the Jews of the Egyptian hinterland to the hippodrome of Alexandria where they were joined
voluntarily by the Alexandrian Jews. The purpose was to have them trampled on68 by elephants.
However, the elephants turned against their attendants and spared the Jews. This was an obvious
miracle, and Ptolemy IV was persuaded by it to adopt a more reasonable attitude. The Jews were
sent home and a seven-day festival was arranged for them by the king at his expense. The Jews
decided to repeat the celebration every year, but as we have seen the Jews of Alexandria kept a
different date from the Jews of the hinterland.
As it happens, we have another much shorter and less elaborate version of a similar story in
Flavius Josephus, Contra Apionem 2, 53-55. There is no reference here to an unfortunate visit to
Jerusalem or to the cult of Dionysus. Indeed, the persecutor is not Ptolemy IV, but Ptolemy VIII,
Physcon, and the persecution is more credibly69 limited to the Alexandrian Jews who had supported
a rival candidate for the throne. However, the central episode of the elephants returns in this version
with the same miraculous consequence; and Josephus explicitly alludes to the commemorative
festival, which is limited to one day.
Notwithstanding all the differences, it would seem probable that Josephus provides a variant
version of the story told by III Maccabees. By his time the seven-day festival may have been
reduced to one day. If so, it seems clear that nobody remembered the origins of the festival exactly,
and various explanations were supplied. Whether there is any truth in either of the two explanations
which have reached us, it is impossible to say. The one provided at length by III Maccabees builds
up a picture of a religious persecution which starts in Jerusalem when a Ptolemy, like Heliodorus,
tries to penetrate into the holiest [16] part of the Templex. The attempt at Hellenizing the Jews of
Alexandria reminds us of Antiochus IV. One has the impression that the author of III Maccabees
had in fact read II Maccabees. He introduces a pious and wise old man, Eleazar, into his story (6, 1)
as a counterpart to the martyr Eleazar of II Maccabees. Like II Maccabees, III Maccabees is
anxious to avoid any generalized anti-Greek or even anti-Alexandrian feeling. The author says that
the Greeks of Alexandria were in sympathy with the Jews. He is less kind to the native Egyptians,
but even in what he says about them, we are still far from the atmosphere of direct confrontation
and dislike which characterizes the age of Philo and Flavius Josephus.
I therefore tend to agree with an admirable essay by Bacchisio Motzo published in 1913 and
republished recently in the posthumous collection Ricerche sulla letteratura e la storia giudaicoellenistica (1977), 351-416 xi that III Maccabees must have been written before the Roman
intervention in Egypt worsened the relation between Jews and Greeks, if not between Jews and
native Egyptians. Nowadays, III Maccabees is more often70 given a Roman date, because one sees71
in the text (2, 28) an allusion to a poll-tax which was probably introduced72 by the Romans about 22
B.C. Consequently, it has been suggested (for instance by Mary Smallwood in her valuable book on
The Jews under the Roman Rulexii, p. 232) that III Maccabees is a historical novel with Augustus
disguised as Ptolemy IV. But what the text says is that the Alexandrian Jews who disobeyed
Ptolemy IV were reduced εἰς λαογραφίαν καὶ οἰκετικὴν διάθεσινxiii. Οἰκετικὴν διάθεσιν certainly
means “servile condition”. What λαογραφία means in the context is less certain. The meaning of
“poll-tax” is not the only one (cf. C. Préaux, L’Économie royale des Lagides, 1939xiv, 380-387; L.
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
P-o 151: favorite; P-o 132, 133, 145: favourite.
P-o 151: non sequitur; P-o 133, 145: non sequitur <-> inconsequence, msn[AMM].
P-o 151: trampled on; P-o 132: stampeded; P-o 133, 145: trampled on <-> stampeded, msn[AMM].
P-o 132: more credibly, interl.ms.
P-o 145: more often, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 132, P-o 133: def.
P-o 151: sees; P-o 132: finds; P-o 133, 145: sees <-> finds,[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
P-o 151: was probably introduced; P-o 132: was introduced.
215
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
Neesen, Untersuchungen zu den direkten Staatsabgaben der römischen Kaiserzeit, 1980xv, 125)73
and is not the most obvious in this context: slaves, as far as I know, [17] are not supposed to pay
poll-tax.74 If we75 take here λαογραφία to mean “census” – a meaning current in the late Ptolemaic
Egypt, as shown by Papyri Tebtunis 103, 121, 189 of the first century B.C. – we may interpret the
sentence as a whole to say that the recalcitrant Jews will be registered and reduced to slavery.
Immediately afterwards the text adds that the same Jews will be branded by fire with an ivy-leaf, a
symbol of Dionysus. Branding by fire was the mark, or, if you like, the registration of a runaway
slave. In preferring a Ptolemaic date for III Maccabees I would not, however, go earlier than 100
B.C.
In his classic article about the Makkabäerbücher in Pauly-Wissowa, E. Bickerman gave some
formal arguments, which seem to me still valid for a date in the first part of the first century B.C. xvi ;
we may add the meaning λαογραφία as “census”xvii . The author undoubtedly managed to indicate
that even in the Diaspora (and more precisely in the Great Diaspora of Egypt) the Jews were ready
to face76 death in obedience to the Law of the God of their Fathers. The way in which the
persecution was presented – as a consequence of attempted profanation of the Temple of Jerusalem
– reasserted the natural link between the Jews of Egypt and the Temple of Jerusalem: not a
superfluous reassertion when there was in Egypt a Jewish Temple of dubious status. By these
events under Ptolemy IV the Jews of Egypt would have shown the way77 to the Jews of Jerusalem
under Antiochus IV.78
My conclusion is that, as far as we can judge, there is no factual truth in the story told by the III
Maccabees. Unlike the first two books, the III Maccabees is a fiction meant to give some religious
respectability to the Jews of Egyptxviii in the eyes of other Jews and to convey a message of religious
and ethnic solidarity. It is a fiction like the book of Esther, but unlike the book of Esther and like
the book of Tobit it declares obedience to and love for Jerusalem.79
III
[18]
Another form in which the idea of active Jewish resistance to Hellenization spread was through
the celebration of the martyrs of the Maccabean era, of those martyrs first mentioned in the II
Maccabees80 who, significantly enough, were later called by the Christians the Maccabean martyrs
tout court. The fourth book of Maccabees present itself as a sermon about them. Deeply Hellenized
in form (with clear echoes of Platonic and Stoic texts), this sermon, however, defends the Torah. It
may have been read during a yearly commemoration of those martyrs. In Antioch the Christian cult
of the seven Maccabean martyrs seems to have originated from Jewish precedents. If so, it is not
unlikely that IV Maccabees was written for a Jewish audience81 in Antioch. Commemoration of
martyrs is not unknown to the Jewish tradition. The ten martyrs of the Hadrianic period, whether
authentic or not, are even now commemorated in the liturgy of Kippur. The author of IV Maccabees
gave the title “governor of Syria, Phoenicia and Cilicia” (4, 2) to the general82 who, on behalf of
Seleucus IV, came to ransack the Temple of Jerusalem. This is an anachronism clearly suggested
73
P-o 132: not the only one (cf. ... 125) <-> hardly to be reconciled with the reduction of the Jews to servile condition:
those who paid poll-tax under the Romans were not slaves, but free men of inferior classes.
74
P-o 145: and is not the most obvious ... to pay poll-tax, mginfms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
75
P-o 132: If we <-> I am inclined to.
76
P-o 145: to face -> slavery and, interl.msn[Mom], del.
77
P-o 132: shown the way <-> preceded and given an example.
78
P-o 132: By these events ... Antiochus IV, mginfmsn.
79
P-o 145: My conclusion is that ... for Jerusalem, inter. e mgsn, msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
80
P-o 145: first mentioned in the II Maccabees, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
81
P-o 151: a Jewish audience; P-o 132: an audience; P-o 133, 145: a Jewish audience <-> an audience [133 AMM, 145
Mom].
82
P-o 151: gave the title ... to the general; P-o 132: called ... the general; P-o 133, 145: gave the title ... to the general
<-> called ... the general [133 AMM, 145 Mom].
216
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
(as E. Bickerman observed thirty-five years agoxix) by Cilicia and Syria being associated in one
Roman province between 20 and 50 A.D. The passage is an indication not only of the probable date
of the text, but also of the probable area in which the text was written, Syria.
Another text celebrating episodes of the Maccabean story is likely to have an Antiochean origin.
The Antiochus Scroll or Megillat Antiochus has reached us in several versions83, the oldest of
which, in Aramaic, seem to belong for linguistic reasons to the period between the second and fifth
centuries A.D. A critical edition has been provided by M.-Z. Kadari in the Annual of Bar-Ilan
University, 1-2, 1963-4xx. As I have observed elsewherexxi , the Antiochus Scroll [19] connects the
names of Antiochus and his general Bagris (a modification of the name of the authentic general
Bacchides) with the names of the city of Antiochia and of its outskirts Pagrai. Only an Antiochean
writer with an eye to Antiochean readers could make such a connection. The Antiochus Scroll does
not, however, speak of the so-called seven martyrs, but of the true Maccabean brothers and
especially of their father Mattathias. It seems therefore to be a text produced in Antioch when the
seven Maccabean martyrs had already been christianized, and the Jews had to go back to what they
could remember (not very much) of the history of Mattathias and his sons in order to keep alive the
memory of the Maccabees84 among the Jews of Antioch.
In this the Megillat Antiochus was more than successful. When I-II and IV Maccabees had for all
practical purposes been forgotten by the Jews, the Antiochus Scroll remained popular reading for
them85. It was in the main read privately, but in the late Middle Ages it penetrated into the
Synagogue service.
I must now emphasize what seems to me the most important result of our inquiry. The Jews,
being a specific nation with a specific religion, faced the dangers any specific nation with a specific
religion would had to face in antiquity. If conquered – or singled out for persecution as a minority
within a given State – humiliation would be extended to its own God or Gods. This is the situation
represented by the book of Esther or the book of Judith. Egyptians, Babylonians and Celts might
have written similar stories 86 . Indeed, the Egyptians, to all appearances, did so. 87 But the
persecution of Antiochus IV was a different story. It opened a new era in which the Jews were
essentially offered the choice between being persecuted or adapting themselves to forms of cult
acceptable to the ruling power. Humiliation was no longer an inescapable situation resulting from
membership of a particular ethnos: it was a situation from which escape was offered through some
kind of apostasy. The novelty of [20] this situation must be seen against the background of what
A.D. Nock has rightly defined as the new feature in the religion of the post-classical period: the
feature of conversionxxii . Apostasy and conversion obviously go together; they represent alternative
points of view for describing the same phenomenon, which is of cutting one’s own religious roots
and modifying the whole of one’s life. Though conversion was possible under certain conditions
within paganism, for instance in philosophic and mystical circles, it became characteristic of the
transition from paganism to Judaism or to Christianity88, or, more seldom, from Christianity to
Judaism.89 Just as the notion of apostasy was connected with hopes of earthly gains by those who
disapproved of it (and perhaps also by some who submitted to it), so refusal of apostasy implied
83
P-o 151: versions; P-o 132: redactions; P-o 133: versions <-> redactions, ms[AMM]; P-o 145: versions <->
redactions, msn[Mom].
84
P-o 132: Maccabees <-> Maccabean rebellion.
85
P-o 151: popular reading for them; P-o 132: regular reading for the Jews; P-o 133, 145: popular reading for them <> regular reading for the Jews, ms[133 AMM, 145 Mom].
86
P-o 132, 133: similar stories -> though the problem remains why, to all appearances, they did not write them, del.;
P-o 145: similar stories -> and the chances are that some of them did [<-> that they did] to judge from the little that
survives, mgsupmsn[Mom], del.
87
P-o 145: Indeed, the Egyptians, to all appearances, did so <-> though the problem remains why, to all appearances,
they did not write them, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
88
P-o 132: or to Christianity -> Viceversa, apostasy came to denote transition from Judaism or Christianity to
paganism or from Judaism to Christianity, del.
89
P-o 145: or, more seldom, from Christianity to Judaism interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
217
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
danger of martyrdom (and in effect led some people to martyrdom). All the four books of
Maccabees illustrate the new perspective of apostasy and martyrdom. The book of Daniel had
introduced this perspective at the very beginning of the Maccabean rebellion: it had even
anticipated what was later to become an important ingredient of any invitation to apostasy, namely
the cult of the sovereign. In so far as the Jews were faced with requests of apostasy which would
have made no sense to Egyptians or Syrians, or indeed to Greeks, the Jews were in a unique
position, and their destiny could appear – both to them and to the Gentiles – as exceptional. What
made the Jews exceptional in the Hellenistic world was not their monotheism, taken by itself, but
the alternative90 of apostasy which Jewish monotheism implied.91
The connotation of the Jews as a permanent ethnic group and the connotation of the Jews as an
ethnico-religious group open to change through apostasy were of course not mutually exclusive.
Apostasy after all affected92 only minorities. Until anti-semitism became completely racist in the
twentieth century A.D., it had always been possible93 to treat the Jews as a closed group, but to open
the [21] gates to apostates.94 In the early first century A.D., Philo reflected both connotations in his
two accounts (in In Flaccum and in Legatio ad Gaium) of the troubles for the Jews of Alexandria
during the reign of the emperor Gaius (Caligula) – the first serious troubles they had under the
Romans. Philo’s In Flaccum is primarily concerned with the Jews as a closed95 ethnic group which
comes into conflict with its neighbors96 in the city of Alexandria and with the local Roman
authorities. The Legatio ad Gaium takes us to Rome and is at least in part aware of the alternative to
persecution which is provided by conformity or apostasy97, and more specifically by adoption of the
ordinary practices of the imperial cult. As Philo was both a communal leader and a religious
thinker, we may well ask how far98 he was conscious of this duality reflected in his writing.99
Both works were written not long after the events which are dated within the brief reign of Gaius
between 37 and 41 A.D. It emerges from the texts themselves that In Flaccum was preceded by
another book now lost, while the Legatio ad Gaium was followed or at least due to be followed by a
Palinode which is missing from our corpus of Philonian writings. Eusebius in Hist. Eccl. 2, 5 speaks
of five books in which Philo narrated what happened to the Jews in the time of Gaius. This text can
be interpreted in different ways, but fundamentally confirms what we can deduce from Philo’s own
words. It is evident that at best we have one-half and at worst two-fifths of Philo’s original account
of these matters. Our interpretation is inevitably open to a large margin of error.
Yet any reader of In Flaccum is struck by the fact that though Philo says in so many words that
the Alexandrians desecrates synagogues by setting up images of Gaius (41), most of this treatise is
taken up by the conflicts between Alexandrians and Jews about civic rights100 and by the decision of
Flaccus, as a governor of Egypt, to strip the latter of their traditional privileges as inhabi[22]tants of
Alexandria. By contrast, the Legatio ad Gaium is centered on the question of imperial cult and
contains a violent attack against this emperor for his claim to divinity. Philo here connects the
hostility of the Alexandrians to the Jews with their awareness that the Jews are the only ones to
deny Gaius divine honorsxxiii . In101 Legatio the pogrom precedes the desecration of the synagogues,
whereas <in> In Flaccum the desecration of the synagogues by the Alexandrian leads to the
90
P-o 145: chance <-> alternative, msn[Mom].
P-o 145: What made the Jews exceptional ... monotheism implied, interl.msn[Mom]. P-o 132, 133: def.
92
P-o 145: affected -> in practice, interl.msn[Mom], del.
93
P-o 132, 133: been possible -> for anti-semites, del.; P-o 145: for other religious groups <-> for anti-semites,
interl.ms[Mom].
94
P-o 145: Until anti-semitism became ... to apostates, del.
95
P-o 151: a closed; P-o 132: an invariable; P-o 133, 145: a closed <-> an invariable [133 AMM 145 Mom].
96
P-o 151: neighbors; P-o 132, 133, 145: neighbours.
97
P-o 145: or apostasy, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
98
P-o 151: how far; P-o 132, P-o 133: whether; P-o 145: how far <-> whether, ms[Mom].
99
P-o 145: it is interesting that he reflected this duality in his writing but was not very conscious of it msn[Mom], del <> we may... in his writing.
100
P-o 133, 145: about civic rights [133 AMM, 145 Mom]; P-o 132: def.
101
P-o 132: in <- Consequently, del.
91
218
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
pogrom. The In Flaccum is confined to the narrow Alexandrian horizon: the Alexandrians and the
Roman governor are the villains. In Legatio ad Gaium the main issue is the imperial cult, and Gaius
is the villain. The amplification of the horizon produced a correspondingly wider problem: did the
Jews remain loyal subjects of Rome if they refused to worship the emperor?102 Philo is therefore
careful to emphasize in Legatio the profound devotion of the Jews to the Roman Empire and
produces a panegyric to Augustus the sincerity of which we have no reason to doubt. Philo
belonged to the Jewish upper class of Alexandria, which had supported the Romans since the times
of Caesar and had everything to lose by breaking with them. I am not convinced by Erwin
Goodenough, who in his Politics of Philo Judaeusxxiv suggested that in The Allegories of Law Philo
presented the biblical Joseph as a political opportunist in order to caricature the opportunistic
Roman governors. Philo preferred contemplative to political life – and therefore must have had
some difficulties with the worldly biblical Josephxxv – but this was a further good reason for leaving
to the Romans the dirty job of policing the world and making it safe for contemplative men like the
Therapeutae and Philo himself103. Of course even the most loyal Jew could not accept the emperor
as god. Though to all appearances very friendly with his apostate nephew Tiberius Alexander, Philo
had no intention of following him down the way to apostasy (Joseph. Ant. Jud. 20, 100). But this
does not cancel104 what seems to me one of the basic [23] assumptions of Philo’s thought: he needs
the Roman Empire in order to be the Jew he is.105 Some other traits of his explicit thought seem to
confirm his readiness to accept the Roman Empire as a suitable frame for the development of an
austere, philosophic Judaism. His interest in and sympathy for unpolitical106 sects like the Essenes
and the Therapeutae are obvious. His notion of Jewish Law is one of regulations supplementing and
improving the rules obtaining in the pagan world. The arguments in favor107 of this point of view
vary in the different works of Philo, but when he comes closest to an apologetic work intended to be
read by pagans, namely in the Hypothetica or “Exhortations”, he says that Jewish Law is better
because it is stricter than pagan laws, and furthermore any Jew knows it without having to turn to
experts (7, 14).
In speaking of Philo’s thought, we must never forget that what he says is surrounded by a zone
of silence.108 Philo never mentions the Messiah; he has only one specific reference each to the return
of the dispersed Jews to the Holy Land (Praem. 28-29) and to the conversion of the Gentiles to “our
laws” (Mos. 2, 44). He must have thought much about these things: no educated Jew of his time
could easily avoid such subjects. But he did not choose to speak109 about them.
It is useless to try to press Philo to say more than he intended to say. The logic of his philosophy
was perhaps to move Judaism from the role of a nation within the Roman Empire to that of a
philosophic or religious sect, thereby accentuating the element of free choice in the profession of
Judaism and the need of support from an external power like Rome.110 But there is no such thing as
logic in the relation between a man and his religious faith.111 Within one generation the world of
Philo had disappeared. The Jerusalem Temple had been destroyed and the Jews of Egypt were
involved in the mortal struggles under Trajan. Philo himself112 seems to have been forgotten by his
fellow-Jews very [24] soon and owes his survival to readers he had not foreseen: the intellectual
102
P-o 145: The amplification of the horizon ... the emperor?, mgsnms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
P-o 151: the Therapeutae and Philo himself; P-o 132, P-o 133: Philo.
104
P-o 145: But this does not cancel <-> We have here reached, interl.msn[Mom].
105
P-o 145: But this does not cancel ... Jew he is, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
106
P-o 145: unpolitical, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
107
P-o 132, 133: favour; P-o 151: favor.
108
P-o 132, 133: In speaking of ... of silence, def; P-o 145: silence -> What he explicitly says tends to present Judaism
as something oscillating between an ethnic and a philosophic corporation, del.
109
P-o 132, 133: to speak -> aloud, del.
110
P-o 145: and the need of support ... like Rome, interl.ms[Mom]; P-o 132,133: def.
111
P-o 132: relation between ... faith <-> human solutions; P-o 145: religious philosophy <-> religious faith,
interl.msn[Mom]; faith -> Philo the man may have been much more traditionalistic than his religious philosophy seems
to imply.
112
P-o 145: Philo himself -> (like the Books of Maccabees), interl.ms[Mom], del.
103
219
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
Christians of second- and third-century Alexandria. Given the existence of a diaspora, the
destruction of Jewish Jerusalem did not mean the death of a nation as in the case of the destruction
of Carthage. It was perhaps rather more like the destruction of Corinth which put an end to Greek
independence, but not to Greek thought. But Jewish survival could no longer be sought in direct
confrontation with the Greeks (which was still Philo’s situation): indeed, what could any
confrontation with the Greeks possibly mean after A.D. 70? The two big factors of Jewish life were
Roman rule, from which it had become impossible to escape either by rebellion or by limited
autonomy, and rising Christianity, which offered the promise of a third way to those who were tired
either of Jewish Law or of Roman values. Judaism after A.D. 70 is mainly characterized by
reactions to institutions, events and beliefs which are very seldom mentioned explicitly. For most
Jews were never attracted by Roman values and never tired of the Torah.
I have confined myself to what we may call the Greek stage of the Jewish situation, though Philo
was probably already born as a Roman subject. What I think we have learnt from the texts I have
been considering is that a group of texts113, such as Esther and Judith,114 was115 basically dominated
by an idea of a static Jewish nation menaced by the surrounding nations. The more recent texts are
increasingly emphasizing the dangers of apostasy; that is, of internal disintegration. No doubt the
danger of internal disintegration is brought about by the example and indeed by the requests of
foreign nations which are more powerful.116 But the choice is now primarily with the individual
Jew:117 and the choice is between Greek life and Jewish life.118 119
i
Per un altro riferimento momiglianeo a Dositeo, vd. Ebrei e Greci, 17.
GL 1980 II (Daniel), c. 10.
iii
BRÜHL, 1977.
iv
Sull’Oracolo del Vasaio vd. CL 1981 II (Resistance, East) , cc. 7-8.
v
Cfr. The Date of the First Book of Maccabees (=First Maccabees).
vi
Per ulteriori momiglianei su II Macc., cfr., oltre a Prime linee di storia della tradizione maccabaica (=Prime
linee), The Second Book of Maccabees (=Second Maccabees) e il postumo The Romans and the Maccabees (=RomansMaccabees).
vii
Cfr. CL 1981 III (Some exemplary), c. 7.
viii
Cfr. CL 1981 III (Some exemplary), cc. 17-18.
ix
WACHOLDER 1978.
x
II Macc. 3, 21-28.
xi
MOTZO 1913.
xii
SMALLWOOD 1976.
xiii
III Macc. 2, 28.
xiv
PREAUX 1939.
xv
NEESEN 1980.
xvi
BICKERMANN 1928. Per la datazione del libro nella prima parte del I sec. a.C., vd. part. gli argomenti alla col.
798: dipendenza di III Macc. da II Macc. per il ritratto di Filopatore nel tempio (= Eliodoro nel Tempio, II M.3), per i
due angeli in III 6.18 (= II 3, 16ss); citazione, in III 6, 6, di un’aggiunta apocrifa a Daniele (i tre giovani nella fornace,
Dan. 3, 50); l’assenza di attributi divini rivolti al sovrano nel prescritto della lettera a 3, 12 rispecchia formulazioni
anteriori al 41 a.C.; se identificata con la metropoli di Arsinoite, la Ptolemais menzionata a 7, 17 fornisce un terminus a
quo, dal momento che la città aveva assunto tale nome (abbandonando il precedente Crocodilopolis) tra il 117 e il 114.
xvii
Cfr. TCHERIKOVER 1945, pp. 91 ss., e HADAS 1976, 19-21.
xviii
Si rimanda sul tema a STROUMSA 2003.
xix
BICKERMAN 1945.
ii
113
P-o 145: a group of texts <-> the earlier texts, msn[Mom].
P-o 145: Judith -> and even the I Maccabees, del.
115
P-o 145: was <-> were, ms[Mom].
116
P-o 145: more powerful -> But there is now a choice before the Jews and between Jews. The dilemma had been
known to the prophets of old, but had been less evident during the Persian rule and in the first 150 years of Hellenistic
rule. It is now not so much [...], del.
117
P-o 145: individual Jew: -> a choice which the existence of a large diaspora makes easier, the choice between
Greek life and Jewish life, del.
118
P-o 145: I have confined myself ... Jewish life, msn[Mom]; P-o 132, 133: def.
119
P-o 145: life. -> Greek life is never condemned in itself, at least in the texts I have considered, ms[Mom], del.
114
220
Chicago Lectures 1981 – T h e J e w i s h H i s t o r i o g r a p h y o f R e s i s t a n c e
IV. From The World of Maccabees to Philo
xx
KADARI 1963-64.
Cfr. Prime linee sulla tradizione maccabaica (= Prime linee), part. alle pp. 58 ss.
xxii
NOCK 1933.
xxiii
Phil. Leg. 114-9.
xxiv
GOODENOUGH 1938.
xxv
Piuttosto oscillante risulta la valutazione filoniana della figura di Giuseppe, in bilico tra elogio e riprovazione:
se nel De Josepho (cfr. part. il par. 70) è ritratto come uomo di stato ideale, disinteressato agli onori, agli incarichi,
privo di presunzione, giusto e moderato, è nelle Legum Allegoriae che si radica l’accusa di “medietà”, percepita da
Filone come l’incapacità di Giuseppe di scegliere tra la dimensione umana e quella divina. Giuseppe è definito altrove
φιλοσώµατος καὶ φιλοπαθὴς νοῦς, una mente che ama il corpo e le passioni (Quod deus sit immutabilis 111), che si
interessa all’eccellenza fisica e ha un avido desiderio di riuscire in questioni terrene (De somniis 2, 11): per una
valutazione della questione nelle sue implicazioni con la riflessione filoniana sull’idolatria, si rimanda a SANDELIN
1991.
xxi
221
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
GL 1982 I Jews and Gentiles
Sedi e date:
CL 1977 (aprile-maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 415)
EL 1978 (12 novembre, cfr. *D-a 1)
GL 1982 (20 gennaio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 426)
Documenti
a) CL 1977 IV
P-o 39 top c., nuova versione basata su P-o 33 (xerox di P-o 21 = NL 1977 III1, con
aggiunte mss.)
P-o 82, P-o 52 (b), P-o 181: c.c. di P-o 39.
b) aggiunte per EL 1978 V
P-o 52 (a), P-o 182: aggiunte mss.
P-o 54 (b) nuova versione basata su P-o 52 (a-b)
P-o 54 (c) nuova versione delle pp. 17-21 basata su P-o 55 (c.c. della
precedente versione, ulteriormente corretta)
P-o 59 (a), P-o 162 (b), P-o 180 (b) c.c. di P-o 54 (b-c)
c) aggiunte per GL 1982 I
P-o 53 aggiunte mss.
P-o 54 (a) top c. di P-o 53.
P-o 162 (a), P-o 180 (a): c.c. di P-o 54 (a).
1. Osservazioni preliminari
Prima di prendere in analisi il testo di Jews and Gentiles occorre considerarlo in rapporto al ciclo
di cui fa parte, l’ultimo in ordine di tempo, presentato a Oxford nel 19822: il titolo, Between
Synague and Apocalypse, recupera quello della Grinfield Lecturership del 1979, delineando in tal
modo una sorta di Ringkomposition che riconduce all’origine il punto di arrivo della riflessione
momiglianea sul giudaismo ellenistico.
A rispettare questa sistemazione – senza riunire in un’unica serie i due cicli omonimi, alterando
così la sequenza delle conferenze – induce la constatazione dell’effettiva esistenza di un progetto
organico di concertazione dei quattro cicli, per il cui progressivo costituirsi si rimanda
all’Introduzione alla presente edizione. Attraverso l’analisi di storia e apocalittica, colte da una
prospettiva universalistica e resistenziale, la seconda e la terza serie contribuiscono a sostanziare
l’argomentazione della quarta da prospettive parallele, convergendo nel delineare quel duplice
declino di entrambe le manifestazioni letterarie che costituisce un nucleo fondamentale, secondo
l’interpretazione di Momigliano, del passaggio dalla cultura ebraica di età ellenistica alle forme
codificate del giudaismo rabbinico3. La scelta di riproporre qui l’esatta successione cronologica
delle lectures intende quindi riprodurre quella che appare l’ultima struttura complessiva perseguita –
e comunicata – dell’indagine, nel rispetto della sua complessità d’impostazione. Nulla afferma
invece, naturalmente, circa la struttura – che rimane ipotetica – del libro (o forse dei libri) progettati
e mai realizzati.
2. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
Così come proposto nella sua ultima versione (GL 1982 I), il testo di Jews and Gentiles ha alle
spalle una storia complessa, che la ricostruzione condotta da GRANATA 1999 rende possibile
dipanare: la lecture ha origine da un nucleo proveniente dalla terza conferenza Northcliffe 1977
(Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past), riproposto con il titolo di Jews and Gentiles prima
a Chicago, nel maggio-giugno dello stesso anno, e poi a Cincinnati, nel novembre 1978. In
1
Attitudes.
Per l’articolazione dei cicli, cfr. part. GRANATA 1999, 76-78 e ID. 2006, lxviii-lxxi.
3
Nella stessa direzione sembra andare anche un dato documentario: su un foglio sciolto contenuto nel fascicolo P-o 89
(che reca il testo della prima Grinfield, Prologue) AMM riporta, alla fine del 1981, l’elenco delle Grinfield lectures
svolte e in programma, ripartendole per anni ma non per cicli.
2
222
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
occasione del suo ultimo ciclo Grinfield, a oltre tre anni di distanza, Momigliano riprende in mano
il testo EL per rielaborarlo ulteriormente: testimoniano la versione definitiva i quattro principali
documenti a cui si farà riferimento per l’edizione della lecture, P-o 53, 54, 162 e 180.
Del precedente stadio di composizione l’AAM conserva la top c. ds. CL 1977, P-o 39, e le sue
tre c.c.; i primi documenti mss. di elaborazione delle aggiunte EL, P-o 52 e 182; e infine P-o 55,
c.c. della versione provvisoria delle pp. 17-21 di P-o 54. Rispetto a questo stadio, l’apparato si
propone di privilegiare piuttosto la fase GL di elaborazione. Compaiono qui modifiche di grande
importanza, indicate dalla stessa AMM sul fascicolo che testimonia la prima rielaborazione del testo
EL in prospettiva GL, P-o 544: “This Efroymson Lecture V (1978) has become Grinfield I, 20.1.82
(5 new pp. at beginning [therefore Efroymson p. 1 = Grinfield p. 6], and insertion of pp. 6a and 6b
on p. 6. Also numerous additions elsewhere)”. Le 29 c. dss. di cui si compone contengono in effetti
le 5 pp. del nuovo inizio e le 2 pp. inserite come 6a e 6b (di cui P-o 53 offre l’originale ms.);
tuttavia, per ritrovare le altre “numerous additions” bisogna piuttosto cercare (sempre secondo le
indicazioni di AMM) nelle due c.c. tratte da P-o 54, P-o 162 e P-o 1805.
È P-o 180 a documentare meglio le modifiche Grinfield sul testo Efroymson: reading copy GL,
il documento mostra una certa stratificazione (testimoniata dal ricorso a diverse penne) di interventi
di modifica di mano di Momigliano stesso; alla ricchezza di aggiunte mss. in margine (di cui due,
particolarmente estese, vengono ricopiate a macchina su foglietti allegati alle pp. 15 e 24) si
affianca anche una presenza consistente di tagli al testo. Le modifiche e le aggiunte di P-o 180 (ma
non i tagli, dato di cui è doveroso tener conto) ricompaiono, trascritte con penna rossa da AMM,
sull’altra c.c. di P-o 54, P-o 162, un fascicolo la cui revisione è stata quindi evidentemente condotta
sulla base del precedente.
Come testo di riferimento per l’edizione si propone quello di P-o 180 che, per le caratteristiche
appena descritte, si presenta come il documento più autorevole; tuttavia, l’assenza in P-o 162 delle
indicazioni di taglio, unita alla possibilità che la loro funzione in P-o 180 assolva il fine pratico di
non oltrepassare i tempi di esposizione, induce a riservare pari considerazione editoriale a entrambi
i documenti in corrispondenza dei passi in questione.
3. Argomento della lecture
La vitalità del giudaismo nella sua particolare relazione con l’ellenismo è esemplificata dallo
sviluppo della paideia ebraica della sinagoga e dalla nascita di una storiografia che rivisita modelli
greci (Daniele). Tra le ulteriori aree di contatto si individuano inoltre la lingua (influenza del greco
su lessico, sintassi, ordine delle parole), il conformismo sociale (il recupero dell’onomastica greca
teoforica, la forma dei documenti) e il rispetto dei sovrani negli ambienti religiosi. Emerge il
fenomeno della pseudoepigrafia ebraica, di frequente rivolta ai gentili: paradossale testimonianza
della debolezza di dialogo tra Ebrei e non Ebrei nel mondo ellenistico, esprime il disagio di una
comuncazione che per realizzarsi deve ricorrere all’espediente di un sincretismo artificiale.
Su questa scia si colloca il disinteresse degli autori pagani per la Bibbia o per il giudaismo, mai
davvero studiato allo scopo di essere compreso. Non esistono discussioni teologiche o filosofiche
tra Ebrei e Greci e lo stesso interesse di pensatori ebrei come Filone per la filosofia greca appare
finalizzato a trarne supporto per il proprio sistema teologico. Il proselitismo diventa l’unico vero
spazio di relazione intellettuale, per quanto anche qui l’incontro del singolo proselita con la Bibbia
sia successivo e non anteriore alla conversione al giudaismo, la cui forza attrattiva va piuttosto
ricondotta alla nozione ebraica di Dio o alle pratiche cultuali e magiche.
Unica vera area di comunicazione intellettuale che emerge da tale analisi è la storiografia: se la
tradizione storica degli Ebrei, la Bibbia, non dà ovviamente spazio a Greci e Romani, la forzata
coesistenza ne rende necessaria la rivisitazione. Un primo aspetto centrale nell’operazione è la
cronologia e la conseguente discussione tra Greci ed Ebrei (Eupolemo, Apione, Giuseppe) sulla
priorità delle rispettive storie. La battaglia di dati viene sostenuta dai documenti – topos comune
4
5
Riproposte poi in apertura di P-o 162 e P-o 180, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 63.
“See additions and alterations in carbon copy of Grinfield Lectures”.
223
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
alla storiografia ellenistica – molti dei quali risultano il prodotto della libera iniziativa degli storici,
talvolta responsabili di massicci processi di interpolazione. Un secondo aspetto centrale del dibattito
è offerto invece dall’ingresso di Roma nella prospettiva storiografica ebraica, che inizia a guardarne
istituzioni ed eventi proponendosi come destinatario un pubblico misto, ebraico-romano (Giuseppe
Flavio, Filone di Biblo). La discussione è destinata tuttavia a esaurirsi con l’opera di Giuseppe:
benché abbia verosimilmente contribuito a smorzare l’interesse storiografico la perdita
dell’indipendenza, la causa profonda della cessazione della storiografia giudaica va indagata in
parallelo all’analogo destino di un altro genere letterario, l’apocalittica.
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione
Una prima, immediata evidenza sulla natura delle modifiche operate da Momigliano nella
versione GL non può non tenere conto della necessità di bilanciare un testo subordinato a tempi di
esposizione: alla cospicua aggiunta di circa 14.200 battute risponde infatti la riduzione
proporzionata di quasi altrettante (13.7006). Ѐ inoltre chiaro come la posizione incipitaria acquisita
dalla lecture richiedesse la stesura di un prologo in grado di fare da ponte tra l’ultimo ciclo e i temi
affrontati in quelli precedenti. Momigliano raggiunge lo scopo con una trattazione di cinque pagine
che solo grande difficoltà può essere considerata alla stregua di una ‘sutura’ estemporanea, data
l’ampiezza concettuale perseguita e la sua efficacia nell’illuminare relazioni e implicazioni tra le
principali tematiche. Chiave interpretativa è il riconoscimento della centralità della pratica
storiografica, collocata fra i due temi polari di sinagoga e apocalisse: chiaro tentativo, già colto da
Giovanna Granata, di reductio ad unum o rinnovata fusione tra il progetto organico dei due cicli
omonimi Between Synagogue and Apocalypse e lo sviluppo di distinti nuclei tematici incentrati
sulla storiografia universalistica e su quella della resistenza7.
Di diversa natura rispetto all’aggiunta incipitaria risultano le inserzioni, sufficientemente
cospicue da richiedere una trascrizione dattiloscritta. Occupa i ff. 6a-b un tentativo di chiarimento
sulle ragioni della divergenza fra le espressioni letterarie rinascimentali di cosmopolitimo ebraico e
la produzione giudaico-ellenistica, influenzata da un progressivo processo di separazione fra Ebrei e
gentili. Sempre nell’ambito di un’accentuata attenzione a un terreno sociale comune si colloca
anche l’aggiunta del f. 15bis, in cui il ricorso dei gentili al nome sacro in ambito magico è
affiancato alla pratica ebraica delle “vie degli Ammoniti”. L’inserzione delle osservazioni su Filone
di Biblos (24 [bis]) è riconducibile invece all’interesse crescente di Momigliano, fra il 1978 e il
1982 (del 1980 è l’Interpretazione minima dedicata a Filone in ASNP 8 ), per un autore che
contribuisce a ricollocare in una prospettiva più ampia la ricerca di “legittimazione regale”
perseguita da Flavio Giuseppe.
Tra i tagli che interessano la lecture, il più cospicuo – per importanza e quantità – riguarda
l’excursus di circa due pagine e mezzo (cc. 18-20) sviluppato a partire da un’analoga disamina
proposta in Alien Wisdom (pp. 92-4) e dedicato ai rappresentanti della storiografia giudaicoellenistica. È Momigliano stesso a motivarne l’elisione: “As I have characterized Jewish Hellenistic
historiography in my previous lectures and published works, I shall not go into details except on
two points: one is the interest in chronology and the other is the intervention of the Romans in the
debate” (c. 18, P-o 180). I due cicli centrali, unitamente ai singoli contributi licenziati
sull’argomento negli stessi anni (su quali cfr. nota xxxiv al testo), rendono quindi superfluo questo
breve quadro d’insieme.
6
Il conteggio tralascia i piccoli interventi su poche parole; comprende invece le aggiunte “maggiori” (cc. 1-5: 9.296;
cc. 6a-6b: 3563; c. 15[bis]: 579; c. 24[bis]: 764 – totale: 14.202 battute) e i tagli corposi (13.656 battute).
7
“I due nuovi cicli nascono invece in maniera molto più autonoma, rappresentando lo sviluppo di distinti nuclei
tematici, la cui fusione rispetto al testo originario è semplicemente affidata alle nuove premesse delle Grinfield dell’82”
(GRANATA 1999, 92).
8
MOMIGLIANO 1980a.
224
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
Nel trascrivere su P-o 162 i numerosi interventi mss. su P-o 180 AMM non tiene però conto di
questa né di altre indicazioni di taglio. Rimane dubbio se tale scelta sia stata determinata da
un’attesa di conferme dirette da parte dell’autore, o se Momigliano stesso abbia richiesto il
mantenimento nella copia delle parti di testo eliminate, forse allo scopo di riconsiderare quegli
interventi che i limiti dell’esposizione orale avevano reso necessari. Si tratta in entrambi i casi di
ipotesi non verificabili: può tuttavia contribuire alla riflessione una presentazione sintetica delle
cancellazioni più rilevanti. I primi due tagli vengono operati all’interno dello stesso incipit:
Momigliano elimina un’osservazione generale sui caratteri della resistenza e dell’assimilazione ai
Greco Macedoni e ai Romani, considerata forse fin troppo nota al suo pubblico (nonché già oggetto
di approfondimento nella GL 1981 I, The Resistance), e taglia anche sulla questione samaritana, già
accennata nella GL 1979 III (The Jews Inside) e su cui dà in generale l’impressione di non volersi
addentrare. Vengono infine eliminate porzioni di testo relative a temi già proposti altrove: sulla
nozione di mistica, Filone e le sette (cfr. tagli alle cc. 13-14), sulla storiografia (cc. 22-23 e 24). Il
taglio sull’ultima pagina risponde plausibilmente all’intento di evitare piuttosto anticipazioni sul
nucleo tematico della lecture di chiusura. L’eliminazione (ripetuta da AMM su P-o 162, f. 10) di
poche righe sui libri sibillini appare invece riconducibile a un desiderio di ripensamento su un tema
che Momigliano, alla fine della vita, recupererà due volte9.
9
MOMIGLIANO 1987C; From the Pagan to the Christian Sibyl: Profecy as History of Religion (=From the Pagan).
225
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
I
Jews and Gentiles*10
I
The resistance of the conquered to the conquerors is nothing surprising. But the GrecoMacedonian conquest of the East included two unusual features. First, the Greeks were at the same
time partners in the conquest and the victims of it. They ruled the East in the service of the
Macedonian kings, but had to defend their liberties in the old cities of Greece against Macedonian
kings, and they did not always do so very successfully. Secondly, when after 150 years the
conquerors were in their turn progressively transformed into subjects of another empire, Rome,
there was a chance for some of the minor political entities of recovering for a while a precarious
political freedom under Roman protection. This was the case of the Jews for about a hundred years
between Antiochus IV of Syria and Pompey. The combination of these two features helps to explain
why the Jews never completely identified Greek culture with the culture of their oppressors. There
was even a question of kinship between Spartans and Jews while the Jews were fighting against the
Seleucid kings. Greek language, Greek political, social and legal ideas were never repudiated as
coming from the enemy. On the other hand, there was a period, so eloquently documented by
chapter 8 of the First Book of Maccabees, of collaboration between Jews and Romans against the
Greeks or at least the Seleucids. The will to collaborate with the Romans survived Pompey’s attack
on the Temple of Jerusalem and became characteristic of a large section of the Jewish upper class
both inside and outside Judaea. Philo’s family in Alexandria collaborated firmly. Julius Caesar was
supposed to have extended his cosmopolitan sympathies to the Jews.
Hence the contrasting aspects of the attitude of the Jews towards Greeks and Romans. Jewish
resistance to Greeks and Romans has more than the usual share of what characterizes resistance to
Greeks and Romans anywhere: intense devotion to native cults and native priests; distrust [2] of
foreigners and ultimately rebellions coloured by religious hopes. At the same time the Jews were
next to the Romans the most attentive to the basic features of Greek civilization and very ready to
absorb elements of Greek education and social life: Greek became one of the languages of Judaism
for several centuries. Much attention was also devoted to the organization of the Roman state and to
Roman legal thinking, though Roman influence on the Jews is far more limited than that of the
Greeks11. It has now become a commonplace that there is no aspect of Jewish life between
Alexander the Great and the destruction of the Second Temple which was not affected by
Hellenism. Which is also to say that there is no aspect of Judaism of that period which is not
marked by the effort to challenge Hellenism in the very act of taking it into account.
* Documento preso come base: P-o 180, c.c. di P-o 54 e reading copy GL 1982, che offre la migliore documentazione
di aggiunte e modifiche Grinfield sul testo Efroymson. Si riportano inoltre le varianti di P-o 162 (c.c. “gemella” la cui
revisione è stata condotta sulla base di quella di P-o 180 ma che si differenzia per l’assenza di alcuni tagli al testo), ed
eventuali lezioni significative presenti in P-o 54, fascicolo composito di 29 ff. che testimonia la prima fase di
rielaborazione del testo EL in prospettiva GL. Si segnala infine, all’occorrenza, il testo di P-o 53, originale ms. delle
aggiunte GL.
10
P-o 180: Reading copy – Jan. 82, tsf, msb[AMM]; New beginning Grinfield I, Jan. 82, then Efroymson V, 1978 from
p. 6 (with additions) – (Found Latymer Court, Feb. 91), tsf, msn[AMM]; P-o 162: New beginning of Grinfield I, 20.1.82
[from p. 6 = former p. 1 = Efroymson V, 1978] tsf, msr[AMM]; P-o 54: su un f. sciolto: See additions and alterations in
carbon copy of Grinfield Lectures. This Efroymson Lecture V (1978) has become Grinfield I, 20.1.82 (5 new pp. at
beginning [therefore Efroymson p. 1 = Grinfield p. 6], and insertion of pp. 6a and 6b on p. 6. Also numerous additions
elsewere). AND Efroymson Lecture VI has become Grinfield III, 3.2.82 – with many changes, deletions and additions.
See carbon copy (removed from this folder and now in Grinfield Lectures 1982 folder), msr[AMM]; P-o 53:
tsfmsr[AMM]: New beginning of Grinfield I, 20.1.82 to Efroymson V.
11
P-o 53: Roman influence on the Jews is far more limited than that of the Greeks <-> there is no comparison between
Greek and Roman influence on the Jews.
226
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
It must be emphasized once again that neither of these two aspects is absent from the story of the
resistance, say, of the Egyptians and of the Babylonians against the Greco-Macedonians, or of the
Egyptians and of the Celts against the Romans. There, too, we find on the one hand the familiar
picture of the religiously motivated rebellions and, on the other the inclination to absorb the culture
and the techniques of the conqueror. But, to judge from results, both resistance and assimilation
went deeper among the Jews than among Egyptians, Babylonians and Celts. Under Greeks and
Romans Judaism acquired a vitality and an intellectual coherence which we miss in other cultures
of the oppressed in the same period.12
In my previous Grinfield Lectures I tried to exemplify this vitality of Judaism13 with reference to
two topics. The first was the specific type of Jewish education, or, if we like the Greek word,
paideia, in its correlation with the development of the synagogue: synagogue and class-room go
together from the very beginning. The second topic was the appearance of a corpus of Jewish
historical writing which was under the influence of Greek models, but reinterpreted the Greek
suggestions in Jewish terms. I shall only [3] mention the transformation of the Greek theory of the
four monarchies into Daniel’s vision of the reign of God replacing the four monarchies, and the
elaboration of motifs evidently coming from Herodotus Book VII in the story of Judith. The point I
have just made about Daniel reminds us that Jewish apocalyptic incorporated Greek historical
elements.
In the concluding Lectures of this year I should like to define three points. First, I should like to
define, more precisely than I have done so far, the zones where intellectual contacts between Jews
and Gentiles were more likely. Secondly, I want to go into the paradoxical situation which makes us
far better informed about the external contacts of Judaism than about the inner currents of Judaism,
especially for the period 150 B.C.-A.D. 50. The situation has been made even more paradoxical by
the Qumran discoveries because we know much more about the Essenes (or, if we want to be very
cautious, about Essene-like groups) than about Sadducees and Pharisees. I shall ask myself: what do
we know about Sadducees and Pharisees? But my ultimate purpose is to try to understand better
why our Jewish sources (Flavius Josephus, Philo and the rabbinic texts) are so oriented as not to
give us any insight into Sadducees and Pharisees. This will lead me to the third point of my enquiry:
the joint decline of historical and apocalyptic interests in large circles of Jewish thinkers during the
last period of the Second Temple and immediately after the destruction of the Temple. The first
impression is of course just the opposite14. The historical literature about Jewish rebellions and
resistance goes together with apocalyptic literature. The Books of the Maccabees are accompanied
and even preceded by Daniel and parts of Enoch. At the end of this period15 Flavius Josephus’
history of the war against Rome is accompanied or preceded by such apocalyptic books as Sibylline
IV and V, IV Esdras and, if you like, Revelation. But this parallelism between historiography and
apocalyptic is too obvious to be completely authentic. If history and apocalypse go together, they
also [4] subtly erode each other. More fundamentally, many Jews became tired both of history and
apocalypse and showed it in the way they dealt with historical and apocalyptic subjects. This
tiredness prepares the revulsion against both history and apocalypse which was to become
characteristic of rabbinic Judaism. In my third Lecture I propose to examine some aspects of the
reaction against both history and apocalypse. To my regret I cannot do here what I propose to do
elsewhere – to re-examine the whole work of Flavius Josephus from this point of view. For it seems
to me that Flavius Josephus is both the greatest Jewish representative of the historiography of the
oppressed and a chief witness for that disenchantment of the Jews with history which was to
continue down to modern times for more than 1500 years16i.
12
13
14
15
16
P-o 180: account. -> It must be emphasized once again ... the same period, del.
P-o 180: of Judaism, interl.msr[Mom];P-o 162, 54, 53: def.
P-o 53: The first impression is of course the opposite <-> The opposite is of course also true, msb[Mom].
P-o 53: period <-> development, msb[Mom].
P-o 53: more than 1500 years <-> two thousand years, msn[Mom].
227
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
A last preliminary remark. Neither in surveying the relations between Jews and Gentiles nor
while going into the question of the groups within Judaism shall I examine the attitude of the Jews
to the Samaritans. I am not of course particularly disturbed by the question whether the Samaritans
were Gentiles who had absorbed a few Hebrew17 notions (which is the opinion of II Kings 17, 2541 in its present obviously re-elaborated form) or were Jewish18 schismatics or heretics according to
ways of thinking which have their roots in rabbinic and patristic sources. But I am paralyzed by the
reticence of the Jewish sources on the Samaritans and one could say the same about the
Christians19. This is an extreme case of that retreat from reality which I have already pointed out in
relation to the rise of Pharisaismii. We know enough to sense that the conflict between Jews and
Samaritans had central importance in the development of Judaism during the Second Temple; but it
is not easy to say more on the present evidence. If the temple on Mount Gerizim was built towards
the end of the fourth century – with or rather without the encouragement of Alexander the Great –
the competition of the two priestly classes of Jerusalem and Shechem must have been acute in the
third century B.C. At the beginning of the second century Ben Sira could allude to the [5] foolish
people of Shechem without much explanation. I incline furthermore to agree with those who believe
that the conflict intensified when under Antiochus IV the Samaritans had their own Hellenizers, like
the Jews of Judaea, but failed to produce their own Maccabees. In consequence the Maccabees, or
rather the Hasmonean John Hyrcanus who was not conspicuous for humanity and tact, destroyed
the temple of Gerizim and later the city of Samaria. However, by the time Josephus and rabbinic
sources are ready to tell us something more about the Samaritans. Jews and Samaritans had already
been affected by other events which included a great deal of common suffering under the Romans.
It is this later, puzzling, evidence which compels me to silence. A good general introduction to the
Samaritans is provided by J. D. Purvis in the recent Festschrift for F. M. Cross, Traditions in
Transformation, Winona Lake, Indiana, 1981, 323-351iii.20
[6]21 It is not unusual for the writing of non-Greeks who accepted Greek as their literary
language to be self-conscious. Meleager the Syrian from Gadara in Transjordania even suggested
that Homer was a Syrian because, as if in accordance with Syrian sacred rules, he did not make his
heroes eat fish, though the Hellespont is full of fish (Athen. 4, 157 b.). But the self-consciousness of
Meleager is different from that of his Jewish neighbours. He talked of Gadara as the new Athens in
the Syrian land and recalled another citizen of Gadara, the cynic Menippus. He concluded: “Was I a
Syrian? Does it matter? My friend, the world is the fatherland of the mortals and the same chaos
generated all men”iv.
We do not find in any Jewish author of the Hellenistic period, as far as I remember, this
engaging combination of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It is perhaps no accident that no
epigram by a Jewish poet found its way into the Greek Anthology. The men of Jerusalem joked in a
friendly way about the men of Athens whom they considered less clever than themselves: we have a
string of such jokes in the most unlikely place, Midrash Rabbah to Lamentationsv. But to the best of
my knowledge, no Jew ever said that Jerusalem was the real Athens. Circumstances did not even
favour that particular situation which is familiar to us from other periods of Jewish history when
Jews wrote their most serious works in Hebrew and their light literature in whatever language they
happened to speakvi. I do not know in the Hellenistic period of an equivalent of Immanuel Romano
writing Italian poems indistinguishable from ordinary fourteenth-century Italian poetryvii or of an
17
P-o 53: Hebrew <-> Jewish, msn[Mom].
P-o 53: Jewish, interl.msn[Mom].
19
P-o 180: and one could ... the Christians, interl.msr[Mom];P-o 162, P-o 54, P-o 53: def.
20
P-o 180: Pharisaism -> We know enough to sense that the conflict between Jews and Samaritans ... 1981, 323-351,
del.; P-o 53: fine della nuova Introduction GL (5 ff. ms. da Mom., ff. 1-5); il ms. prosegue con i ff. poi inseriti in P-o
180 e 162 come 6a e 6b (v. infra).
21
P-o 180: Reading copy Sept. 1978, tsf,msb[Mom]; P-o 162: AMM 29.9.79, tsfmgdx, msb[AMM]; [This is p. 6 in
Grinfield 1982 version] – Efroymson V = also Grinfield I, 20.1.82 with new beginning, pp. 1-5 and insertion pp. 6 a +
b., msr[AMM].
18
228
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
Eliah Levita, the great pioneer in the study of the Hebrew text of the Bible, amusing himself and his
fellow-Ashkenazis by translating into Yiddish the Italian poem Buono d’Anconaviii.22 [6a]23 This
may appear strange because in the Italy of the fourteenth or of the sixteenth century Jews were
isolated from their Christian neighbours by a combination of external prohibitions and internal
regulations which does not bear comparison with the prevalent mild24 restrictions in the social
relations between Jews and Gentiles either inside or outside Judaea in the second or first century
B.C. But the answer (or the beginning of an answer) is that in the second century B.C. both Jews
and Gentiles were in the process of25 building up the walls which were to separate them from each
other for millennia, whereas at least in Italy Humanism and the Renaissance were making these
walls look rather questionable in educated circles – at least until the Counter-Reformation was fully
established.
The precise limits of the social and legal restrictions in the daily relations of Jews and Gentiles in
the Hellenistic and early Roman age remain obscure. We have a mass of rabbinic rules and opinions
about the goyyim, the Gentiles; and there can hardly be any doubt that some of these are much older
than our evidence. But exact dating is almost impossible, and we have no idea of how generally
such regulations were obeyed even in Judaea. Confirmation from other sources is rare and, when it
appears, poses new problems. Talmudic scholars have found it difficult to accept the authenticity of
the regulation or programma enacted by Antiochus III to protect the holy status of Jerusalem. I
believe that the authenticity of the text quoted by Josephus in Antiquities 12, 145-6 is confirmed
precisely by the circumstance that it does not entirely agree with later rabbinic notions. E.
Bickerman, whose recent death we all mourn, wrote one of his masterpieces in commenting on this
text in Syria 25, 1946, 67ix. That a Jew should not eat at a Gentile table or partake of Gentile food is
repeated by so many sources of the Hellenistic period from Daniel (1:8) to Judith (10:5), from Tobit
(1:10) to Jubilees (22:16) that one must take it as a fairly well established rule. But how many will
have observed it? Certainly Josephus [6b] tells us that it was observed by some of his priestly
friends when they were prisoners in Rome (Vita 3; 14). Even the Mosaic prohibition of images was
not universally observed. While it is true that when Pilate ordered Roman troops carrying portraits
of the emperor into Jerusalem a near-revolutionary situation developed (Bell. 1, 648; Ant. 17, 149),
we have many instances to the contrary of toleration of images. Gymnasia were a bad thing in
Judaea, as any reader of the Books of the Maccabees knows. But we find the Jews of Alexandria
trying to introduce themselves into the local gymnasium, much to the disgust of the Emperor
Claudiusx. And we are told by the archaeologists that the synagogue of Sardi was built in the
compound of the local gymnasium. No doubt the Jews had created for themselves a reputation of
misanthropy since the time of Hecataeus of Abdera at the end of the fourth century B.C. (cf. Diod.
40, 3, 4). The letter of Aristeas had to explain that association with Gentiles was compatible with
the observance of dietary laws. Let us hesitate. Eratosthenes was obviously guilty of unwarranted
generalization when he stated that all the barbarians were in habit of throwing out foreigners
(Strabo 17, 1, 19). He forgot that Sparta, which specialized in this operation, was Greek.26
The Jews adopted important Greek modes of expression readily enough, but this was not meant
to facilitate contacts with non-Jews or to transmit [7] non-Jewish works to Jews. It was often meant
to reassure the Jews about themselves against the temptations and objections offered by Greek
culture. I should like to emphasize this point especially in relation to the indisputable use by Jews of
Greek methods of reasoning and interpretation. Since the second century B.C., Greek allegorical
interpretation had been applied to the Bible. The first Jewish practitioner of allegorical
interpretation in the Greek language known to us is Aristobulus of Panion – an authoritative figure
in the Egypt of Ptolemy VI. When allegory came to Philo it had already a long tradition behind it.
22
23
24
25
26
P-o 162: Insertion pp 6 a + b, mgsn msr[AMM]; P- o 180: id., mginf con segr, msb[Mom].
P-o 162: - 6 a – (in new Grinfield I version, 20.1.82), tsf, msr[AMM].
P-o 180, 162: mild, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: mild, interl.ds;P-o 53: def.
P-o 53: in the process of <-> just, msb[AMM].
fine di P-o 53.
229
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
The main purpose of allegory was to reinforce the confidence of the Jews about the validity of their
Bible. It provided a new interpretation of what had become insignificant or objectionable. Allegory
is less persuasive when made to explain the products of one’s own culture to those who live in
another culture. In any case, the aim of making pagans interested in Jewish texts is not very evident
in Philo’s allegorical interpretations; and we know too little about Aristobulus to be able to say that
he used allegory to present Judaism to Ptolemy VI and to other Gentile readers. The same is
basically true for the use of rhetorical examples and of modes of arguing in rabbinical texts. Though
there are a few exceptions, the rabbis intended to regulate Jewish life, not to polemize with pagans.
With all these Greek materials the Jewish authors, whether in Greek or in Hebrew or in Aramaic,
were building their own castle; and the castle was meant to keep idolatry out.
II
Areas of contact and friendship existed of course between Jews and Gentiles, just as much as
areas of friction and enmity. If27 they had not existed the Jews would not have been able to live as
minorities. The number of Greek words which penetrated into Hebrew and Aramaic is eloquent
proof of these contacts, and we are only at the beginning of the study of Greek influence on Hebrew
and Aramaic syntax and word order. Only a few years28 ago we were told such a simple thing as
that the legend Jehonathan melech in a bulla of the Hasmonean [8] king Alexander Jannaeus betrays
Greek influence by the absence of the definite article in the apposition: the model is the formula29
Alexandrou Basileos (Gad. B. Sarfatti, Israel Exploration Journal 27, 1977, 204-206xi).30 In reading
the Mishnah a student coming from the Greek of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius feels an impalpable
similarity: the same sharp, thrusting dialectics; the same economy of words; and the same lack of
well organized argumentation.
Let us remember that Jews might pay homage to foreign gods simply as a matter of courtesy in a
decent exchange of signs of respect. After all there were Gentiles who sent offerings to the Temple
of Jerusalem, and the Jews were naturally proud of this (Joseph. Bell. 2, 412). Since at least31 the
time of Deutero-Isaiah 56, 7 the sacrifices of Gentiles had been acceptable, and later rabbinic
doctrine allowed pagans to build altars and to sacrifice to the Jewish God everywhere (Sifra, Lev.
17, 3 II p. 58 ed. Jerusalem 1975). The second-century B.C. Jewish historian Eupolemus attributed
to Solomon the gift of a gold pillar to Hiram King of Tyre for the local temple of Zeus (<723 F 2b>
Jacoby): this may be one of the pillars32 mentioned by Herodotus 2, 44. Solomon simply imitated in
suitable proportions what many wealthy Jews were in fact doing for the gods of their neighbours in
the Hellenistic age. In the second century B.C. Nicetas son of Jason from Jerusalem gave the city of
Iasos in Asia Minor a hundred drachmae for the local feast of Dionysus (C. I. Jud. 749). There is
probably not much more to the gift of three hundred drachmae sent by the High Priest Jonathan to
Tyre for the celebration of sacrifices to Hercules (II Maccab. 4, 18-20). The LXX translation itself
seems to recommend respect for the gods of the nations in the notorious translation of Exodus 22,
28 “thou shalt not revile the gods”, where the ‘gods’ renders ‘Elohim’; Philo (Vita Mosis 2, 205;
Spec. Leg. 1, 53) and Josephus (Ant. 4, 207c; c. Ap. 2, 237) took this verse33 to forbid vilification of
foreign gods.
In some cases, no doubt, Jews tried other gods when the God of the Fathers appeared not to
answer. What is perhaps the oldest Greek inscription by a Jew is the by now famous dedication of
the Jewish slave Moschos son of Moschion [9] who went to the oracle of Amphiaraus in Boeotia to
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
P-o 162: If <-> It, msr[AMM]; P-o 180, 54: corr.def.
P-o 180, 162: years <->, months interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM].
P-o 180: the model is the formula, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
P-o 180: and word order -> Only a few years ago ... 204-206), del.
P-o 180: at least, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: deff.
P-o 180: may be one of the pillars <-> must be the pillar, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: must be the pillar.
P-o 180: verse <-> line, msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: line.
230
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
seek advice about regaining his freedomxii. About 250 B.C. there can34 have been very few Jews in
Boeotia to warm the heart of the poor slave; if they existed, they probably were slaves too. In other
cases the identification of the real god to whom the dedication was made was left open. Some
Jewish sailors in Upper Egypt made dedications in a sanctuary to the god Pan when they were saved
from shipwreck; they thanked God, and, no doubt, meant the God of their fathers (A. Bernard, Le
Paneion d’El Kanaïs, 1972, 34; 42xiii). Apostasy does not seem to have been common. Tradition
preserves very few names of apostates: Dositheus at the end of the third century B.C. (III Macc.
<1,3>), Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, in the first century A.D.
Giving one’s own children Greek theophoric names – Apollonius, Artemidorus, Demetrius,
Hermaius, Isidorus, etc. - did not imply any religious commitment. As this practice was shared by
other ethnic groups and was often accompanied by the precaution of giving the child two names –
one Hellenic and the other native - there is nothing more to it than social conformism. It is indeed
one of the recurrent questions in interpreting the life of other people whether marked conformism or
marked non-conformity is the better defence of internal freedom. In the social relations of the
Hellenistic age, which were simple, but characterized by great care for the right forms and by little
relish for surprises, the Jews seem to have accepted the prevailing trend. The sepulchral epigrams of
Leontopolis in Egypt and the manumission documents of Panticapaeum in the Crimea have become
by-words of paganizing texts. I am not sure that they can tell us much about the religious and
national emotions of those Jews who composed them. As quite clearly there were limits to what a
Jew could do while remaining a Jew, he also had to pay some compensations. Keeping outside any
form of dynastic cults, the Jews of Egypt dedicated some of the synagogues (or rather
proseuchai xiv ) 35 to their kings – and in the Temple of Jerusalem there were prayers for the
sovereigns of the day. Institutions have to be understood and, to a certain extent, to be accepted not
only by those [10] who live in them, but also by the outsiders. Therefore the Synagogue, which
probably originated before the time and outside the zone of Hellenistic associations, came in many
respects to resemble the cult associations of the Gentiles. Indeed, it is possible that Jews36 were
inspired by the Greek clubs – eranoi – to create their problematic37 fraternities to which I shall
return in my next lecture38. One has simply to open the Mishnah at its first page to find that Rabban
Gamaliel had sons who enjoyed symposia (Bereshit 1, 1). But Greek youths did not return home to
confess to their fathers that they had not recited the Shema’ 39; and the observation may be
extended, mutatis mutandis, to all the parallel developments, imitations or transformations we can
discover in comparing Jewish and Hellenic associations. They indicate co-existence of Jews and
Gentiles rather than communication between them.
One cannot escape the fact that communication between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic
world was poor. This is confirmed by the fact that a considerable portion of what the Jews
circulated among pagans was fraudulently attributed to pagan authors; most commonly to wellestablished authorities of the old days. The Sibyls were supposed to have produced prophecies in
the Hebrew spirit and with due appreciation of Jewish achievements.40 Pseudo-Orpheus, pseudoPhocylides, pseudo-Sophocles, pseudo-Aratus and even pseudo-Homer and pseudo-Hesiod
circulated on Jewish initiative. They could not speak exactly like Jews. The forgers therefore
created an artificial syncretism.
It seems to me unnecessary subtlety to doubt that such forgeries were primarily meant for
Gentiles. They could be used for the purpose of proselytism or simply to show off: it was nice to
have been remembered by Homer. But one may well wonder whether the pagans were impressed.
34
P-o 180, 162: can <-> must, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: must.
P-o 180: (or rather proseuchai), interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
36
P-o 180: Jews <-> the Pharisees, msb[Mom]; P- o 162, 54: the Pharisees.
37
P-o 180: problematic, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162: problematic, interl.msr[AMM]; P-o 54: def.
38
P-o 180: to which I shall ... lecture, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
39
P-o 162: Israel, msr[AMM]; P-o 180, 54: def.
40
P-o 180, 162: achievements. -> In the extant collection of Sibylline poems, Books III and V are of Jewish origin.
Book III mainly belongs to the second century B.C., Book V is of early imperial times, del.
35
231
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
In any case, forgeries have seldom been an instrument for genuine contacts between different
groups: they betray unease, if not hostility. It is reassuring to note that [11] Philo never used such
texts to buttress his arguments. Philo defended his integrity by accepting isolation.41 True enough,
the Jews did not confine their forgeries to alleged pagan texts. There is no dearth of works or at
least of sayings42 attributed to Enoch, Abraham and the other patriarchs, Solomon, Elijah, Esdras,
etc., which were for internal consumption by Jewish groups. I am convinced that these forgeries,
too, betray uneasiness and lack of rectitude in those who perpetrated them – and perhaps also in
those who believed them and I extend this evaluation to analogous forgeries by pagans for pagans.43
But there is a difference between forging texts as if they had been written by one’s own ancestors in
order to put across certain beliefs to one’s own brethren and forging texts as if they had been written
by eminent members of a different civilization in order to mislead other members of that
civilization. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the various sections of the Book of
Enoch, even if backed by great names, would be acceptable to Jews only if their contents appealed
to them. The Testament of Orpheus, the false lines attributed to Phocylides, Aeschylus and
Sophocles, and the book on Abraham allegedly by Hecataeus of Abdera were deliberate attempts to
make Gentiles believe that men they respected had held opinions unknown from other sources. In
the case of Jewish pseudepigrapha for Jewish consumption the forger imparted some of his
repressed thoughts and may subjectively even have been convinced that by doing so he interpreted
the mind of one of his ancestors. In forging pagan texts the Jewish forger could not possibly have
been inspired by mystical experiences. He simply cheated, and his cheating probably took in other
Jews, too. The allegorist Aristobulus seems to have been one of these credulous Jews. He quoted
Pseudo-Homer and Pseudo-Hesiod to prove that the Jewish Sabbath was known to themxv. He
seems to have been in good faith.44 Gentiles were not the only victims of Jewish forgeries45.
III
Few pagans seem to have read the Bible for the purpose of finding out what the Jews thought or
believed. Even the philosopher Posidonius, who admired Moses and was interested in the Jewish
past and present, never set [12] eyes on the Bible – as far as we know. Anti-Jewish polemists never
purchased a copy of the Septuagint. I cannot share the opinion that Apollonius Molon (first century
B.C.) shows direct knowledge of the Septuagint, more precisely Genesis 21, 6, by calling Isaac
Gelos (“the laugh”)xvi. To write against the Jews Molon must of course have collected some
information somewhere. But if the controversy about the Jews had been based on the Bible, it
would have had a different complexion. From time to time scholars think they have found echoes of
some biblical passages in pagan46 Hellenistic writers. Such findings have been announced for
Theocritus, Callimachusxvii and even Vergilxviii . They have invariably failed to command wide
assent. The first clear quotation of the Bible in a pagan author is still the quotation of a line of
Genesis 1 in the Sublime attributed to Longinus and now commonly dated in the first century A.D.
(though there has been one authoritative defence of the third-century date)xix. Pseudo-Longinus is
himself an enigma. Eduard Norden was so struck by the isolation of the author of the Sublime that
he rather irrationally placed him in Philo’s circle in Alexandria. However, his isolation is not so
total after all. The anonymous author of the Sublime shows some connection47 with the rhetorician
41
P-o 180: Philo ... isolation, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: but Philo ... isolation, interl.ms[AMM].
P-o 180: or at least sayings, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: or at least of sayings, interl.ms[AMM].
43
P-o 180: and I extend ... for pagans, mgsn msb[Mom] <-> I shall have to return to this point later; P-o 162: and they
extended ... for pagans <-> I shall have to return to this point later, interl.msr[AMM]; P-o 54: believed them -> I shall
have to return to this point later, del.
44
P-o 180, 162: He seems ... good faith, interl.ms[180 AMM, 162 Mom]; P-o 54: def.
45
P-o 180, 162: of Jewish forgeries, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
46
P-o 180: pagan, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
47
P-o 180, 162: However, his isolation ... connection <-> His most obvious literary connection is, interl.ms[180 Mom,
162 AMM]; P-o 54: corr. def.
42
232
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
Caecilius of Calacte whom by chance we know to have been a Jew. Before the Sublime a dubious
allusion to the account of creation in Genesis may be found in the treatise on the nature of the world
attributed to the Pythagorean Ocellus Lucanus (second or first century B.C.) xx.
Even if a few more passages were to turn up showing an acquaintance with the Bible, it would
still remain true that no pagan studied Judaism on the basis of authentic texts in order to understand
in what ways Jewish thought differed from Greek thought. There was no theological and
philosophic discussion between Jews and Gentiles on the level of the later discussions between
Christians and Gentiles. No Hellenistic philosopher considered it necessary to read the Bible before
he sat down on his chair to instruct his pupils. There was no Celsus, or Porphyry, or Plotinus or
emperor Julian to controvert Jewish doctrines.48
It follows that such Jewish interest as existed in Greek philosophy and religion was unilateral.
The Jews, or certain Jews, took the trouble of [13] seeing where Judaism stood if confronted with
Greek philosophy: Philo more so, of course, than the Palestinian sages. With a writer like Philo it is
even conceivable that he wrote some of his treatises with pagan readers in mind. He may have done
so in some of his treatises which presuppose little or no knowledge of Judaism, such as Quod omnis
probus liber or De Abrahamo. However, he never addresses a pagan audience. He never declares
any intention of speaking to non-Jews. Basically Philo argued to reassure himself and his fellowJews that what they had learned from their Bible was confirmed by Plato or by Zeno the Stoic. It
was once again an internal operation to consolidate Judaism. Such an enterprise must not be
underrated and, as Harry Wolfson so clearly sawxxi, it was fraught with immense consequences for
the future. The issue was the reconciliation of revelation and philosophy, a process which Philo
started and nobody seems to have brought to a perfect conclusion. It has also been observed by
Professor Sandmel49xxii that in the depth of his heart Philo preferred Abraham, who saw God but did
not receive the whole of the Law, to Moses, who brought down the complete Torah from Mount
Sinai. One of the curious and unforeseen results of the confrontation of Jewish revelation with
Greek philosophy was to emphasize one aspect of Judaism which rabbinic Judaism was bound to
undervalue: the age of the Patriarchs, when the true God and the true pattern of religious life had
been recognized without the need of a full-dress revelation. This goes together with the inclination
which is characteristic not only of Philo, but of the Wisdom of Solomon and perhaps also of the
Fourth Book of Maccabees, to treat Judaism as a mystery to which access is granted through
Wisdom. The mystic type of language must not lead us to think that Philo was looking for a
substitute for the mysteries of Eleusis or of Isis in which he was not allowed to take part. Judaism
was presented as an initiation to which the ordinary pagan was not admitted.
As we know, there have been repeated attempts to connect the Essenes with the Pythagoreansxxiii .
The most recent is the one to which Isidore Lévy devoted his extraordinary learning and acumen
(Recherches esséniennes et pythagoriciennes, 1965xxiv ). Isidore Lévy even believed that the Dead
Sea Scrolls confirmed his [14] opinion. But50 the Dead Sea Scrolls discourage any theory about any
connection of any Jewish sect with Pythagoreanism, because they have revealed the deep Jewish
roots of such societies. If we concede for a moment that the Essenes were Pythagoreans in disguise,
we should have to conclude that their purpose was to keep the Gentiles out. Even in the account of
Josephus, the Essenes appear as extreme supporters of Levitical purity51.
The confrontation between Jewish revelation and Greek philosophy was, therefore, a unilateral
Jewish initiative, to which there was little response on the other side. Gentile men of letters
expressed their opinions on the cult and the mentality of the Jews. These opinions became
progressively less favourable, as we can see from Josephus’ Contra Apionem which is our main
source of information. The Jews were even supposed to worship an ass-head and to commit ritual
murder. The evaluation of the cult went together with a certain amount of speculation about the
48
49
50
51
P-o 180, 162: There was no Celsus ... doctrines, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
P-o 180: by Professor Sandmel <-> I need not saying by whom, mgsnmsb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: corr. def.
P-o 180, 162: But <-> It seems to me that, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: corr. def.
P-o 180, 162, 54: purity -> laws, del.
233
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
history of the Jews. But there was never a serious discussion of the basic tenets of Jewish religion or
of any of the Jewish rituals (say Atonement Day) for the simple reason that Bible was not read.
There was apparently no Greek philosopher ready to discuss Philo, as Philo was ready to discuss
Greek philosophers. Philo was perfectly capable of polemical writing, as his historical pamphlets
Against Flaccus, and The Legation to Gaius show.52 If he53 is the exception among the philosophic
writers in the Greek language, in so far as he did not write polemical books against specific
philosophic opponents, the probable explanation is that no pagan philosopher controverted Jewish
tenets on revelation, resurrection, Messianic age, etc. It is also noticeable that Josephus stops
dropping names of antagonists in his Contra Apionem when in book II he passes from refuting
vulgar calumny to comparing Jewish religion with Greek religion. At this higher level he had no
real opponent.54
One suspects that far more popular common ground for Jews and Gentiles was magic, from
which at least in imperial times it is difficult to separate astrology. The name of Yao – a variant of
Yahwe – and other Hebrew names [15] are common in amulets. [15[bis]] On the other hand we are
told by the Second Book of Maccabees55 (12, 39) that some of the soldiers of Judas Maccabeus used
the idols of Jamnia to protect themselves in battle – and of course were killed. The “ways of the
Ammonites” – to use the expression by which the rabbis indicated the superstitious practices they
disapproved of – are too many to be followed in detail. As we know from the Sefer Harazim, the
Book of Secrets published by Mordecai Margalioth in 1966xxv, Jews of the third or fourth century
A.D. used in magic formulas prayers to Helios and appeals to Aphrodite.56 [15] Origen in Contra
Celsum 1, 22 claims that pagans abused the name of the God of Abraham for magic. Pliny (N.H. 30,
11) and Apuleius (Apol. 90) consider Moses a magician; Vettius Valerius (II, 28, 96 Kroll)
attributed astrological books to Abraham, and Vettius seems to have Hermippus, the third-century
B.C. admirer of Jewish wisdom, as his source. Abraham was internationally well-known as a master
of astrology. Correspondingly, at a very early date, at least from the second century B.C. onwards,
certain Jewish writers took pride in presenting him as the man who instructed the Egyptians in
astrology. This was the claim of Artapanus, probably a Jewish57 second-century writer (<FGrHist
726 F 1>) who was backed by a Samaritan writer whose extracts have come down to us under the
name of Eupolemus. We must, however, notice that when the reputation of Abraham as astrologer
stood undisputed in pagan circles in the first century A.D., Philo repeatedly made the pointed
remark that Abraham abandoned astrology and polytheism for the knowledge of the true God (De
Virt. 212; Cong. erud. 9 etc.). There is a similar statement in a later well-known Talmudic passage
(Bab. Shabbat 156 a). In the days of their cruder attempts to gain sympathy and support in the
Hellenistic world, the Jews used Abraham as a suitable ambassador to Gentile lands. We know that
in the second century B.C. the Jews also claimed, in good Hellenistic manner, ancestral connections
through Abraham with Sparta and Pergamum (II Macc. 12, 20; Jos. Ant. Jud. 14, 225). But when at
least the reputation of Abraham as the inventor of astrology began to be taken seriously by the
Gentiles, the Jews seem to have backed down. This issue must not be confused with the wider one
internal to Judaism, whether astrology was valid knowledge and, if so, whether the Jews could free
themselves from the influence of the stars by the study of the Law. What I am suggesting here is
that the Jews seem to have refrained from using Abraham as a link with the pagan world as soon as
this link began to work.58
52
P-o 180: full-dress revelation. -> This goes together with the inclination which is characteristic not only of Philo
[c.13] ... to Gaius show, del.
53
P-o 162, 54: he; P-o 180: Philo <-> he, msb[Mom].
54
P-o 180, 162: At this higher ... opponent, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
55
P-o 180: by the Second Book of Maccabees; P-o 162: by II Maccabees.
56
P-o 180: On the other hand we are told ... Aphrodite, msb[Mom] mgsup,dx,inf, copiato ds. su f. 15bis, con indicazione
su mgsup: insertion l. 1, msr[AMM]; P-o 162: ts f15,msr[AMM]; P-o 54: def.
57
P-o 180, P-o 162: Jewish, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
58
P-o 180: to work. -> Unless my memory plays me a very bad trick, there is very little about Abraham in the Sepher
Harazim, mginfmsb[Mom], del.
234
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
There may be a serious reason for this. If the confrontation between Jewish revelation and Greek
philosophy had reinforced the tendency, which is [16] conspicuous in the whole of Jewish thought
during the Hellenistic age, to feel isolated in a Gentile world, it had correspondingly encouraged the
welcoming of proselytes from the pagan world. Abraham himself had been a proselyte of a sort
(Philo consciously describes him from that angle), and it was important to prevent the model
proselyte from being regarded as the teacher of astrology by pagans59 who had no intention of
becoming proselytes. The point about Abraham abandoning astrology for the knowledge of God is
well taken in the circumstances. Long before Philo, the Book of Jubilees, a text perhaps60 of the end
of the second century B.C., had gone into another question. Had Abraham had to learn Hebrew?
The author’s answer was positive: Abraham did have to learn Hebrew, and he learnt it in the six
months of the rainy season (Jub. 1211-14). Perhaps better informed, the Antiquitates Biblicae which
are attributed to Philo, but were written after the destruction of the Temple, correct the opinion of
the Book of Jubilees and state that Abraham had been spared the trouble of learning Hebrew
because he had refused to take part in the building of the tower of Babel: Hebrew had remained his
language. We may well ask, without being able to answer, whether such discussions on the
language of Abraham were connected with the question of the duty of a proselyte to learn some
Hebrew.
Proselytism61 was in fact the only specific situation which transformed the intellectual relations
between Jews and Gentiles. Whether the initiative came from Jews or from Gentiles, the issue was
conversion from polytheism to monotheism. I wonder whether acquaintance with the Bible ever
attracted pagans to Judaism. We must assume that the Bible – or at least the Books of Moses, the
Psalms and perhaps some prophets – played a part in the instruction of proselytes: the proselyte
depicted by Juvenalxxvi knows the Book of Moses. But this is a different question from what first
attracted pagans towards Judaism. The little evidence we have seems rather to indicate that pagans
would be struck by the Jewish notion of God, by Jewish religious [17] ceremonies and taboos and
perhaps by Jewish magic rather than by Jewish legal and prophetic books. Nobody seems to have
read the Bible before he or she became a proselyte. In Josephus’ story Izates, the crown Prince of
Adiabene, is found reading the Law of Moses before circumcision, but long after he had decided to
become a Jewish proselyte (Ant. Jud. 20, 17-56). Simple books instructed the proselyte about moral
principles, if we accept the very likely theory that the first six chapters of the Didaché, with the
exception of the first paragraph, were lifted bodily by a Christian missionary from a Jewish “guide”
for the proselyte. The later Talmudic rule that the dialogue with the proselyte must not be extended
nor must it go into an excess of details (Bab. Yebamot, 47 a-b) is certainly already found operating
in these chapters of the Didaché. The Wisdom of Solomon, the IV Maccabees and certain books of
Philo, though particularly suitable for proselytes, have nothing to show that they were written either
to attract or to comfort proselytes. But the Testament of Job, a Greek text first published by Angelo
Maixxvii at the beginning of the nineteenth century, may perhaps be considered to aim specifically at
the edification of the proselyte. Scholars have vainly tried to find Christian elements in it. The book
stresses the fact that Job was a pagan who turned to the true God, presents him as an ex-satrap of
Egypt under Persian rule (28, 8; cf. 17, 1), and gives pride of place to his daughters. They receive
from him phylactery-like objects with long cords which change their hearts and make them speak in
angelic language. We are reminded that saintly women play their part in the Jewish-Egyptian
society of Therapeutae described by Philo, but we are even more directly reminded that Judaism
attracted pagan women, including Nero’s Poppaeaxxviii .
IV
59
60
61
P-o 180, 162: pagans <-> people, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM].
P-o 180, P-o 162: perhaps, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM].
P-o 180: Proselytism <- num. IV, msb[Mom], del.
235
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
If we discount proselytes, there is only one area of intellectual life in which we must admit some
continuous communication between Jews and pagans: the area of historiography. There are very
good reasons for this. The Jews had their own historical tradition in the Bible, which gave no space
worth [18] mentioning to the Greeks before Alexander and never mentioned the Romans. The
Greeks and Romans had their own historical tradition which virtually ignored the Jews. It was
impossible to co-exist – or to quarrel – without at least comparing notes on the past. The reasons,
however, are such as not to modify the essential isolation of the Jews in the pagan world.
Traditionally in the Hellenistic world each nation was supposed to produce some account of its own
past for circulation in the wide world of Greek speakers. How the custom originated and developed
remains unclear, though we know that it goes back to the fifth century B.C. when Xanthus of Lydia
wrote an account of his own national history in Greek. Manetho, the Egyptian; Berossus, the
Babylonian; and Fabius Pictor, the Roman, are the schoolbook examples of this tendency in the
third century B.C. The genre was intrinsically ambiguous. It was meant to satisfy the curiosity of
the natives as much as of the foreigners, in so far as both had Greek education and therefore certain
interests suggested by Greek culture. What was intelligible to the native was not necessarily
intelligible to the foreigner, even if both had read their Herodotus or their Timaeus, which as we
shall see did not happen in our case.
The Jews did not fail to contribute to this international literature. As the translation of the
Bible into Greek was not regarded as an equivalent of the national histories produced by Manetho
and Berossus, the Jews had to do something new. Of all their historical books we have only tiny
fragments, except for Flavius Josephus who was one of the very last to write in this tradition. Some
of this writings was even in poetry; and we may at this point ask ourselves whether Ezechiel the
poet composed his tragedy on the Exodus as a form of historiography62.
Under Ptolemy IV Philopator (222-205 B.C.) a Jew called Demetrius presented some Jewish
history according to the methods of Greek chronography. He was basically an expositor of the
Bible. He gave the years from Creation according to the Septuagint text and is therefore our oldest
witness for the existence of the Septuagint translation of Genesis. He divided history into epochs:
from Adam to the deluge; from Abraham’s birth to Jacob’s arrival in Egyptxxix . In this notion of
epochs he anticipated the Book of Daniel [19] which is 40 years later. The notion of epoch was
pagan – Greek – but not surprising to Jews, as Genesis knows a pre-deluge age, and Chronicles
isolate the seventy years of desolation as an epoch. Demetrius’ Greek education is probably
confirmed by his rhetorical device of question and answer (ἀπορίαι καὶ λύσεις) which, though
abundantly used in Midrashic hermeneutics, seems to be of Greek origin. Flavius Josephus, who
can have known this Demetrius only at second hand, stupidly identified him with the pagan
Demetrius of Phalerum who had lived about a hundred years earlierxxx .
Next comes Eupolemus’ work on “The Kings of Judaea”. Eupolemus is firmly dated by one of
his fragments (fr. 5 xxxi ) in about 158 B.C. and therefore must probably be identified with the
Eupolemus who was an ambassador to Rome on behalf of Judas Maccabaeus in 161. If so, his
father had been involved in diplomatic dealings with Antiochus III. His Greek is sufficiently
affected by Hebrew syntax to make it certain that the author was brought up on Hebrew and
Aramaic. He had much to say about the splendour of Solomon’s Temple and reported letters
exchanged between Solomon and fellow-kings: neither chronology nor common sense was
respected. When he maintained that the prophet Jeremiah saved the ark from Babylonian looters, he
followed a tradition to be found also in the Epistula Jeremiae and in one of the initial letters of II
Maccabeesxxxii . On the other hand the mention of king Astibares of Media in fr. 4 seems to depend
on Ctesias. The date of composition, 158 B.C., excludes any probability, if not the possibility, that
Eupolemus brought his history to Rome when he went there as an ambassador. As we know nothing
about a Philo, author of another book on the Kings of Juda, whom Clemens Alexandrinus puts
together with Demetrius and Eupolemus, the other author to be considered is Artapanus. He is
62
P-o 180, 162, 54: Some of this writings… historiography, interl.ms[180 Mom, 54 e 162 AMM].
236
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
earlier than circa 70 B.C. because he was read by Alexander Polyhistor. He is famous for making
the Egyptians dependent on Jewish instruction. Abraham introduced the Egyptians to astrology,
Joseph brought agriculture, and Moses, to be identified with Musaeus and to be considered the
teacher [20] of Orpheus, brought in practically everything else from shipbuilding to hieroglyphics
and the cult of animals. No wonder that the Egyptians called him Hermes, that is, Thot. Though the
book is quoted as Iudaika, it was perhaps a biography of Moses with some introduction about the
patriarchs. For the moment all I want to say is that Artapanus must have considered himself a Jew
and was obviously familiar with the Pentateuch.
Samaritans did not write very different history from Jews. Alexander Polyhistor attributed to
Eupolemus a fragment about Abraham which cannot be by him, but obviously comes from a
Samaritan author because it makes Abraham and Melchisedek meet on Mount Garizim, the
Samaritan sanctuary. Since the same Polyhistor quotes another fragment on Abraham as a specialist
in astrology with the remark that it comes from an anonymous author, it is evident that Alexander
Polyhistor attributed the first fragment to Eupolemus only by an oversight. All this was seen by
Jacob Freudenthal long agoxxxiii . The author quoted the Bible in the Septuagint version. He, too,
made some attempt to equate Oriental and Greek chronology: he identified the Babylonian Belos
with Kronos. Finally, a mysterious Cleodemus Malchus, whom Josephus calls prophetes (Ant. Iud.
1, 260-1), made Hercules marry a granddaughter of Abraham in Libya. I would consider Cleodemus
a Jew rather than a Samaritan or a pagan.xxxiv 63.
[20]
V64
From the first65 point of view – chronology –66 historical67 works certainly contributed to a real
debate between Jews and Gentiles – about the length of their respective histories and therefore
about priority in civilization. The debate is best documented in Josephus’ Contra Apionem, both a
contribution to and a summary of such a quarrel. By the end of the third century B.C. the Peripatetic
polymath Hermippus had already accepted what must have been a Jewish claim that Pythagoras had
Jewish masters. If we take, as I think we must, the long fragment of Vettius Valerius on Abraham’s
astrological books as deriving from Hermippus, then he was also acquainted with an analogous
claim related to the origins of astrology.68 Eupolemus asserted that Moses was the first wise man
and imparted the alphabet to the Jews who passed it on to the [21] Phoenicians, from whom it was
received by the Greeks. The Jews tended to lengthen their past. If the Hebrew Bible puts 1,948
years between Adam and Abraham, the Septuagint increased the interval to 3,334 years – which is
also the figure to be found in Demetrius. But significantly the Septuagint reduced to 215 years the
430 years in Egypt of Exodus 12, 40.
The Jewish claims to superior antiquity were certainly noticed and questioned by pagan
historians, especially in Egypt. I shall give only one example, the implications of which do not seem
to have been considered. In the first century A.D. that firm opponent of Jewish claims, Apion of
Alexandria, stated that Moses had lived in the eighteenth year of Bocchoris’ reign, i.e. 753 B.C.
This is intriguing; it makes Moses a contemporary of Romulus, the Exodus contemporary with the
foundation of Rome according to the Varronian date69. But Apion is silent about Rome; he presents
63
P-o 180: As I have characterized Jewish Hellenistic historiography in my previous lectures and published works, I
shall not go into details except on two points: one is the interest in chronology and the other is the intervention of the
Romans in the debate, interl. e mgsn, msn[Mom] < -> Traditionally in the Hellenistic world each nation was supposed to
produce some account of its own past [c. 18] … rather than a Samaritan or a pagan; P-o 162, 54: <-> def. (conservate
cc. 18-19).
64
P-o 180: num. V, msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54:def.
65
P-o 180, 162: the first <-> one, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: one.
66
P-o 180: - chronology – interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
67
P-o 180: historical <-> these – interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: these.
68
P-o 180: Jewish masters. -> If we take ... astrology, del.
69
P-o 180: of 753 B.C., interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
237
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
instead the Exodus as contemporary with the foundation of Carthage (Jos. Contra Ap. 1, 17 = 616 F
4 Jacoby). In other words Apion accepts Timaeus’ synchronization of the foundation of Rome with
the foundation of Carthage, transfers it from 814 B.C. to 753 B.C. and thus succeeds in making the
two enemies of Rome – Carthage and Judaea – coeval and of course far more recent than Egypt.
Synchronisms were never insignificant to classical historians. By skilful use of chronology Apion
presents the Jews as enemies of Rome and far less ancient than the Egyptians.70
The battle of dates was backed by documents, as temple cultures are always rich in documents.
Flavius Josephus adapts to his case a commonplace of Hellenistic historians from Eastern countries
when he claims that the Jews, owing to their temple archives, were better documented than the
Greeks about their own past. What Josephus did not know or could not say is that temples are not
only repositories of documents, but also centres of forgeries. Furthermore, many of the documents
circulating in the literature available to him did not even come from temples. They were the product
of the free enterprise of historians. The Greek additions to the Book of Esther include forged
documents, and Eupolemus forged the correspondence of Solomon with his fellow kings. Forgeries
could be interpolated in pagan books [22] of history in order to change their character. Two nonJewish writers, Hecataeus of Abdera in the late fourth century and Manetho in the early third
century, received additions. In the case of Hecataeus it seems that the interpolation amounted to one
or two sections on Jews to supplement the not unsympathetic authentic remarks already existing in
the text. The manipulation of Manetho is more obscure. Manetho’s history of Egypt reached
Josephus in a version which seems to have been unknown to other ancient readers of Manetho. The
explanation which appeals to me is that the text of Manetho which Josephus read had received both
Jewish and anti-Jewish insertions: the anti-Jewish element prevailed. But the matter is dubious.
What is not dubious is that somebody thought it necessary to tell the story of the Exodus from the
Egyptian angle. As there was no record (or at least no available record) all the Greco-Egyptian
historians could do was to identify the Jews with the unpleasant Hyksos and turn them out of the
country in a humiliating mannerxxxv .
Alexander Polyhistor is the best example of how the Jews managed to force themselves on the
attention of the Gentiles. This Greek freedman worked hard in the neighbourhood of Rome in the
first century B.C. to compile extracts from historical books about practically all the “barbarian”
countries of the known world. Fittingly enough, he died with his library when his house was burnt
down. The Jews were only one of his specialities, and there is really no reason to suspect that he
was a Jew in disguise. He is quoted as having said that Moses was a woman (273 F 790), though he
would certainly only have transmitted somebody else’s opinion.
VI71
Thus there was some debate on historical matters between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews had
to accommodate some Greek history, and the Greek historians had at least to take cognizance of the
existence of a Jewish past. This knowledge was passed on to chronographers and universal
historians without specific interest in the Jews. While Castor of Rhodes about 60 B.C. apparently
still ignored the Jews, the Roman72 Varro made one or two entries about them. Trogus Pompeius
[23] knew of Abraham and Moses. For Alexander Polyhistor the synchronism of Moses and
Ogygus, the first king of Attica about 1796 B.C., seemed to be an established fact: true enough, he
wrote before Apion.
History was something that enabled Jews and Gentiles to display some knowledge of each other on
the basis of common standards of judgment: chronological priority, authenticity, genealogical trees,
etc. were criteria on which they agreed.
70
71
72
P-o 180, 162: By skilful use ... Egyptians, interl. ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM], interl.; P-o 54: def.
P-o 180: num. VI, msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
P-o 180: the Roman, msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: def.
238
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
However, the question which were discussed could be a source of pride or humiliation for the
parties concerned, but were not likely to change their reciprocal understanding of their ways of life.
If the Gentiles did not know the Bible, few Jews seem to had made an73 effort to study and
understand Greek history and institutions. They did not read Herodotus, Thucydides, Ephorus and
Timaeus in order to learn Greek history: they checked whether the Jews were mentioned in them,
and at best they transferred some episodes of Greek history to Jewish history. This is the case of the
Book of Judith.74 Philo, who knew that history had some part in the encyclopedia of knowledge of
his time as a sub-section of grammar (De Cherub. 105), does not show any precise familiarity with
Greek history.75
The matter must not, however, be left there, because some significant change happened in
relation to Rome.76 With Alexander Polyhistor we are in Rome, and he worked for the Roman
aristocracy. In Rome history was not the product of free-lance workers, mainly expatriates, as it was
normally in Greece. It was firmly, though not exclusively, controlled by the ruling class. The
foreigners who in Rome or for Rome wrote books on other foreigners were directly or indirectly
helping the Roman upper class to orient itself in its relatively new role of masters of the
Mediterranean world. Alexander Polyhistor must have provided the information which cultivated
Romans wanted to have about the foreign countries they had conquered or considered conquering.
When the Roman upper class lost interest in his findings, the Jewish section of his compilation was
saved from total oblivion by the Christian Fathers. The Jews had no particular [24] interest in him.
Even Josephus is not greatly interested in Alexander Polyhistor. A new factor had inserted itself
between Greeks and Jews: the Romans. The attitude of the Jews in historical matters changed
correspondingly. With the arrival of the Romans, two features became prominent in Jewish
historians. One is perhaps of limited consequence. The Jews paid some attention to Roman
institutions and events. Chapter 8 of the First Book of Maccabees on Rome is exceptional in Jewish
historiography for its keen, if hardly exact, evaluation of Roman institutions. Philo, too, displays
considerable interest in contemporary Roman history; and Flavius Josephus makes a definite effort
to give objective information about Rome: he includes in his Bellum a list of the Roman legions
(<II, 366-87>). If Roman rule increased the demand for historical detail about Jews, the Jews
developed a corresponding interest in Roman institutions. 77 As for the second change, its
importance cannot be disputed. Flavius Josephus is, to our knowledge, the first and perhaps the only
Jewish historian about whom we are sure that he constantly kept a mixed Jewish and Roman
audience in mind. All his works, including his autobiography, were written with an eye to the
Roman masters. Josephus went as far as to ask Titus for official approval of his history of the
Jewish war. The story he tells in his autobiography (363), that Titus affixed his seal to the text, is
extraordinary, and I cannot quite understand what it means. [24bis] It is, however, worth
mentioning that Philo of Byblos, according to Porphyry (cf. Euseb. Praep. Evang. 10, 9, 11)
declared that his source Sanchuniathon wrote a history of the Jews the contents of which had been
pronounced as truthful by the king of Berytus Abibalos. The text is not completely clear, but the
authentication by a very ancient king seems to be beyond doubt. To say the least, Philo of Byblos
shows that there was an oriental notion of authentication of history by kings. As Philo of Byblos
was a younger contemporary of Flavius Josephus this piece of evidence is particularly relevant. I
73
P-o 180, 162: few Jews seem to have made an <-> the Jews had made no, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: corr.
def.
74
P-o 180, P-o 162: and at best they transferred ... Judith, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
75
P-o 180: somebody else’s opinion. -> VI – Thus there were some debate on historical matters between Jews and
Gentiles [c.22]... history, del.
76
P-o 180, P-o 162: The matter must not ... Rome, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM] <-> It remains true that with Alexander
Polyhistor and later Josephus a certain change is noticeable. The conditions of this change are not far to seek.
77
P-o 180: institutions and events. -> Chapter 8 of the ... institutions, del.
239
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
believe furthermore that Philo of Byblos was in fact opposing Josephus’ claims about the priority of
Jewish antiquities by his claim on Phoenician antiquitiesxxxvi .78
[24] Though the intellectual terms of reference of Josephus are still those of the relation between
Jewish and Greek laws and philosophies, the Romans cast their shadow on whatever he wrote.
Characteristically, he chose as a model for his Jewish Antiquities the Roman Antiquities by
Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a work written by a Greek for a mixed Greco-Roman audience. Like
Alexander Polyhistor, Josephus soon ceased to be of interest to the Romans and never succeeded in
becoming indispensable to the Jews. He was saved by the Christians, and the Jews who in the
Middle Ages became again [25] acquainted with him learned 79 to know him from Christian
readers.80
VII81
We are therefore faced by a curious situation. Alexander Polyhistor on the pagan side and
Josephus on the Jewish side – not to speak of other writers about whom we know less such as Justus
of Tiberias, Josephus rival82 - indicate that the Romans got more serious historical information
about the Jews than the Hellenistic monarchs had ever obtained. On the other hand, there is no
indication that either Alexander Polyhistor or Josephus had lasting success with the Romans, nor
that they left continuators. What is even more important is that Jewish historiography in Greek
came to an end in Josephus’ time, and it was not substituted by Jewish historiography in Hebrew
and Aramaic. The Talmudic texts on Greek and Roman history are notoriously few and inexact,
though occasionally very shrewd at defining the reality of Roman power at large.xxxvii Nor can we
find Hebrew or Aramaic books of Jewish history, if we except the lost Hebrew original of the Liber
Antiquitatum Biblicarum attributed to Philo which cannot, in any case, have been much later than
Josephus.
Turning at least partially to the Romans, as Flavius Josephus and perhaps Justus of Tiberias
did83, was the last act of ancient Jewish historiography before it died. This would at first sight
appear to offer a simple explanation of the end of Jewish historiography in Antiquity. It is generally
recognized that there is not much inducement to write the history of one’s own nation once
independence is lost. The Greeks stopped writing their own history during the Roman Empire. Yet
on reflection this cannot be the whole explanation in the case of the Jews, for political independence
had been taken away from them long before the destruction of the Temple, while their spiritual and
religious independence survived the disappearance of the Temple. The intervention of the Romans
and, above all, the trauma of the loss of the Temple have, no doubt, something to do with the end of
Jewish historiography, but they do not constitute a satisfactory explanation.
[26] Further reflection multiplies the doubts. We cannot isolate the end of Jewish historiography
from other concurrent developments – least of all from the rise and decline of apocalyptic thought.
Can it be chance that Jewish apocalyptic starts in strength in the second century B.C., when Jewish
historiography of the Hellenistic period begins, and ends in a paroxysm about A.D. 100-120 when
historiography also died? What does this parallel rise and decline mean?
Having decided that Jewish historiography was only of limited importance in the relations
between Jews and Gentiles, we discovered that there had perhaps been a change when the Romans
came in: they interested the Jews more directly and perhaps they themselves took some practical
interest in knowing Jewish history. But the change was not such as to give new and lasting84 vitality
78
P-o 180: It is, however, worth mentioning that Philo ... antiquities, msn,b[Mom] su mgsn,dx,inf, copiato ds. su f. 24bis,
con indicazione su mgsup: Insertion end of § 1, msr[AMM]; P-o 162: tsf24, msr[AMM] interl.mginf,sn; P-o 54: def.
79
P-o 162: learned <-> learnt, msr[AMM];P-o 180, 54: learnt.
80
P-o 180: readers. -> Yosippon, mgdxmsb[Mom], del.
81
P-o 180: numm. VII <-> V, msb[Mom]; P-o 162, 54: V.
82
P-o 180, 162: such as Justus ... rival, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
83
P-o 180, 162: and perhaps Justus of Tiberias did, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
84
P-o 180, 162: and lasting, interl.ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.
240
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
to the Jewish attitude to history, it was rather one of the manifestations which prepared the death of
Jewish historiography. However, the death of Jewish historiography was accompanied, if not by the
death, at least by the paralysis of Jewish apocalypse.85 Our inquest must ultimately86 turn to the
balance between history and apocalypse and must end by assessing the ultimate meaning of the
decline of both. In this decline we shall find the Romans again, but in a different role. But before we
are doing that, we must ask ourselves some stringent questions about our evidence on the internal
currents of Jewish life in the last two centuries before the destruction of the Temple.87
i
Sulla presenza di Flavio Giuseppe nel ciclo sul giudaismo ellenistico e sul proposito momiglianeo di
riesaminare l’intera opera dello storico dal punto di vista della reazione giudaica alla storia e all’apocalittica (progetto
evidentemente mai realizzato) cfr. l’introduzione a GL 1980 III (Flavius Josephus), par. 3, pp. 147-49, e CL 1981 III
(Some Exemplary), n. i.
ii
Il riferimento è alla conclusione del saggio del 1976 Ebrei e Greci e alla sua connessione tra il trionfo del
Farisaismo successivo al 70 e l’affermazione di una “prospettiva ottimistica e contemplativa” connessa alla perdita del
senso di continuità della storia (p. 443).
iii
PURVIS 1981.
iv
Anth. Gr. 7.417, 5-6.
v
Cfr. Midrash Rabbah, Lam. I, 1, 4-13, in cui ben dieci storie si basano sul confronto tra l’intelligenza di
Ateniesi e Gerosolimitani, a tutto vantaggio di questi ultimi.
vi
Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1975C per la recensione di un volume di I. Zinberg sul tema.
vii
Per i sonetti e la frottola sulla corte di Cangrande della Scala vd. Rime volgari di Immanuel Romano, poeta del
XIV secolo, nuovamente riscontrate sui codici e fin qui note, Parma 1898; I sonetti volgari di Immanuel Romano,
Torino 1904; Il Bisbidis di Manoello Giudeo secondo il Codice Casanatense d.V.5, a c. di G. Mazzoni, Roma 1887.
viii
Scritto fra il 1507 e il 1508, il Bovo-Bukh di Elia Levita è disponibile in una recente traduzione in J. SMITH
2003.
ix
BICKERMAN 1948.
x
Cfr. GL 1979 IV (Defence), c. 15.
xi
SARFATTI 1977.
xii
Vd. D. LEWIS 1957; l’articolo, con edizione del testo greco e traduzione inglese dell’epigrafe, è citato da
Momigliano stesso in un altro contributo sull’argomento (Alien Wisdom, 86-7).
xiii
BERNARD 1972.
xiv
Sulla proseuche cfr. anche Ebrei e Greci, 15.
xv
Eus., PE, XIII 12, 13-14 (cfr. DENIS 1970B, 225-226).
xvi
Ha ora inizio una sequenza di valutazione di alcuni discussi riferimenti biblici in autori gentili (per cui cfr.
Anche Alien Wisdom, 92-4), in cui è plausibile che Momigliano avesse presente SAFRAI - STERN 1974-1976, II, 11261146, data la riproposizione, con sostanziale accordo dei punti di vita, degli argomenti affrontati (cfr. note successive).
xvii
Cfr. SAFRAI-STERN 1974-1976, 1139 e n. 1 (dove si rimanda inoltre, per la possibile conoscenza della Bibbia
greca da parte di Callimaco e Teocrito, a FRASER 1972, II 1000 n. 255).
xviii
Cfr. SAFRAI-STERN 1974-1976, 1146, per l’unico (presunto) riferimento "ebraico" diretto in Virgilio (Georg.
3, 12: Idumaeas palmas), e ibid., n. 3, per la questione dell’influenza del messianismo ebraico sulla IV Ecloga.
xix
Ps.-Long., De Subl. 9, 8. Cfr. Alien Wisdom, 91, e SAFRAI-STERN 1974-1976, 1139-1141 (con bibliografia di
riferimento).
xx
Cfr. SAFRAI-STERN 1974-1976, 1139, dove è proposto in particolare il confronto di Gen. 1, 28 con Ocellus
Lucanus, De Universi Natura, 45-46 (ed. R. Harder 1926, 22 = THESLEFF 1965, 135-136).
xxi
WOLFSON 1947; cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1949B.
xxii
SANDMEL 1971. Di Sandmel Momigliano possedeva anche il dattiloscritto preparatorio a SANDMEL 1979 (dal
titolo Philo Judaeus: an introduction to the man, his writings, and his significance).
xxiii
Cfr. GL 1979 I (Prologue), cc. 6-10.
xxiv
LÉVY 1965.
xxv
MARGALIOTH 1966.
xxvi
Iuven. 14, 102 ss.
85
P-o 180: apocalyptic thought. -> Can it be chance that Jewish apocalyptic starts in strength ... apocalypse, del.
P-o 180, 162: ultimately <-> now, ms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: now.
87
P-o 180, 162: But before we are doing ... Temple, mginfms[180 Mom, 162 AMM]; P-o 54: def.; P-o 180: But before
we are doing ... Temple <-> I have reserved for my last lecture the analysis of this strange combination of
historiography and apocalyptic writing among the Jews of the period from the Maccabean rebellion to Bar Kochba
rebellion. When both apocalyptic and historical writing are silenced, then we know that we are in a new age,
mginfmsb[Mom].
86
241
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – Between Synagogue and Apocalypse
I. Jews and Gentiles
xxvii
Mai, A. (ed.), Scriptorum veterum nova collectio, vol. VII, Roma 1833, 180-191.
L’interessamento e la favorevole disposizione di Poppea nei confronti degli Ebrei sono testimoniati da Ios.
Ant. 20, 195 (cfr. anche Ant. 20, 252, per il suo ruolo nella nomina di Floro a procuratore della Giudea). Assai discussa
è l’ipotesi di un’eventuale adesione di Poppea al giudaismo, basata sull’interpretazione della qualifica di θεοσεβής in
Ant. 20, 195 (cfr. bibliografia in STERN 1974–84, II 5-6 e n. 12) e della sua sepoltura difforme dal Romanus mos in Tac.
Ann. 16, 6 (STERN 1974-84, II 42-43).
xxix
FrGH 722 F 1. Per la datazione di Demetrio si rimanda a WACHOLDER1968, part. alla p. 454.
xxx
FrGH 722 T 1 = Ios. Ap. 1.218.
xxxi
FrGH 723 F 5 = Eus. P.E. 9.39.
xxxii
II Macc. 2, 1-7. L’individuazione di un ulteriore testimone della tradizione (Geremia salvatore dell’arca
durante il saccheggio babilonese) nella breve Epistola di Geremia, benché il testo di quest’ultima non contenga al suo
stato attuale alcuna allusione all’episodio, suggerisce che Momigliano volesse collocarsi nel filone della critica che
identifica in un’ipotetica versione originaria “estesa” dell’Epistola la fonte del sopracitato passo di II Macc. 2, dove si
fa riferimento a delle generiche ἀπογραφαὶ Ἱερεµίας (chiamate anche γραφή in II Macc 2,4) attribuendo loro sia l’invito
del profeta all’astensione dall’idolatria (effettivo argomento dell’Epistola) che una narrazione del salvataggio dell’arca.
Sulla dibattuta (e forse irrisolvibile) questione si rimanda a BALL 1913; C. MOORE 1977.
xxxiii
FREUDENTHAL 1874-5, 82-103.
xxxiv
L’ elisione delle cc. 18-9 nel testo GL e l’aggiunta esplicativa in P-o 180 (per cui cfr. apparato critico ad loc.)
testimoniano la volontà di ricongiungere al quadro generale i due cicli intermedi di lectures del 1980 e 1981. Il
riferimento ai testi editi è rivolto ai contributi sull’argomento dati alle stampe in quel periodo e riuniti poi nel 1984 nella
sezione “Storici del Giudaismo” in Settimo; fra questi, risultano incentrati su Giuseppe e su Daniele Flavius Josephus
and Alexander’s visit to Gerusalem (= Alexander’s visit); Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi
(=Daniele, teoria); Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide (=Ciò che Flavio). Fra i lavori di poco precedenti, che documento
una progressiva focalizzazione d’interesse a partire dalla seconda metà degli anni ’70, si ricordano: Greek
Historiography; The Date of the First Book of Maccabees (=First Maccabees); The Second Book of Maccabees
(=Second Maccabees); Interpretazioni I-III. Per la disamina degli storiografi giudeo-ellenistici eliminata in P-o 180
(cfr. apparato) si rimanda invece ad Alien Wisdom, 92-4.
xxxv
Per contributi successivi sull’argomento, si rimanda a SCHÄFER 1997 e ASSMAN 1998.
xxxvi
Cfr. la settima Interpretazione minima su Filone di Biblos (Interpretazioni IV-VII, 111-114) di poco
precedente alla lecture di Chicago.
xxxvii
Sul possibile uso storiografico del Talmud Babilonese cfr. KALMIN 2006 (part. al cap. 1, “Roman persecutions
of the Jews”).
xxviii
242
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
GL 1982 II The Jewish Sects in the Sources
Sedi e date:
GL 1982 III (27 gennaio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 426)
Documenti:
P-o 163 ms.
P-o 164 top c. di P-o 163.
P-o 160, P-o 165 (b): c.c. di P-o 164.
P-o 165 (a): aggiunte per Leo Baeck College Lecture 1985
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
The Jewish Sects in the Sources è stata proposta in due occasioni, in forme tra loro così diverse
che non sarebbe scorretto parlare, più che di una, di due lezioni dallo stesso titolo.
La prima volta è stata presentata come GL II il 27.1.1982; la seconda come singolo intervento
presso il Leo Baeck College, il 9.1.1985. La trattazione oxoniense prevedeva, oltre all’ampia
sezione su Giuseppe, due capitoli finali incentrati sulle fonti rabbiniche e neotestamentarie. Al Leo
Baeck, tre anni dopo, i due capitoli in questione vengono tralasciati a favore dell’inserimento in
apertura di una discussione, allora in stampa per Athenaeum, sulla Lettera di ‘Anna’ a ‘Seneca’1.
L’edizione della versione del 1985 implicherebbe una riproposizione di tale inserimento; tuttavia, il
fatto che nelle carte conservate ogni riferimento relativo alla discussione sulla Lettera non vada
oltre l’accenno porta a concludere che la versione Leo Baeck sia andata perduta. Come ha messo in
evidenza GRANATA 2006 (pp. lxiv-lxv), il fatto il testo stampato da Athenaeum rimanga del tutto
estraneo alla questione delle “sette” ebraiche2, e quindi al nucelo tematico sostanziale di The Sects,
dissuade dall’ipotizzare che la trattazione momiglianea della Lettera presso il Leo Baeck
coincidesse con il testo stampato da Athenaeum e che sia quindi ricostruibile sulla base della
versione pubblicata3.
Alla luce di queste difficoltà oggettive, e nell’intento di rendere accessibile una trattazione –
quella dei due capitoli Grinfield caduti – non altrove pubblicata e mai definitivamente “scartata”
dall’autore4, si presenta in questa sede la versione Grinfield. Preso come base è il testo di P-o 160,
una c.c. ds. di 20 cc. corredata da interventi mss. blu e neri di mano dell’autore; la tipologia di molti
di essi identifica il fascicolo come reading copy GL, su cui Momigliano – come di consueto –
sarebbe poi tornato a lavorare in preparazione del testo Leo Baeck (cfr. inserzione alla c. 12).
Le variazioni apportate per quest’ultima versione sono documentate invece nella forma più
completa da P-o 165, c.c. che nella parte ds. risulta identica a P-o 160 e su cui gli interventi di
Momigliano, ricopiati a mano da AMM, vengono affiancati da indicazioni redazionali di AMM
stessa finalizzate alla nuova versione: si riportano in apparato gli aggiornamenti e chiarimenti di
maggior rilievo, che si sarebbe tentati di mettere a testo se non trattenesse la necessità di evitare di
produrre un ibrido, mai proposto dall’autore in quella forma.
Tra gli altri documenti, P-o 164 rappresenta infine l’originale ds. delle due c.c. P-o 160 e P-o
165, privo di interventi di rilievo; esso offre un testo fedele a quello del ms. P-o 163 (23 ff. a righe),
documento in cui Momigliano sembrerebbe aver ricopiato, con due penne diverse e pochi, piccoli
interventi in corso di lavoro, una prima stesura di cui non rimane traccia documentaria.
1
MOMIGLIANO 1985a (= Anna-Seneca).
L’AAM conserva il ds. originale, il documento P-l 19, identico al contributo stampato.
3
Essenzialmente P-l 6, documento composito rubricato come Chicago Lecture 1985, che pur presentando
l’apposizione (di mano di AMM) del titolo The New Letter by Anna to Seneca sulla prima pagina non fornisce
propriamente una trattazione relativa al tema, e P-l 18, frammento di 5 ff. mss. della Chicago version che si riporta in
apparato per permettere di rilevare le differenze rispetto all’edito P-l 19.
4
Significativo in proposito il fatto che sul f. 12 di P-o 160, correggendo a mano il ds. Grinfield in vista della lecture al
Leo Baeck, Momigliano scriva: “It is not my purpose to go beyond Josephus this evening. I shall deal elsewhere with
the Gospels and the Talmudic sources.”
2
243
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
2. Argomento della lecture
Le scoperte di Qumran, portando alla luce la complessa organizzazione della setta essenica,
hanno contribuito a mettere in evidenza l’inadeguatezza della descrizione che ne offre Giuseppe
Flavio e a gettare dubbi anche sulla sua presentazione di Farisei e Sadducei. Risulta difficile da
stabilire la loro riconducibilità a determinati filoni della letteratura intertestamentaria, a causa di un
circolo vizioso creato dalla mancanza di informazioni certe sulle correnti interne al giudaismo
ellenistico e sui testi loro attribuibili, il cui fattore determinante va individuato nella reticenza delle
stesse fonti primarie (Giuseppe Flavio, i testi rabbinici e il Nuovo Testamento). Alle conoscenze
mostrate sugli Esseni, per i quali doveva disporre di fonti informative, Giuseppe affianca infatti il
trattamento superficiale di Farisei e Sadducei, in cui si osservano la mancanza di un’analisi
sistematica del loro disaccordo sulla Legge orale e una caratterizzazione politica incoerente sia in
relazione alla mancata assunzione di ruoli definiti nella lotta di potere tra Aristobulo II e Ircano II,
sia nella descrizione dei rapporti con Erode: tutti fattori imputabili alla dipendenza troppo stretta di
Giuseppe dalle sue fonti, inquadrabile in un processo descrittivo che tende a farsi più confuso con
l’avvicinarsi della ribellione anti-romana.
L’esame dei testi rabbinici (Mishnah e Tosefta) dà l’impressione che il mondo in essi descritto,
una comunità coesa di saggi che riconosce l’autorità reciproca, non attribuisca alcuna preminenenza
a Farisei e Sadducei, subordinandone l’autorità a quella dei rabbini. A differenza che in Giuseppe le
differenze di opinione diventano qui puntuali, per quanto l’esiguità dello spazio loro riservato e la
natura spesso marginale o cavillosa del dibattito non permettano una valutazione complessiva. Una
netta distinzione tra Farisei e Sadducei è evitata: la stessa espressione “Legge orale” (comunque
rara nei testi tannaitici) non è mai usata per contrapporli; la considerazione per i Farisei oscilla tra
simpatia e ostilità, secondo un’alternanza di giudizio di volta in volta subordinata alle posizioni
assunte da autorità rabbiniche rispetto a un mondo evidentemente sentito come lontano.
Con le fonti rabbiniche il Nuovo Testamento condivide una perdita di interesse per gli Esseni e
una maggiore simpatia per i Farisei piuttosto che per i Sadducei, ma se ne discosta per
l’impressione di vivo contatto con la quotidianità che discende dal tipo di narazione. La struttura
che ne emerge non è tuttavia esente da conflitti: spiccano soprattutto le discrepanze tra Vangeli
sull’identificazione tra Farisei e scribi, sentita comunque molto più che nei testi rabbinici. Il
disinteresse delle fonti nel presentare un quadro corerente delle sette giudaiche ha quindi per
conseguenza il fatto che il profilo delle fazioni di maggiore responsabilità storica, i Farisei e i
Sadducei, rimanga indefinito, mentre il gruppo di cui possediamo le informazioni migliori è
paradossalmente quello di minore influenza (gli Esseni).
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi.
The Jewish Sects in the Sources è una lezione nuova, scritta da Momigliano per l’occasione
specifica offerta dalle GL 1982. Sottolineare la novità del tema è importante per diverse ragioni:
non risultano altri contributi momiglianei incentrati sull’argomento, e la lezione appare nel
complesso il frutto di un approfondimento relativamente recente sul ruolo delle fonti scritte nel
determinare, ed eventualmente alterare, i connotati delle articolazioni interne – siano esse politiche
o dottrinali – della società ebraica in età ellenistica.
Il confronto con le posizioni espresse altrove da Momigliano su singole questioni affrontate nella
lezione permette di apprezzare l’intensità con cui qui viene dato rilievo alla mancata percezione, da
parte dei rabbini, della propria continuità rispetto ai Farisei. Continuità che nell’opera momiglianea
è fuori discussione: se si pensa all’ultima pagina di Ebrei e Greci (1976) e alla sua trattazione del
“trionfo del farisaismo”, l’identificazione dei Farisei con i saggi/rabbini, o per così dire l’evoluzione
della prima categoria nell’altra, risulta implicitamente accettata5. Che in The Jewish Sects in the
5
Cfr. anche il lavoro La ribellione giudaica, scritto per la CAH nel 1934. In uno dei suoi ultimi lavori, la recensione
su CPh del 1988 al libro di Will e Orrieux su Ioudaïsmos-hellénismos, non è messo in discussione il fatto che il
244
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
Sources venga analizzata la distanza che separa nelle fonti il mondo dei rabbini da quello dei farisei
potrebbe quindi apparire una contraddizione in termini: ma la contraddizione è solo apparente, se si
considera come il fuoco della lecture dell’82 sia rivolto a una prospettiva parziale e specifica, la
valutazione della capacità delle fonti esaminate di “fare storiografia”. In altre parole, non interessa
qui all’autore la risposta all’interrogativo, se corrisponda a verità storica o meno il fatto che il
rabbinato discenda dal farisaismo: l’obiettivo è piuttosto sottolinare come i rabbini non conoscano e
non indaghino storicamente il loro passato, nel tentativo di dimostrare come la perdita di interesse
per la storia che le fonti evidenziano costituisca un aspetto sostanziale della cesura che segna il
passaggio, per gli Ebrei, a nuove forme e strutture di identità e vita sociale.
Non si può tuttavia escludere che la modifica apportata alla versione Leo Baeck, ossia
l’eliminazione dell’esame del Nuovo Testamento e in particolare delle fonti rabbiniche, possa
essere messa in relazione con una certa insoddisfazione dell’autore nei confronti alle parti eliminate.
La disamina di testi rabbinici, dichiaratamente parziale, poteva parere inadatta a un pubblico di
specialisti. Era escluso dall’analisi, ad esempio, il Talmud babilonese, in cui Neusner avrebbe
segnalato a breve un passo talmudico (Kiddushin 66a), in stretta relazione con il racconto di
Giuseppe sulla rottura fra i Farisei e Giovanni Ircano citato da Momigliano nella lezione Grinfield
(Ant. 13, 288-299), in cui la prospettiva di identificazione tra Farisei e saggi risulta indiscutibile6.
farisaismo “can survive even without the support of a Jewish state because it sacralizes most of ordinary life” (Nono,
764).
6
NEUSNER 1987, pp. 284 ss. (Giovanni Ircano è Alessandro Janneo in Kiddushin).
245
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
II*7
The Jewish Sects in the Sources8
I
We know far less about the internal currents of Judaism inside and outside Palestine in the period
between 200 B.C. and the destruction of the Temple in A.D. 70 than we know about the relation
between Jews and Gentiles in the same period. This may at first seem unbelievable if one considers
that it is Flavius Josephus’ explicit aim to give us very precise information about these currents –
Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes and the “fourth philosophy” which he ominously leaves unnamed.
Furthermore, the rabbinic texts and the New Testament provide, as we all know, ample material to
compare with Josephus. But the difficulty of obtaining any clear impression of the internal social
and intellectual stratification of Judaism in the Hellenistic and Roman period has been felt since the
end of the sixteenth century when the famous dispute on Jewish sects developed between Johannes
Drusius, the Jesuit Nicholas Serarius and no less a person than Joseph Scaliger. The texts of this
controversy were collected in 1619 at Arnhemi and dedicated to John Prideaux who is described9 as
Vice-Rector of Exeter College and Professor of Holy Scriptures at Oxford. About 250 years later, in
one of the earliest momentous interventions of Jewish scholars in what was after all the history of
their own Judaism, Abraham Geiger gave an interpretation of the Jewish sects which, by
introducing an element of social and political history while relying heavily on Talmudic texts,
appeared revolutionary. Geiger’s book of 1857, Urschrift und Uebersetzungen der Bibel,ii was
followed in rapid succession by Joseph Derenbourg’s Essai sur l’histoire et la géographie de la
Palestine of 1867 and Julius Wellhausen’s monograph on Pharisäer und Sadduzäer of 1874iii
which, while deprecating the rabbinic sources, basically accepted Geiger’s new social approach to
the religious groups. But no basic agreement ensued on the interpretation of the so-called Jewish
“sects” or “philosophies”, though the words Epicurean and Pythagorean were rather freely [2] used
when Sadducees and Essenes were examined.iv The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls had among
its consequences that of making evident at least one factor in the obscurity of the previously known
sources. With the Damascus rule now solidly inserted among the Qumran texts (some scholars had
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 160, c.c. di 20 ff. reading copy GL corredata da interventi mss. dell’autore; si
riportano in apparato gli interventi condotti sul testo in vista della riproposizione presso il Leo Baeck College
(documentati nella forma più completa da P-o 165) e le lezioni alternative eventualmente presenti in P-o 164, top c.
alla base delle due c.c. 160 e 165, o nell’ originale ms. P-o 163 di cui P-o 164 appare trascrizione fedele. Si segnalano
inoltre le lezioni presenti nel documento P-p 99 (sottoserie inediti AAM), quaderno “miscellanea” che alle pp. 1-23
reca il testo di The Jewish Sects GL 182 II.
7
P-o 160: II Grinfield Lecture 27.II.82, tsfmsb[Mom]; Also: Leo Baeck College, Jan. 85 (with a new beginning),
f
ts msl[AMM]; P-o 165: Grinfield II, 27.1.82 (new), c.c. 3, mgsupmsr[AMM]; Corrections in this copy transferred to the
second (<-> third) c.c. and sent to A. in Chicago (who now has c.c. 1 and c.c. 2), 17.4.82, tsf(sn)msb[AMM].
8
P-o 165: su due ff. allegati al f. 1: [f. a] I shall begin where I should not begin – with an almost irrelevant text. But the
text is new, fascinating, and may even teach us something about Jewish sects and help us to evaluate Josephus. Cf. THE
NEW LETTER BY “ANNA” TO “SENECA”, to be publ. in Athenaeum. (new beginning of lecture at Leo Baeck
College, 9.1.85) [f. b] (Insertion on p. 1 of Leo Baeck College lecture, 9.1.85) We can now go to the real subject of my
lecture. The stray piece of evidence which I have so far discussed is a further indication of how complicated matters
really are when we examine the ancient texts about the Jewish sects with the precise intention of avoiding
simplification. What we found at first sight in the new text was a Sadducee high priest making propaganda for the
immortality of the soul in a letter to the pagan philosopher Seneca. True enough, even a superficial analysis of the new
text indicated the possibility that the letter had not been written by a Sadducee high priest and had not been addressed to
the pagan philosopher Seneca. But the fact remains that somewhere in the Latin West there were some Latin-speaking
Jews who insisted on the immortality of the soul, but not on the Oral Law. If we follow the conventional description,
this particular Jew was perhaps better than a Sadducee, but not quite as good as a Pharisee. But on what do we base our
conventional view?
9
P-o 160: described <- curiously, del; P-o 165, 163, P-p 99: corr. def.
246
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
defined it, when still isolated, as a Sadducean text) and with the Manual of Discipline10 added to it,
it became clear that at least in this case the internal organization of a Jewish sect was far more
complex than we would have expected. If then as appeared overwhelmingly probable for reasons of
location and chronology, the Qumran sect had to be identified with the Essenes, it also became
evident that the description of the Essenes provided by Josephus was not only inadequate but
misleading. The whole conflict centred on the Teacher of Justice, an essential episode in the story of
the Qumran sect on any interpretation, was simply ignored by Josephus. It became legitimate to ask
whether his account of Sadducees and Pharisees was not equally or more misleading. It had not
escaped attention even before the Qumran discovery that Josephus, a self-confessed Pharisee, had
so little to say on both Pharisees and Sadducees – far less than on the Essenes. Furthermore, if the
discovery of the Qumran library directly raised the problem of how far these books scattered in
different caves would be considered the expression of one sect, indirectly it called attention to the
confused state of our knowledge about the relation of the other sects to the surviving
intertestamentary literature. Was the absence of Pharisaic connotations, such as belief in
resurrection, sufficient to make the Ecclesiasticus by Ben Sira or the First Book of Maccabees a
Sadducean book? Vice versa, would belief in resurrection necessarily make the Book of Daniel or
the Second Book of Maccabees Pharisaic? The more evident our ignorance about Sadducees and
Pharisees became, the less certain we felt about the attribution of specific books to either sect.
The interpretation of the Psalms of Solomon is a cautionary tale in itself. In 1874 Wellhausen
lent his authority to the view that the Psalms of Solomon were the product of Pharisean circles.
Consequently the Cambridge edition of [3] 1891 by H. E. Ryle and M. R. James presented them as
Psalms of Pharisees commonly called the Psalms of Solomon. Indeed these Psalms show faith in the
resurrection of the good and in the punishment of the wicked. They are for freedom of the will.
They oppose priests and members of the Synedrion; they express hope in the Davidic Messiah. All
these notions can be more or less11 safely12 attributed to the Pharisees. The historical allusions are in
keeping. The allusions to the siege of Jerusalem and the occupation of the Temple by Pompey are
fairly clear. The death of Pompey by murder in Egypt is even more clearly alluded to in Psalm 2,
30, especially if one slightly emends ἐπὶ τῶν ὀρέων Αἰγύπτου “on the hills of Egypt” into ἐπὶ ὀρίων
Αἰγύπτου “on the borders of Egypt”, as Hilgenfeld suggestedv before Wellhausen. The bulk of these
Psalms must have been put together between 70 and 40 B.C. when there were plenty of Pharisees
about. The Psalms may well reflect their hostility not only to Pompey, but also to the last
Hasmoneans. And yet we must ask ourselves what we mean by saying that these Psalms are
Pharisaic. We know next to nothing about what the Pharisees thought of Pompey. On the other
hand, as we shall see, we have some reason to believe that the Pharisees placed a special emphasis
on the distinction between written law and oral law and on the authority of the latter; but there is no
sign of this in the Psalms of Solomon. Nor is there any indication that the Psalms emanated from an
organized fraternity or at least a well definite circle of religious activists, as the Pharisees are
generally recognised to be. We are therefore presented with the dilemma of either accepting as
satisfactory a definition of Pharisaism which is far vaguer than the definitions circulating at present
or admitting that the Psalms of Solomon, though including Pharisaic notions, are not, strictly
speaking, Pharisaic. It is remarkable that in his recent work on the Psalms of Solomon, Joachim
Schüpphaus (Die Psalmen Salomos, Leiden 1977), though operating from the doubtful
presupposition that one can discover innumerable additions to the original text, feels nonetheless
unable to repeat the old definition of Pharisaic psalms. Schüpphaus says that the Psalms of Solomon
represent a “Vorstufe des späteren Pharisäismus”, a previous stage of later Pharisaism. But this
10
11
12
P-o 163: Manual of Discipline <-> Rule of the Community, msn[Mom]; P-p 99: id., c.c.
P-o 163: more or less, interl.msb[Mom]; P-p 99: id., c.c.
P-o 163, P-p 99: safely; P-o 160, 165, 164: def.
247
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
simply raises the further question of whether Schüpphaus [4] or anybody else is capable of
recognizing different stages in the development of Pharisaism.13
In other words the example of the Psalms of Solomon indicates in an acute form that any
attribution of extant intertestamentary texts to Sadducees or Pharisees – or indeed to Essenes –14 is
made uncertain, or more precisely unsafe, by the difficulty we have in grasping the characteristics
of these sects. In its turn the lack of texts to be attributed with certainty to either sect makes it
difficult to characterize the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The vicious circle is not easy to break.
Indeed we may begin to suspect that in a strict sense it is impossible to break. It is not enough to say
that we have an altogether insufficient knowledge of the internal structure of the Jewish groups or
sects – with the exception of the Qumran sect. The fact is that our sources – Flavius Josephus, the
rabbinic texts and the New Testament – are so constructed as not to answer our questions about the
origins of the sects, their internal organization (with the possible exception of the Essenes), their
mutual behaviour, their organs for intervention in the political and legal activities in Judaea, and
their attitudes towards pagan surroundings. We should of course not be surprised if Flavius
Josephus did not ask himself the questions we learned to ask from Max Weber and his belated pupil
Ernst Troeltsch in the first decades of this centuryvi. But the reticence of our sources goes beyond
what is normal in ancient historical sources. If we take Sadducees and Pharisees as primarily social
and political groups, then we are told far less about them than the Greek and Roman historical
sources tell us about oligarchs and democrats, patricians and plebeians, optimates and populares
and so on. If we take them (as Josephus would seem to present them) as primarily doctrinal
factions, schools of thought, then Diogenes Laertius is incomparably more informative. He knows
how to trace back a Greek sect to its founder and to characterize the original setting of a philosophic
school. Dr. Vermes remarked in his fairly recent paper on “The Essenes and History” in Journ.
Jewish Studies 32, 1981, 18-31 that our sources, including Josephus, treated this sect in a way
which is unhistorical, not in relation to modern ways of writing [5] history, but to Greek and even
earlier Jewish types of historiography. The first two Books of the Maccabees have a far more
realistic vision of how divisions developed in Judaea than Flavius Josephus has. We return,
therefore, to the phenomenon which I have tried to emphasize many times in my writings15vii – that
Flavius Josephus is only up to a point an interpreter of Jewish history according to Greek methods.
Indeed, when we approach him from the angle of the internal currents of Jewish life of the
Hellenistic and Roman period he bears witness to the loss of historical orientation which
characterizes Jewish thought in the late first century A.D. In different forms non-historical
orientation characterizes rabbinic and Neo-testamentary sources alike. We have therefore to reckon
with a far more fundamental difficulty than insufficient evidence in dealing with the internal life of
Judaism in the period, say, between 200 B.C. and A.D. 50. We are asking our evidence to answer
questions which it does not want answer16.
II
With these considerations in mind, let us then go nearer to our sources, and first to Josephus.
There is no need to give here a bibliography because a recent and excellent one is provided in the
new revised Schürer, The History of the Jewish People, Vol. II, which appeared in 1979viii. But
13
P-o 160: the development of Pharisaism. In 1982 E.-M. Laperrousaz could revive the equally unconvincing theory
that the Psalms of Solomon are Essenic in his book L’attente du Messie en Palestine à la veille et au début de l’ère
chrétienne. I return with pleasure to the book by A. Büchler, Types of Jewish-Palestinian Piety from 70 B.C.E. to 70
C.E.: the Ancient Pious Men, now more than fifty years old, even if it is only a partial interpretation of the Psalms of
Solomon, interl. e mgsup, dx, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., interl. e mgsup, msb[AMM]; Addition on Leo Baeck lecture,
mgsnmsb[AMM]; P-o 163, 164, P-p 99: def.
14
P-o 160: - or indeed the Essenes -, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 163, 164, 165, P-p 99: def.
15
P-o 160, 165: have tried to emphasize many times in my writings <-> already mentioned at the end of my previous
lecture,ms[160 Mom, 165 AMM]; P-o 163, 164, P-p 99: def.
16
P-o 163: does not want answer <-> is not suitable, msn[Mom]; P-p 99: id., c.c.
248
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
three books which were published after the completion of that bibliography may be mentioned: A
Hidden Revolution by Ellis Rivkin, 1978 – mainly on the Pharisees; Judaism. The Evidence of the
Mishnah by J. Neusner, 1981; and George W. E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature between the Bible
and the Mishnah, 1981. There is also a recent collection of essays, Aspects of Judaism in the
Graeco-Roman Period, published as the second volume of a series entitled Jewish and Christian
Self-Definition, 1981ix, which contains much of interest.
Flavius Josephus begins to be elusive where he seems to be most explicit. He tells us in his
autobiography that at the age of sixteen he decided to become personally acquainted with Pharisees,
Sadducees and Essenes successively in order to decide which of the three sects was the best: after
three years he chose the [6] Pharisees as his own permanent group. But in the next line he blandly
explains that he passed the three years in the wilderness as a disciple of a man called Bannus,
“wearing only such clothing as trees provide, feeding on such things as grew themselves and using
frequent ablutions of cold water”x. Bannus, to all appearances, was an independent religious leader
owing no allegiance to any of the prevailing sects. We are therefore left to wonder when and where
Josephus found the time to make his personal acquaintance with the life of these sects. In any case
he made his choice, but when he wrote down his three17 main accounts of the three sects – first in
Bellum II, 118-166, then in Antiquities XIII, 171-173 and XVIII, 12-1518 with explicit backreference to Bellum – he hardly concealed his sympathy with the Essenes – which, again, is not
what we expected. For Josephus the Essenes are different from Sadducees and Pharisees in so far as
they put themselves outside ordinary society. They live for themselves and therefore their style of
life is more important than their tenets. This partly explains why Josephus goes much more into the
details of their rules and habits. But one can hardly avoid suspecting that the complexity of his
description of the Essenes is due to the circumstance that he had predecessors in that description,
whereas it is doubtful whether he had sources to rely upon for a systematic account of Sadducees
and Pharisees. Philo of Alexandria, who to my knowledge never explicitly mentions Sadducees and
Pharisees, has a precise description of the Essenes in the Quod omnis probus liber sit,xi a pamphlet
which may or may not belong to his youth, but is certainly one of the few of Philo’s writings which
would have been intelligible to a Gentile. The question whether Josephus followed Philo is
immaterial because there were other analogous descriptions of the Essenes for the benefit of the
Gentiles, one of which is summarized by Pliny Nat. Hist. 5, 17, 73. The “gens aeterna ... in qua
nemo nascitur”, as Pliny says, was a curiosity for export. Not so the Sadducees and Pharisees. It is
important to form a precise idea of what Josephus tells us about them.
In Bellum 2, 118 Josephus mentions the rising of Judas the Galilean. As soon as Judaea was
turned into a Roman province in A.D. 6, Judas the Galilean [7] incited his countrymen to revolt
against the Romans and upbraided them for consenting to pay the tribute. He became the founder of
a sect of his own, which had nothing in common with the pre-existing sects. This offers Josephus an
opportunity to describe the three pre-existing sects. The Pharisees and Sadducees are perfunctorily
described as two philosophic sects of the Greek type, one of which (the Pharisees) believed in fate
and immortality of the soul – with the good men reincarnate and the bad ones suffering eternal
punishment – whereas the Sadducees refused to believe in immortality and fate. Josephus alludes to
the different style of behaviour of the two sects: the Pharisees being affectionate to each other and
on good terms with the rest of the Jews, whereas the Sadducees were boorish in their reciprocal
relations, rude to non-Sadducees19. We are left to guess the relevance of these details, and we may
negatively notice that in this description the famous contrast between the Pharisees as supporters of
Oral Law and the Sadducees as the opponents of its authority is not even mentioned.20
17
P-o 163: three <-> two, msb[Mom]; P-p 99: id., c.c.
P-o 163: and XVIII, 12-15, mginf con segr, msb[Mom]; P-p 99: id., c.c.
19
P-o 160: non-Sadducees -> and severe in applying the Law, mgsnmsb[Mom], del.; the Pharisees being affectionate ...
rude to non-Sadducees, stlnmgsn[Mom], con nota ms.: not mentioned.
20
P-o 160: the famous contrast ... not even mentioned, stlnmgsn[Mom] con nota ms.: contrast.
18
249
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
Antiquities 13, 171-3 provides the second passage. It is not quite clear why Josephus should
choose just this point of Jewish history in the middle of the second century B.C. for introducing the
three sects. He actually adds nothing to the text in Bellum to which he refers. Oral Law is again
conspicuous by its absence. In Antiquities 18 he returns to the situation of Judaea under Quirinus21
in A.D. 6 and to the revolt of Judas the Galilean whom he calls Judas the Gaulanite and associates
with Saddok the Pharisee. He repeats his summary of the three tenets. It becomes even clearer that
Josephus, in dealing with the three traditional sects, is mainly interested in separating them, as
innocent and rather noble, from the subversive behaviour of the fourth school, which is anti-Roman.
The new point to emerge from the brief description in Antiquities Book 18, 11 ff. is that the
Pharisees control the cult practice because the inhabitants of the cities like them, while the
Sadducees stick to the Laws (νόµοι)22, not to the Law, discuss the right path to wisdom with their
teachers, are fewer in number and accomplish nothing because the masses compel them to comply
[8] with the Pharisaic rules. In Antiquities 18 Josephus comes slightly nearer to saying that the
Pharisees call the tune in the matter of ritual, but he is still far from saying that the notion of oral
law separates Pharisees from Sadducees.
The disclosure that a basic disagreement on the nature of the Torah separates Pharisees and
Sadducees is made only by the way within an account of the political conflicts in which the two
sects were involved. If Josephus cannot establish a relation between the philosophical and
theological ideas which he attributes to the two sects and their political activities, he can give us
some impression of where and when they made an impact on the politics of the Hasmoneans. The
most important episode is of course the break of John Hyrcanus and his sons Aristobulus and
Alexander Jannaeus with the Pharisees, a break which Alexander Jannaeus’ widow Alexandra tried
to heal with only moderate success.23 According to Josephus (Ant. 13, 288 ff.) John Hyrcanus, who
was at first supported by the Pharisees, fell out with them because one of them – evidently on behalf
of his group – asked him to give up the High Priesthood and to content himself with the political
leadership of the Jewish State.24 The Sadducees took advantage of this conflict and persuaded
Hyrcanus to abolish unspecified legal regulations patronized by the Pharisees. At this point
Josephus reveals that the Pharisees “passed on to the people certain regulations handed down by
former generations and not recorded in the Laws of Moses, for which reason they are rejected by
the Sadducean group, who hold that only those regulations should be considered valid which were
written down and that those which had been handed down orally25 by the fathers need not be26
observed”xii (Loeb translation by H. St. J. Thackeray). Here finally we have an admission of the
difference between Pharisees and Sadducees in the matter of oral law. But we cannot say that this
clarifies the conflict between the Hasmoneans and the Pharisees. With Alexander Jannaeus it
became open warfare, in which apparently the Pharisees turned to the King of Syria, Demetrius III,
as an ally. Josephus speaks of 800 Jews nailed on crosses by Alexander in one day. Though he does
not say that these Jews were Pharisees [9] (Bell. 1, 97; Ant. 13, 380) he compels us to make the
equation, because when the Pharisees returned to power under Alexandra they took revenge for the
800 (Ant. 13, 410). Alexandra was ultimately compelled to seek a sort of balance of power between
the Pharisees and their opponents whom Josephus now identifies with the dynatoi (the powerful
ones), not specifically with the Sadducees (Ant. 13, 411). Alexandra put these powerful ones in
control of some of the fortresses (Ant. 13, 417) which prepared the second downfall of the Pharisees
on her death. Whatever the details and the uncertain implications of this account by Josephus, what
he had not prepared us for and now asks us to accept is that the Pharisees were a political party with
21
22
23
24
25
26
P-o 160, 165, 164: Quirinus; P-o 163, P-p 99: Quirinius.
P-o 160: νόµοι, msb[Mom]; P-o 163, P-p 99: νόµων; P-o 165: νόµων, msr[AMM].
P-o 160: The most important episode ... moderate success, stlnmgsn[Mom].
P-o 160: asked him to give up ... Jewish State, a fianco, mgsnmsn[Mom]: here only Oral Law.
P-o 160, 164, 165: orally; P-o 163, P-p 99: [orally].
P-o 160, 164, 165: not be; P-o 163, P-p 99: not to be.
250
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
armed followers sufficient to make a difference to the balance of power within the little Jewish
state.
Surprise soon turns in the opposite direction. We would expect the Pharisees and Sadducees to
play a considerable part in the struggle between Aristobulus II and Hyrcanus II which precipitated
the intervention of Pompey, but there is nothing of that in Josephus. The equation of the followers
of Hyrcanus II with the Pharisees and of those of Aristobulus II with the Sadducees is if anything,
modern, not ancient. When Herod appears on the scene, we hear from Josephus (15, 2-4) that he
especially honoured Pollion the Pharisee and his pupil Samaias (whom modern scholars like to
identify, not without risk, with the rabbinic couple of Shemeyah and Abtalionxiii). Pollion, according
to Josephus’ story, would have told the Jewish judges, when Herod had been on trial for his life in
earlier days, that if they spared Herod’s life they would in the future be persecuted by him. Herod
allowed the prophetic Pharisee and his pupil to refuse to take the oath of allegiance to him. If there
was a point of Pharisaic doctrine in refusing an oath of allegiance we are not told. Later, in
Antiquities 17, 41-45, Josephus tells us (as if he were introducing something never mentioned
before) that “a group of Jews calling themselves Pharisees, priding themselves on their adherence to
ancestral custom and claiming to observe the laws on which the Deity approves”27 had a great
influence on the women [10] of Herod’s court. These men, six thousand in number, refused to take
an oath of allegiance to the Romans and to Herod. They were consequently fined. As a faction in
Herod’s court came to their rescue, some of the most influential Pharisees were killed. We may
sympathize with Professor Ellis Rivkin who in his book on A Hidden Revolution (pp. 322-4) refuses
to take the Pharisees of this passage as ordinary Pharisees and describes them as a group of fanatics
“engaged in Rasputin-like palace intrigue to unseat” Herod. We may sympathize with Rivkin, but
we must regretfully conclude that there is no more incoherence in this passage than in any other
passage by Josephus on the Pharisees. At most we can concede that in this passage of Book 17 on
the Pharisees, just as in a passage of Book 15, <371-379xiv>28 on the friendship of Herod for the
Essenes, Josephus may have followed a bit too closely the pagan terminology of his probable source
Nicolas of Damascus, the secretary and historian of Herodxv. Copying secondary sources is not an
exclusive undergraduate activity29. But Josephus would not have copied hostile passages to the
Pharisees if in the Antiquities he had been determined to make propaganda for the Pharisees before
his Roman readers: if I cannot follow Rivkin I can ever less believe my friend Morton Smith’s
theoryxvi that in the Antiquities Josephus tries to sell the Pharisees to the Romans.30
We could go on and analyse the few remaining passages on Pharisees and Sadducees in the
historical books of Josephus, but the analysis would not be very productive. The nearer Josephus
gets to the rebellion against the Romans, the more confused the picture becomes, for the simple
reason that there appears to be no one whose actions are controlled by previously valid principles –
to begin with Josephus himself, who after all is a Pharisee. If in Bell. 2, 411-4 the most notable of
the Pharisees seem to be set against the revolt, in Vita 190-8 the most resolute opponent of Josephus
in Galilee is Simon son of Gamaliel, one of those Pharisees who have the reputation of being
unrivalled experts in their country’s laws. On the other hand the Sadducees almost disappear as
such from the account of Josephus. We learn without apparent motive that the High Priest Anan the
Young was following Sadducean principles in A.D. 62 (Ant. 20, 199). The Essenes enter into the
late history of Judaea as individuals rather than as a group: Simon the Essene interpreted correctly a
dream of Archelaus son of Herod (Ant. 17, 346), and John the Essene was one of the zone
commanders in the war against Rome (Bell. 2, 567). Yet Josephus pays a moving tribute to the
courage [11] shown by the Essenes in general during the war against the Romans (Bell. 2, 152).
If the purpose of Josephus is, as I believe, to separate the three old respectable sects from the
new anti-Roman one of Judas the Galilean, he is perhaps less than successful in his purpose. For he
27
28
29
30
P-o 160: Josephus tells us ... the Deity approves”, stlnmgsn[Mom], con nota ms.: another passage on Oral Law.
P-o 160, 163, 164, 165, P-p 99: Book 15, 2-4.
P-o 163: Copying secundary sources ... activity, interl.msn[Mom].
P-o 160: But Josephus would not ... the Romans, mginfmsb[Mom]; P-o 165: def.
251
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
tells us that “this school agrees in all other respects with the opinion of the Pharisees except that
they have a passion for liberty which is almost unconquerable”. This leaves us no wiser about the
Pharisees and even less so about the fourth sect. I shall not complicate matters further by discussing
the old question whether the fourth school of philosophy of Judas the Galilean is to be identified
with the Zealots. It will be enough to say that Flavius Josephus, who talks a lot about the Zealots,
never identifies them with the fourth philosophy. He rather connects, at least implicitly, the
followers of Judas the Galilean with the Sicarii who held Masada during its last period (Bell. 7, 2525). The traditional identification of the fourth party with the Zealots has nothing to commend it. A
good discussion of the evidence can be found in the article by Menachem Stern in the Yearbook
1973 of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, 135-152xvii . I see no great progress in Martin Hengel’s new
appendix to the second edition of his book on Die Zeloten of 1976xviii .31
To sum up. The Pharisee Josephus gives a coherent account only of the Essenes – whether
reliable or not. He does not even attempt to indicate the precise activities of the Sadducees and
Pharisees and establishes no meaningful relation between their theological opinions and their
political activities. Though in one context, which is not that of the characterization of the sects, he
hints at the difference between Pharisees and Sadducees regarding oral law, he does not attribute
any special importance to it and, in any case, does not give sufficient details to make the difference
significant to the outsiders. To say with Professor Rivkin that in the account of Josephus “the
Unwritten Law thus emerges from the pattern of action as the core of Pharisaism” seems to me
wishful thinking. Consequently it would be too much to expect from Josephus any clarification of
the position of Sadducees and Pharisees in relation to priests, Levites, scribes and rabbis or sages. In
fact it is very doubtful whether [12] Josephus ever perceived scribes and rabbis as specific groups.
This conclusion is somewhat depressing because it means that Josephus does not provide us either
intentionally or unintentionally with a coherent picture of the sects among which he lived and of
which he claimed to have made a special study in his youth. There is in fact an even more
disturbing question arising from this conclusion. The Pharisee Josephus is obviously not thinking of
Jewish history from a Pharisaic point of view. Nothing suggests that his Jewish Antiquities would
be different if he had not been a Pharisee.32 We may take leave of Josephus for the moment with the
question: What difference did it make to him to be a Pharisee? Or alternatively: would we recognize
a Pharisee or a Sadducee if we met one in the street after having read Josephus?33xix
III
31
P-o 160: I see no great progress ... of 1976, mgsn, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: interl.msr[AMM]; P-o 163, 164: def.
P-o 160: It is not my purpose to go beyond Josephus this evening. I shall deal elsewhere with the Gospels and the
Talmudic sources, mgsn con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165:def.; P-o 160, ds. su f. spillato alla c. 12 con segr dopo a Pharisee:
The fact is that Josephus, though a Pharisee, does not commit himself to a recognizably Pharisaic point of view. I am
aware that Morton Smith in his famous essay of 1956 on “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century” (Israel: Its Role in
Civilization, ed. M. Davis) presented the thesis that in his Jewish Antiquities Josephus tried to depict the Pharisees as
“the leading candidates for Roman support in Palestine” after the destruction of the Temple. According to Morton
Smith this would be a departure from the attitude of Josephus in the Jewish War, where he still favoured “the group of
which his family had been representative – the wealthy, pro-Roman section of the Priesthood”. Morton Smith is a
scholar of such stature that any disagreement with him must be expressed with hesitation. But I cannot see a real change
of attitude in Josephus in the Jewish Antiquities, where he has some very strange passages on the honesty of the
Pharisees – it does not matter for our purpose whether these were copied from Nicolaus of Damascus. Furthermore, the
question is wider. How far is Josephus interested in the real religious world of his Jews? He has nothing of the real
Qumran – whatever he may say about the Essenes. He has nothing of Philo and all that goes with Philo. And finally he
has really almost nothing about Jesus. Ellis Rivkin in his very recent What crucified Jesus? (Nashville 1984) has tried to
supplement Josephus on Jesus, a new testimonium flavianum, so to speak, from the Hebrew Union College side. I do not
underrate the meaning of this gesture. But it simply confirms that Josephus was silent.; P-o 165: id., inserito al f. 12 con
segr dopo a Pharisee e nota msb[AMM]: Insertion in Leo Baeck lecture, 9.1.85.
33
P-o 160: The new text I have produced this evening seems to imply that this is not quite the case. The fault may be
that of the new text – but it may also be that of Josephus, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., msb[AMM] con nota
msb[AMM]: end of Leo Baeck lecture.
32
252
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
The trouble is that this question becomes even more acute when we turn to the rabbinic sources.
I shall confine myself to what the Mishnah and the Tosefta have to say. The former is traditionally
dated at the very beginning of the third century A.D., though nobody likes to be asked what he
means by saying that the patriarch Judah compiled it: was it an oral or a written compilation? As for
the Tosefta, we know even less. The language is very close to that of the Mishnah, and the internal
evidence does not seem to go beyond A.D. 240. But in what precisely the Tosefta should be
considered a supplement to the Mishnah and at what moment and place this supplement was put
together are two questions not yet rigorously answered. Authoritative scholars put it at the end of
the fourth century and make it contemporary with the Talmud of Jerusalem for reasons which are
not self-evident. There is indeed ample scope for disagreement in the interpretation of the rabbinic
passages on the Sadducees and Pharisees, but the overwhelming impression they leave on the reader
is that the world of the two sects and the world of the rabbis are different. The world of Mishnah
and Tosefta is a world of individual rabbis or sages who know they belong to the same society and
therefore reciprocally presuppose and recognize each other’s authority.
[13] They are the confrères of a sort of Institut of France rather than the Fellows of the British
Academy who have not yet developed the implicit solidarity and mutual esteem engendered by
intellectual disagreement on individual topics. The opinions which count are given in the Mishnah
and Tosefta either under the individual names or collectively under the names of sages, Hachamim.
Sadducees and Pharisees do not appear either individually or collectively as authoritative. No
Sadducee or Pharisee, as such, has an individual face; and no rule is authoritative simply because it
is given either by Sadducees or by Pharisees. If in specific cases the sages accepted the rules of the
Pharisees they gave authority, as sages, to what they learned from the Pharisees34. I am not going
beyond Mishnah and Tosefta in using rabbinic passages, because I am satisfied that the passages in
the two Talmuds and in the early Midrashim, of which a representative selection is collected by
John Bowker in his well-known book Jesus and the Pharisees, 1973, would not change the picture
while raising desperate problems about the transmission of the information and its reliability.
To pass from Josephus to Mishnah and Tosefta is of course to pass from texts in which the
difference of opinion between Pharisees and Sadducees is so lofty as to be invisible to texts in
which the differences are precise. There is always a legal point at stake. Furthermore, the rabbis
have a formula to indicate these differences of opinion: “The Sadducees say, we cry out against
you, oh Pharisees ... The Pharisees say, we cry out against you, oh Sadducees”. However, it soon
becomes evident that these conflicts of opinion are extremely few, if measured against the two
thousand pages or so to which any joint English translation of the Mishnah and Tosefta would run
(the Mishnah alone in Danby’s translationxx has more than 800 pages). The disagreements are about
details, even if they are important details. For instance, in the treatise “The Hands” (Yadaim) the
Sadducees are shown to be indifferent to the Pharisaic notion that the Holy Scriptures render the
hands unclean, whereas they object to the Pharisaic habit of writing the name of the current ruler in
order to date35 [14] a letter of divorce. In the former case the Sadducees are reducing the gap
between holy and prophane books whereas in the latter case they objected to the Pharisaic practice
of recognizing by implication any ruler, even a foreign ruler, as legitimate, by dating according to
him. The contrast between holy and profane books would became even more dramatic if we could
accept the attractive conjecture that the Sadducees gave as an example of profane books not the
otherwise unknown books of Hamiram (as the vulgate text seems to say) but the perhaps better
known books of Homer. The slight and easy emendation is supported by Saul Lieberman in
Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 1950, 106xxi. Even so, there is no suggestion that the dividing line
between Pharisees and Sadducees is rigid and continuous. In fact there is no intimation of
cumulative disagreement. Each case stands by itself and has to be judged on its own merits. Though
the notion of oral law is clearly implied at the beginning of the most popular (in every sense)
34
P-o 163: they gave authority ... Pharisees, msb[Mom] <-> and gave them authority, they were uninterested in
recognizing the fact – uninterested rather than unwilling.
35
P-o 160: the Sadducees are shown to be indifferent ... in order to date, stln[Mom].
253
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
treatise of the Mishnah, Abot (“The Sayings of the Fathers”) the notion itself is never used to define
Pharisees as against Sadducees. The expression “oral law” in any case is not very common in
Tannaitic texts. It is attributed to Shammai in Abot de-Rabbi Nathan, version A, 15, 61 and to Hillel
in Babylonian Talmud Shabbath 31a (cf. also Sifré Deuteron. 351).36 Secondly, there are passages
both in Mishnah and Tosefta from which the sympathy of the sages with a given opinion of the
Pharisees, and even the identification of the sages with a given opinion of the Pharisees, seem to
emerge. Over the question whether the holy books defile the hands, the great Rabbi Jochanan ben
Zaccai is conspicuously brought in to support the Pharisees. He asks the Sadducees ironically:
“Have we only this case of complaint against the Pharisees?”. In other passages the opinion of the
Sadducees is opposed to the opinion of the sages, which may or may not imply the intention of
identifying the opinion of the sages with that of the Pharisees. This is the case of Mishnah, Makkot
(“Stripes”) 1, 6 where the ruling of the Sadducees about putting to death false witnesses is
contrasted with that of the sages. Finally, in this order of ideas I would attribute more importance
than is usually given to the emotional declaration of Sotah (“The Suspected Adulteress”) 9, 15:
“When Rabban [15] Gamaliel the Elder died, the glory of the Law ceased, and purity and
Pharisaism died”. I have translated prīshūth literally by “Pharisaism”, though here the word is
usually translated by “ascetism”. Rabban Gamaliel is (apart from the couple Pollion and Samaias in
Josephus) the only rabbi of whom we know for certain, thanks to Acts 5: 34 and by implication to
St. Paulxxii , that he was a Pharisee. It seems to me not by chance that the Mishnah introduces into
his epitaph the word prīshūth - perhaps making a pun on the double meaning of “Pharisaism” and
“abstinence”.
If in such passages the sages seem to indicate their contiguity with Pharisaism and their
sympathy for it, there are other passages in which the Pharisees are kept at a distance. What is more
surprising, there are finally passages in which the hostility against Pharisaism is plain. I shall only
refer to two characteristic passages of the Mishnah expressing or implying remoteness from the
Pharisees. In the treatise of the Mishnah, Hagigah (“Festal Offering”) 2, 7, mention is made of a
strange hierarchy of ritual uncleanness according to which the garments of ordinary Jews ignorant
of the Law (the am-haarez) are a source of uncleanness for the Pharisees, and the garments of the
Pharisees for the priests, and so on. Here the Pharisees are given an intermediate status between
ignorant peasants and priests, quite outside the world of the sages.37 In Menahot (“Meal offerings”)
10, 3 the messengers of the Court, that is the Beth-Din, mobilize public opinion in the village
assemblies against the ruling of the Boëthusians about the offering of barley before the new harvest
(the so-called Omer). For reasons which may be left aside here but which are cogent, the
Boëthusians are to be taken as a synonym for Sadducees. We have therefore a contrast between
Court (Beth-Din) and Sadducees from which the Pharisee are ostensibly excluded. Also in the
Tosefta there are passages in which either the sages or the Beth-Din or even the ignorant peasants,
the am-haarez, take the Sadducees to task. Tosefta, Sukkah 3, 1 is quite instructive38 on the revolt of
the peasants against the Sadducees or rather Boëthusians who did not want them to beat the willow
branches on the Sabbath during the festival of Tabernacles. The Pharisees are left out.
[16] Decisive, however, are the passages in which both Mishnah and Tosefta express hostility
towards the Pharisees. In Mishnah, Sotah 3, 4 an obvious anti-feminist passage, we read that “a
foolish pious man and a Pharisaic woman and the self-inflicted39 wounds of the Pharisees, these
ruin the world”. Though modern translators render isha prusha, “Pharisaic woman”, by something
like “sanctimonious woman”, there can hardly be any doubt that the text points disapprovingly to a
36
P-o 163: The expression “oral law” in any case ... Sifré Deuteron. 351) <-> To the best of my knowledge, the explicit
terminology of oral law is first to be found in a statement attributed to Hillel only in Babylonian Talmud Shabbath 31a
to which Midrash Tannaim to Deuteronomium p. 15 [vacat] can be added. The words “Oral Torah” are not, strictly
speaking, mishnaic, msb[Mom].
37
P-o 160: Here the Pharisees ... world of sages, stln[Mom].
38
P-o 163: instructive <-> amusing, msn[Mom].
39
P-o 160: self-inflicted <-> ascetic, msn[Mom]; P-o 165: corr. def.
254
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
woman whose spiritual director is a Pharisee. The disapproval extends to the ascetic practices
attributed to the Pharisees. In a similar passage of Tosefta, Sotah 15, 11-12 the Pharisees are
rebuked by the sages for having turned to ascetic practices after the destruction of the Second
Temple. Finally, in Tosefta, Berakhot (“Blessings”) 3, 25 we find the extraordinary statement that
the pericope against the heretics, minim, which is part of the so-called Eighteen Blessings (Shmone
Esre)40, is meant to include the prushim, the Pharisees, in the condemnation. It is easy of course to
suggest that in this particular case prushim does not mean the ordinary Pharisees, but a wicked
group of dissenters. Inconvenient facts must not be eliminated so easily. 41 However, that passage of
the Tosefta is not entirely isolated in its negative evaluation of the Pharisees.
Positive and negative evaluations of the Pharisees alternate in Mishnah and Tosefta probably as a
consequence of different historical situations and of different groups of sages adopting attitudes
towards Pharisaism and Sadduceanism. But the main impression is, I repeat, of distant reactions to a
remote world. Pharisees and Sadducees are ghosts of the past for the sages.42
This remoteness explains why Mishnah and Tosefta, and a fortiori the two Talmuds, leave us in
doubt about the relation between the Pharisees and the Haverim. Haverim, “companions”, are the
members of a voluntary association to which candidates were admitted by stages. Admission was
apparently decided by three senior members (cf. Talmud Bab. Bekhorot 30 b, whereas Tosefta,
Demai (“Products not certainly tithed”) 2, 14 speaks of admission by the association as a whole; but
there was a rabbinic rule that three members of the synagogue are like the synagogue43, Jer.
Megillah 3, 74 a). Membership of the association implied duties which automatically separated an
individual from the ordinary ignorant layman or [17] am-haarez. As Tosefta, Demai 2, 2, a difficult
text, seems to say: “He who takes upon himself four things is accepted as a haver (“companion”):
that he will not give terumah (heave-offering) and tithes to an am-haarez, that he will not prepare
his food in the observance of the laws of purity with an am-haarez, and that he will eat his
ordinary44 food in a state of purity”. This was however not the only definition in circulation of the
duties of a haver because the Abot de-Rabbi Nathan, version A (p. 132 Schechterxxiii ) indicates as
the four things required of the haver: “he does not go to a cemetery, does not breed small cattle,
does not give terumah and tithes to a priest who is an am-haarez and he eats ordinary45 food in the
observance of the laws of purity”. The clause that a haver is not allowed to rear small cattle may or
may not date the version of the rule in the Abot de-Rabbi Nathan after the destruction of the
Temple: the whole question of the obstacles to rearing small cattle introduced by the rabbis both for
ideological preferences and in view of the economic situation is too complex to be dealt with here46.
Though the haver was so severely separated from the am-haarez, an am-haarez could seek
admission to the association and be accepted as a full member. Tosefta, Demai 2, 3; 5 speaks
roundly of an am-haarez who “took upon himself the obligations of a haver”.
Now there is a circumstance which may seem to imply the identification of these companions
(haverim) with Pharisees. I previously quoted a passage from the Mishnah (Hagigah, “Festal
Offerings” 2, 7) in which the am-haarez is hierarchically just below the Pharisee, and the Pharisee
below the priest, etc. Now in at least one passage of Mishnah, Demai 1, 3 the same position above
the am-haarez is conferred upon the haver – though there is no specification about the relation
between haver and priest. So there is at least some indication that the haver has a position
analogous to that of the Pharisee in relation to the am-haarez. But the rest of the evidence is against
40
P-o 160: Shmone Esre, mgsnmsb[Mom]; P-o 65: def.
P-o 163: Inconvenient facts must not be eliminated so easily, mgsup con segr, msn[Mom]; P-o 160, 165, 164: def.
42
P-o 163: Pharisees and Sadducees ... sages <-> which is still famous, but no longer well remembered and only
vaguely relevant, msn[Mom].
43
P-o 160: Tres faciunt collegium [Neratius Priscus in Digestum 50, 16, 85], mssnmsb[Mom]; P-o 165: def.
44
P-o 163: ordinary <-> secular, msn[Mom].
45
P-o 163: ordinary <-> secular, msn[Mom].
46
P-o 160: the destruction of the Temple ... to be dealt with her <-> the destruction of the Temple, when the
prohibition to rearing small cattle was introduced by the rabbis in view of the economic situation, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o
165: id.,interl.msr[AMM].
41
255
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
the identification of47 Pharisees and haverim. Firstly, none of the rabbinic texts equates haverim and
Pharisees. Secondly, none of the rabbinic texts implies that there were formalities of admission to
Pharisaism. Thirdly, none of our sources specifies the obligations of the Pharisees as it specifies the
obligations of the haverim. Even less do we find indications that [18] an am-haarez could turn
himself into a Pharisee, as he could turn himself into a haver, by accepting definite and limited
obligations. In fact, if there is anything negatively certain about the Pharisees is that they were
different from the haverim. The haverim look much more Hellenistic than the Pharisees. Formally,
they are one of the many free associations which developed in the Hellenistic world, with their rules
of admission and limited obligations. It remains of course very obscure why this particular
association especially attracted the attention of the rabbis – beginning with Hillel and Shammai who
apparently contributed their legal acumen to the formulation48 of the49 rules of admission (Tosefta,
Demai 2, 11-12; Bab. T., Bekhorot 30 b). But Mishnah and Tosefta know of other associations such
as the associations of Jerusalem “some of which went to betrothal feasts and some to wedding
feasts” (Tosefta, Megillah 4, 15) or the “companies celebrating religious acts” mentioned in
Mishnah, Sanhedrin 8, 12. We hear also of specific associations for the celebration of the paschal
meal (Pesahim 7, 13; 8, 3). These meal-fellowship must have been very common. What is
surprising is that the Pharisees are never described as a meal-fellowship – which is enough to
dispose of the fashionable view, countenanced, albeit with reservations, by Professor Neusner, that
the Pharisees were a table-fellowshipxxiv .
All we know from the rabbinic texts about the Pharisees is that they had specific solutions for
specific points of sacral law. Their ruling was sometimes identical with that of the sages or rabbis,
but no complete identification is ever implied. We have heard voices to the contrary among rabbis.
And we are more than ever in the dark about origins, developments, obligations and motivations of
the Pharisees.
IV
One can easily see why passing from the rabbinic texts to the New Testament gives an
immediate impression of a fresher contact with daily life in Judaism. Some common features of the
Gospels with the rabbinic texts are of course obvious: the lack of interest in the Essenes, the greater
importance attributed to the Pharisees in comparison with the Sadducees, and I would add the clear
preference for the former [19] over the latter, even in the most polemical contexts. Besides, we have
seen that the sages were not above disapproving of Pharisaic attitudes and habits. The impression of
fresher life is of course inherent in the type of narration. Jesus and his disciples meet the Pharisees
in synagogues, houses, streets and fields. Though a pattern of conflicts ultimately emerges, this is
by no means a foregone conclusion. Each Gospel, as we know, has its own evaluation of the
encounters. Luke is the only one to register on three different occasions that Jesus dined in the
house of a Pharisee – once apparently by inviting himself to the table of one of their leaders (7: 36;
11: 37; 14: 1). Luke (13: 31) is also the only one to tell of the warning given by Pharisees to Jesus
about Herod Antipas’ intentions, though the interpretation attributed to Jesus of this act is not
kind 50 . There is furthermore a discrepancy within the Synoptics in the degree of implicit
identification between Pharisees and scribes. Matthew is more emphatic in connecting the two
groups, though I find it difficult to derive any conclusion from the pattern of distribution of the
terminology concerning scribes and Pharisees in the different Gospels. What is undeniable is the far
greater proximity of the Pharisees to the scribes in the Gospels than in the rabbinic writings. I can
only recall a passage in Mishnah, Yadaim (“Hands”) 3, 2 in which by implication the scribes or
47
P-o 163: is against the identification of <-> points to strong differences between, msb[Mom].
P-o 163: formulation; P-o 160, 164, 165: formation.
49
P-o 163: contributed their legal ... formulation of the <-> gave different opinions about the, msn[Mom].
50
P-o 160: though the interpretation ... is not kind [<-> favourable], mgsnmsb[Mom]; P-o 165: though the
interpretation ... is not favourable, mgsnmsr[Mom].
48
256
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
soferim may be identifiable with the Pharisees; but I am personally in doubt even about this
passage.
Granted the liveliness, the drama, of these individual encounters, what matters for our enquiry is
that the Gospel do not preserve the memory of an institutional organization of Pharisees and do not
give us any indication about the origins, political activities or general aims of Sadducees and
Pharisees.51 The New Testament may be informative about the reactions of the Pharisees to a new
religious situation, but leaves us where we were as regards the institutional, political52 and doctrinal
framework of Sadducees and Pharisees.
If I were under the obligation of writing an encyclopaedic article or a chapter of a Cambridge
History53 on Pharisees and Sadducees, I should probably be able to extract from54 the evidence
supplied by Josephus, the rabbinic sources and the New Testament enough material to make a
decent historical report. Some authentic facts can of course be put together.55 But [20] in these
lectures I am not paid56 to make the best of a bad situation. What we must realize is that in a strict
sense we do not know, or know very indistinctly,57 who the Pharisees and the Sadducees were,
though we are now in a position to say something definite about the most isolated, self contained
and presumably least influential group,58 the Essenes, or about the communities we have agreed to
define collectively as Essenian. If I am correct, this means that we are for the time being unable to
tell the story of59 the internal religious life of Judaism from say 150 B.C. to the destruction of the
second Temple. The main reason for our ignorance is that the sources transmitted to us are not
meant to provide an ordinary historical picture of the two sects. This, in my mind, is connected with
the decline in historical interest which is characteristic of the Judaism of the first centuries of the
Christian era. But we can also state the situation in different terms. Ordinary Greek and ordinary
Jewish historiography, each in its own way, was certainly capable of explaining the rise of new
social, political and religious groups. It was also used to explain the consequences of collective
action by a group.60 In comparison Josephus lets us down. If Josephus lets us down, it would be
absurd to complain that legal rabbinic texts and Christian texts proclaiming a new faith are not
doing what Josephus omitted to do. However, even the best Greek and Jewish historians were not
able 61 to pursue the development of organized religious groups beyond a certain point. The
existence of several definite political parties, each with its own theological orientation, was
unknown to Greeks and Romans and after all was rather new even among the Jews themselves.62
One has to wait for Eusebius to have an ecclesiastical history. What we would like to have but
know we cannot have is a Jewish Eusebius of the first century A.D.
51
P-o 160: Granted the liveliness ... and Pharisees, stln[Mom].
P-o 160, 165: political, interl.ms[Mom].
53
P-o 163: of a Cambridge History, interl.msn[Mom].
54
P-o 163: to extract from <-> to combine enough of, msn[Mom].
55
P-o 160: Some authentic facts ... together, mginf con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., interl.msr[AMM].
56
P-o 163: in these lectures I am not paid <-> I am not here, msn[Mom].
57
P-o 160: or known very indistinctly, mgsup con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., interl.msr[AMM].
58
P-o 160: the most isolated ... group, mgsn con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., interl.msr[AMM].
59
P-o 163: to tell the story of <-> to reconstruct, msn[Mom].
60
P-o 160: It was also used ... by a group, mginf con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: id., interl.msr[Mom].
61
P-o 163: However, even the best ... not able <-> But it was not quite traditional either for Greek or for Jewish
historians, msn[Mom].
62
P-o 160: The existence... Jews themselves, mginf con segr, msb[Mom]; P-o 165: mginf con segr, msr[AMM].
52
257
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
Appendice a The Jewish Sects in the Sources: The New Letter by “Anna” to “Seneca”
(P-l 18 - Chicago version, primavera 1985)
Il ms. P-l 1863 si presenta come una prima (e tormentata) stesura, percorsa per intero da correzioni eseguite con la
stessa penna nera con cui il testo è stato steso. Si interrompe a metà di una frase, benché in un contesto in cui il nesso
con l’inizio della trattazione relativa alle “sette ebraiche”, così come conservata in P-o 160, può già dirsi stabilito.
Il testo mostra una somiglianza strettissima con l’omonimo articolo pubblicato su Athenaeum, rispetto al quale si
segnalano in apparato le differenze più rilevanti (essenzialmente legate allo stile e all’organizzazione
dell’argomentazione, oltre all’aggiunta di citazioni dirette). Diversamente dal testo edito, in questa versione per
Chicago la considerazione dei problemi è sottoposta agli students of Judaism (vd. quarto paragrafo), con significative
conseguenze nell’argomentazione (notevole appare ad esempio la convinzione con cui si presenta l’ipotesi di una
priorità della Lettera rispetto al cosiddetto carteggio fra Paolo e Seneca).
[1]
I
I shall begin where I should not begin – with an almost irrelevant text. But the text is new,
fascinating and may even teach us something on Jewish sects.
Bernhard Bischoff, the great Munich master of Medieval Latin Philology, has just published one
of those books which were ordinary in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but are now very
unusual: a collection of 42 medieval Latin literary texts discovered in various European libraries.
The title of the book indicates its contents: Anecdota novissima. Texte des vierten bis sechzehnten
Jahrhunderts (Hiersemann, Stuttgart 1984). It is not superfluous to add in this place that Professor
Bischoff is the last of the German scholars who can consider themselves the pupils of the pupils of
Ludwig Traube, the Jew who at Munich placed Latin medieval philology on a new basis64. Several
of these new texts touch Jewish matters: a Hebrew-Latin glossary of the tenth century, an antiJewish Easter sermon by Liutprandus of Cremona, a parody of a biblical text, etc. But the most
important of these texts gives itself as a letter, written by an individual called Anna to Seneca65.
This Latin text is preserved in the library of the Archibishop of Cologne in a ms. of the early IX
century. The text is not complete, though it is fairly long for a letter, about four pages of a modern
book66.
What this man Anna tells Seneca is that pagan polytheism is indefensible – even in its
philosophic forms. The truth is to be found in strict monotheism67. The author does not utter the
words Jews or Judaism in any form, but he repeatedly alludes to passages of the Old Testament68.
Furthermore he abundantly uses the apocryphal Wisdom of Salomon which he may have read in
Greek rather than in Latin. The truth is defined “veritas nostra”. The text does not contain any sign
either of Christianity or of [2] polemical concern with Christianity. The abundant allusions to the
Old Testament are in marked contrast with the absence of references to Christian texts or events.
The author is neither Christian nor disturbed by Christianity. He speaks to educated pagans and
criticizes ordinary Roman paganism 69 from the point of view of Old Testament but with an
emphasis on the immortality of the soul70. Now, as we all know from Flavius Josephus, there was a
contemporary of Seneca who was called Anna and was famous for his eloquence: the man who was
63
Sottoserie P-l: Chicago Lectures 1985 (cfr. GRANATA 2006, lxxxii).
It is not superfluous… on a new basis: def. in Athenaeum.
65
P-l 18: Incipit, interl.msb; Athenaeum: Incipit Epistola Anne ad Senecam de Superbia et Idolis.
66
Athenaeum: Professor Bischoff calls his editio princeps “Der Brief des Hohenpriesters Annas an den Philosophen
Seneca – eine jüdisch-apologetische Missionschrift (Viertes Jahrhundert?)”.
67
Athenaeum: “iactant sese creaturae signa cognoscere, cum ignorent ipsum Dominum creatorem mundi”.
68
Athenaeum: from Genesis to Job.
69
Athenaeum: with special reference to the cult of Liber Pater
70
P-l 18: from the point of view of Old Testament ... of the soul, interl; Athenaeum: “quod de terra natum est, in terra
revertetur; anima autem caeleste munus exspectabit”.
64
258
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
a high priest for a brief period in 62 and was deposed for his responsibility in the condemnation of
James, the brother of Jesus71. After his deposition he remained very authoritative until he was killed
in 68: a pro-Roman Sadducee who accepted to play a part in the struggle against Rome72. Professor
Bischoff has suggested that we must identify this Sadducee leader Anna or Ananos or Hanan with
the alleged author of the title given by Bischoff to73 the letter to Seneca, and I think he is correct, as
far as the incipit goes. Only a very important Jew could be supposed to write to Seneca.74
But this is only the beginning of a series of questions which the students of Judaism under the
Roman Empire will have to answer in relation to the new text.
We are in no need for being reminded that since the time of St Jerome there was in circulation a
Latin correspondence between St Paul and Seneca. As this correspondence was known to St Jerome
but not yet known to patristic authors like Lactantius in the early IV century, it is now generally,
and surely correctly, inferred that these letters were forged in the fourth century. Curiously enough,
a few years ago an eminent Italian student of Medieval Latin, Ezio Franceschini, thought he could
defend this correspondence as authentic (Studi E. Paratore, Bologna 1981, 827-841). We shall
ultimately see that the new letter by Anna to Seneca is in comfort to any one who want to believe in
the authenticity of that correspondence between [Seneca] and St. Paul.75 The new text now shows
that at least one letter alleged to be76 by a Jewish high priest to Seneca was in existence. It is natural
to ask in what relation this new letter stands to the famous exchange between Seneca and St Paul.
But before we ask this natural question we have to take other facts into account77.
[3] But first of all a complication must be noticed which Professor Bischoff has noticed but
underrated78: even the most superficial analysis of the contents of the letter shows that it is not a real
letter to Seneca. True enough the incipit of the new letter says that it is a letter by Anna to Seneca:
“Incipit Epistola Anne ad Senecam de superbia et idolis”. But in the text the writer speaks to several
people79, not to Seneca. These people – the recipients of the message – are called fratres80: they are
clearly potential proselytes. In other words: the name of Seneca is a secondary interpolation.
Somebody turned a letter or a sermon directed to a group of potential proselytes into a letter to
Seneca. If the original text was not addressed to Seneca, it may still have been written by a man
called Anna.81 But an Anna disconnected from Seneca needs not to have been identical with the
famous high priest contemporary with Seneca: he may be an otherwise unknown Jewish
propagandist in Latin called Anna, who wrote a letter or a sermon to fratres, potential converts.
We are therefore faced by the probability that our text had really nothing to do with Seneca and
by the possibility that the name Anna had originally nothing to do with the Sadducee high priest of
62. In other words, the story of our text may have had two stages: the first in which it was a simple
propaganda text by a Latin speaking Jew trying to attract proselytes, the second in which it was
turned into a letter to Seneca. In this second stage the author of the text – whether called Anna or
otherwise – must have been thought to be the high priest Anna or Ananos or Hanan, because Seneca
could not be addressed by a Jew of no consequence. A text in Latin to attract proselytes to Judaism
is not, as far as I know, something very common. Future research into the Latinity of the text will
have to give us an approximate date of the text. It will not to be an easy task because we know so
71
Athenaeum: Ant. XX, 199.
Athenaeum: Josephus admired him, at least when he wrote the Bellum (IV, 319-25). What he wrote in his
autobiography is another story.
73
the title given by Bischoff to, interl.msb.
74
Only a very important. ... to write to Seneca, interl.
75
We shall ultimately see ... and St Paul, mginf con segr.
76
alleged to be, interl.
77
But this is only the beginning of a series of questions … we have to take other facts into account: def. in Athenaeum.
78
first of all a complication ... underrated, mgsup con segr.
79
several people <-> fratres.
80
Athenaeum: “vehementer admiror, fratres… Videtis ergo, fratres…”.
81
If the original text was not addressed ... called Anna, mgdx <-> This in its turn opens the new question whether the
original text without Seneca may have been attributed, either as a letter or as a sermon, to a man called Anna.
72
259
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
little about the Latin used by Jews and indeed about the Latin versions of the Biblical texts they
used. As we might expect, the text has signs of having being written by a man whose Latin was
strongly influenced by Greek82. All that I can say at present is that our text does not look one
written [4] by a Sadducee, whether high priest or not.83 Future study will have to say whether it may
have written in the second or third century when the Latin speaking Jews of Rome included
cultivated individuals, such as the one who wrote the famous epitaph for Regina now in the Corpus
Inscr. Judaic. n. 476.84 With these complications in mind we can now return to the relation between
our text and the correspondence85 between St Paul and Seneca. A Jew may well have thought of
opposing a correspondence between the high priest Anna and Seneca to the correspondence
between St Paul and Seneca. This in an easy solution but the easier solution is not always the better.
It is also obvious that the interpolator did not interfere with text by adding polemical allusion to
Christianity. So there is no clear sign that a Jew intended to turn Anna into a competitor of St Paul
as a correspondent with Seneca. Our incipit “Epistula Anne ad Senecam de superbia et idolis”
implies that our letter was not a part of a correspondence between Anna and Seneca. So there is no
direct imitation of the correspondence between Seneca and St Paul86. Against my will, I feel
inclined to suspect that somebody thought of a letter by the high priest to Seneca before the
correspondence between Seneca and S. Paul had been forged. The existence of the alleged letter by
Anna to Seneca may have preceded and inspired the composition of the correspondence between S.
Paul and Seneca.87 Nobody could, however, think of an Anna writing to Seneca unless he knew
exactly that a high priest Anna was the exact contemporary of Seneca. The obvious place to find
this information was Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities. But of course other histories, for
instance that by Justus of Tiberias, might provide the information. The only thing which seems
certain in so many uncertainties is that if somebody chose the Sadducee high priest Anna or Ananos
as the writer of a letter to Seneca emphasizing the immortality of the soul, he did no longer know
who a Sadducee was88.
And this brings me back to the real subject of my lecture. Christians have read Flavius Josephus
through the centuries. They have got their ideas about the Jewish sects of Jesus’ time by combining
the Gospels with Josephus. We Jews have hardly gone back to Josephus in order to know about
Pharisees and Sadducees before the XIX century. A real examination of Josephus on Jewish sects in
comparison with both the Gospels and the [5] Talmudic texts is a very recent enterprise both for
Jews and for Christians, and it happens to be pursued when the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
has enormously complicated matters. The stray piece of evidence which I have produced this
evening from the new text published by Bischoff is a further, however small, indication of how
complicated matters really are. What we have found in the new text is a Sadducee high priest who is
supposed to make propaganda for a Judaism emphasizing immortality of the soul in a letter to the
pagan philosopher Seneca. Even if we leave aside the names of Anna and Seneca we shall have to
cope with the precise fact that somewhere in the Latin West there was somebody insisting on the
82
we know so little about the Latin ... by Greek <-> first because the thext has passed through copies made by
medieval scribes and secondly because we know so little about Latin versions of the Biblical texts made by Jews in the
first centuries of the Empire, mginf con segr.
83
whether high priest or not <-> given the insistence on the immortality of the soul, interl.
84
Athenaeum: In any case a text in Latin written to attract proselytes to Judaism is not, as far as I know, something we
encounter at every corner. Proselytes in Rome certainly existed. Another Roman inscription (CII 523) celebrates a
women who became a proselyte at the age of 70 and died at the age of 86 after having been “mother” of two
synagogues.
85
With these complications in mind ... our text and <-> At this point it would be easy to suggest that the original piece
was turnedinto a letter to Seneca because there was already in circulation a correspondence, interl.
86
This is an easy solution ... and St Paul <-> It is an easy solution, but does not quite account for the absence of any
awareness of the existence of Christianity in our text, interl., mgdx.
87
Athenaeum: A third possibility (though not a very likely one) is that the introduction of the name of Seneca into
Anna’s letter and the forgery of the correspondence between Seneca and St. Paul are two unrelated events.
88
he did no longer know who a Sadducee was <-> the name Sadducee had lost any precise theological implication in
the mind of, interl.
260
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
II. The Jewish Sects in the Sources
immortality of the Soul, but not on oral Law: better than a Sadducee, yet not quite good as a
Pharisee, if we follow the conventional description. But whose is the conventional description ... 89
i
Ioh. Drusii De sectis Iudaicis commentarii Trihaeresio & Minervali Nic. Serarii Iesuitae Mogunt. oppositi,
atque antehac seorsim editi. Accessit denuo Iosephi Scaligeri I.C.F. Elenchus Trihaeresii ejusdem. Sixtinus Amama
omnia in unum volumen redegit atque secundam hanc editionem variis additamentis locupletiorem accuravit, ...
Arnhemiae, Apud Ioannem Iansonium. Typis Frederici Heynsii Typogr. in Acad. Franckerana, 1619.
ii
GEIGER 1857.
iii
WELLHAUSEN 1874.
iv
Cfr. GL 1979 I (Prologue), part. alle cc. 6-10.
v
HILGENFELD 1868.
vi
Per la riflessione momiglianea su Weber, cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1977B (=Weber-Meyer); ID. 1978A (=Dopo Weber);
B
ID. 1981 (=Weber e l’antichità); ID. 1980D (=A Note on Weber); ID. 1986I (=Two Types). Per il ruolo di Troeltsch nello
storicismo si rimanda invece all’analisi di MILLER 2007, 363; tra i contributi di Momigliano, vd. MOMIGLIANO 1963B (=
The Conflict), intr. p. 6.
vii
Il riferimento alla “previous lecture” GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), in cui era già stata messa in luce questa
caratteristica di Giuseppe, viene soppresso in occasione dell’intervento presso il Leo Baeck College. In considerazione
del numero di testi momiglianei dedicati al ruolo storiografico di Flavio Giuseppe (per cui vd. supra, GL 1982 I, nota i)
viene accolta a testo in questo caso la versione Leo Baeck.
viii
SCHÜRER 1973-1987.
ix
SANDERS-BAUMGARTEN-MENDELSON 1981.
x
Ios. Vita 11, with an Engl. transl. by H.St. J. Thackeray, London-Cambridge(Mass) 1923.
xi
Phil. Prob. 75-91.
xii
Jos. Ant. 13, 297.
xiii
Per l’atteggiamento “farisaico integralista” dei due personaggi, che compaiono in Ant. 14, 172 ss. e 15, 370,
cfr. SCHÜRER 1985, 373, e SCHALIT 1969, 768 ss.
xiv
Tutti i documenti esaminati citano Ant. 15, 2-4, passo già incontrato in relazione ai farisei Pollione e Samaias.
La buona disposizione mostrata nei loro confronti da Erode ad loc. torna a essere menzionata quando Giuseppe
descrive, in Ant. 15, 370-9, la simpatia del monarca verso gli Esseni. Trattandosi di un lapsus plausibilmente causato da
una citazione a memoria, si sostituisce con la numerazione corretta.
xv
Per una rassegna delle discussioni relative all’eventualità di una dipendenza di Flavio Giuseppe da Nicola di
Damasco, cfr. FELDMAN 1989 (part. alle pp. 402-403).
xvi
SMITH 1956, 67-81. Momigliano tornerà sulla questione con maggior ampiezza tre anni dopo, nella versione
per il Leo Baeck College: si veda l’inserzione alla c. 12 di P-o 160 e P-o 165, supra, in apparato. Una completa e
autorevole adesione alla tesi di Smith si può trovare argomentata in NEUSNER 1987. Per altre posizioni, cfr. FELDMAN
1989, 421-422.
xvii
STERN 1976B.
xviii
HENGEL 1976.
xix
Il new text a cui fa riferimento Momigliano nel testo riportato in apparato (P-o 160, interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 165,
interl.msb[AMM] con annotazione End of Leo Baeck lecture) va identificato con la Lettera di Anna a Seneca, per cui
cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1985A (=Anna-Seneca).
xx
DANBY 1933.
xxi
LIEBERMAN 1950.
xxii
Cfr. Atti 22: 3; 23: 6.
xxiii
Masekhet’Avot de-Rabi Natan, hujus libri recensiones duas collatis variis apud bibliothecas et publicas et
privatas codicibus edidit, prooemium notas appendices indicesque addidit Salomon Schechter, Vienna 1887 .
xxiv
Su questa posizione assunta in precedenza da NEUSNER 1971 si rimanda alla valutazione critica di SANDERS
1990, 117 (in cui le dispute farisaiche concernenti la purità dei cibi rituali vengono stimate all’1%, di contro al 67% di
Neusner); lo stesso Neusner ha successivamente ritrattato la propria ipotesi (NEUSNER 1987, 290).
89
Il testo si interrompe qui.
261
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
GL 1982 III The decline of History and Apocalypse
- [Old] From History to Apocalypse.
Sedi e date
NL 1977 IV (31 gennaio, cfr. D-a 1)
CL 1977 V (maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 415)
Documenti
a) NL 1977 IV
P-o 27 ms.
P-o 40 (a), P-o 13 (a): top c. di P-o 27.
P-o 26 (a), P-o 58 (a), P-o 84 (b): c.c. di P-o 40 (a).
P-o 34 xerox di P-o 84 (b).
b) aggiunte (prob. per CL 1977 V)
P-o 25, P-o 13 (b) = P-o 26 (b,c), P-o 84 (c,d)
P-o 28 nuova versione ms. delle aggiunte basata su P-o 84 (c,d).
P-o 40 (b) top c. di P-o 28.
P-o 56 (b), P-o 58 (b): c.c. di P-o 40 (b).
c) CL 1977 V
P-o 40 (a-b), P-o 84 (a,b,c,d).
P-o 58 c.c. di P-o 40 (a,b).
P-o 29, P-o 85 [escluse pp. 28-30, utilizzate per EL 1978 VI1]: xerox di P-o 58.
- [New] The decline of History and Apocalypse
Sedi e date:
EL 1978 VI (15 novembre, cfr. *D-a 1)
GL 1982 III ( 3 febbraio, cfr. Granata 2006, 424)
Documenti
a) EL 1978 VI
P-o 56 (a) aggiunte mss., (b) c.c. di P-o 40, (c) pp. provenienti da P-o 242, (d) ds. da
una c.c. di P-o 363
P-o 86 xerox di P-o 56.
P-o 57 nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 56.
P-o 166 (b) c.c. di P-o 57.
b) GL 1982 III
P-o 166 (a) aggiunte per GL 1982 III.
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
The Decline of History and Apocalypse è la lezione che Momigliano scelse per chiudere la
Grinfield Lecturership tenuta senza interruzioni per quattro anni, dal 1979 al 1982. Se l’intero ciclo
GL 1982 rappresenta in sostanza una rielaborazione dell’ultima sezione del suo iniziale progetto
d’insieme sul giudaismo ellenistico (apprezzabile, nella sua variante preliminare più estesa, con le
sei Efroymson lectures del 1978) The Decline si presenta come definitiva riscrittura della sesta e
ultima EL, The Decline of History and Apocalypse and the Defence against the Romans.
Tra i numerosi testimoni conservati dall’AAM, il ds. P-o 166 – cui si fa riferimento come testo
base per l’edizione – documenta con accuratezza i cambiamenti apportati sul testo Grinfield a
partire da quello Efroymson, di tre anni precedente. Il documento si compone di 40 carte dss., in
parte originali e in parte c.c., testimoni di due distinte fasi (come confermano le note apposte sul ds.
da AMM): le pagine in c.c. riproducono la versione EL (di cui P-o 57 fornisce l’originale),
interessata da cospicue eliminazioni o riassunti, mentre quelle dss. (cc. [1], 11, 14-15, 18-22) recano
aggiunte e modifiche GL.
1
2
3
Decline.
Ds. di CL 1977 III (Rabbis)
Top c. CL 1977 II ([New] Temple).
262
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Prima di prendere in esame questi interventi finali è opportuno ripercorrere brevemente la storia
della composizione della lecture, ricordando come la stessa Efroymson fosse il risultato di
importanti rielaborazioni condotte sul testo di una conferenza dal titolo From History to
Apocalypse, presentata per la prima volta allo University College London nel 1977 (NL 1977 IV) e
in versione rivista, nello stesso anno, in occasione delle Chicago lectures (CL 1977 V).
Nel passaggio dal ciclo di Chicago (1977) a quello Efroymson (1978) l’intero ciclo di lectures è
sottoposto a un consistente ripensamento che porta a sostanziali modifiche strutturali, istituendo
rapporti nuovi fra i temi trattati4. Nel caso specifico di The Decline, il cambiamento più cospicuo
risulta dall’accorpamento in un’unica sede (EL 1978 VI) della lezione CL 1977 V (From History)
con parti provenienti dalla CL 1977 II (The Temple and the Synagogue) e dalla CL 1977 III (The
Rabbis and the Communities)5.
È la struttura composita del fascicolo P-o 56 a permettere apprezzare pienamente il processo di
costruzione del testo: la complessità della composizione, che una descrizione in apparato potrebbe
rendere indecifrabile, induce a proporne piuttosto un riassunto in sede introduttiva.
P-o 56 (di cui P-o 86 risulta copia xerox e P-o 57 una nuova dattiloscrittura in 31 cc.) consta di
35 carte, in parte mss. e in parte dss. I primi 11 fogli, vergati a mano da Momigliano, contengono la
nuova introduzione EL; le carte successive, rinumerate a mano come 12-18, sono c.c. delle pp. 2228 della CL 1977 V From History to Apocalypse (P-o 40); nuova è la c. 19 (ms.), a cui segue
un’estesa sezione di 16 carte dall’origine composita: le cc. rinumerate a mano come 20-30 (già 515) provengono dalla CL 1977 III The Rabbis and the Communities (P-o 24); le due successive (3132, già 26-27), sono prese da una copia della CL 1977 II The Temple and the Synagogue (P-o 36),
mentre le ultime carte provengono nuovamente dalla CL 1977 V From History to Apocalypse.
Il confronto fra le versioni EL e GL evidenzia coincidenze e differenze di cui si cercherà di
rendere conto in dettaglio tra apparato e appendice al testo, in cui si riportano i passi Efroymson
soppressi dagli interventi più massicci. Nello specifico, i capp. I-V, mss. per la Efroymson (cc. 1-11
di P-o 56), vengono conservati nella versione Grinfield, mentre i capp. VI-VII, provenienti dalla CL
1977 V From History to Apocalypse (cc. 12-18 di P-o 56), subiscono tagli e rielaborazioni; infine, il
cap. VIII della Grinfield (che nella versione EL si articolava in tre capitoli, VIII-X) riprende la
pagina di apertura scritta a mano per la Efroymson, per riassumere poi fortemente, in soli 5 fogli, la
lunga “sezione composita” proveniente dalle conferenze di Chicago (cc. 20-35 di P-o 56).
2. Argomento della lecture
La consuetudine alla lettura sinagogale integrale della storia sacra delle origini, il Pentateuco,
conferisce all’idea ebraica di storia una centralità incomparabilmente più profonda di quella
sviluppata dai Greci, presso i quali la storiografia si definisce tardi, ha oggetto indefinito e finalità
tendenti alla retorica o alla costruzione di teorie etiche o politiche. A questo approccio al passato,
spesso al confine con la novellistica, si adeguano gli Ebrei che cercano terreno di incontro con la
cultura greca. È il caso della ripresa del genere degli exitus virorum illustrium nella forma talmudica
delle “ultime parole dei rabbi”: la scelta di isolare il messaggio supremo, eventualmente profetico,
di un rabbino o di un patriarca ha l’esito di creare un legame con il passato, chiamando a
condividere o anticipare le nuove speranze di immortalità proposte dal cosiddetto pensiero farisaico,
senza implicare però un rinnovato processo di produzione storica.
Alla soppressione della storia a favore della pietà e della saggezza si accompagnano attese
escatologiche e un incremento nel senso di premonizione della fine del mondo. Una datazione
complessiva dei resoconti apocalittici affidati a grandi figure del passato (Enoch, Daniele, Mosé,
Ezra) induce a collegare il sorgere del genere all’età maccabaica (II sec.a.C.). I due secoli di vita
dell’apocalittica (fra Antioco IV e Adriano) sono d’altra parte gli stessi in cui si consolida
l’istituzione della sinagoga, la cui fede nell’eternità della Torah sembrerebbe a prima vista trovare
completamento proprio nella prospettiva dell’apocalittica, che sottolineando la transitorietà di
4
5
Cfr. Introduzione, pp. 20-22.
Cfr. GRANATA 1999 e 2006.
263
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
questo mondo garantisce l’eternità di quello futuro, fondato sulla Torah. Sarebbe però erroneo
considerare tale genere la “dimensione segreta” della pietà ebraica, non solo perché gli Ebrei lo
abbandonarono presto, ma anche perché i loro leader religiosi non lo guardarono mai con
particolare simpatia. Al contrario, è proprio in nome della Torah, che è permanenza, che il
giudaismo rabbinico finisce per reprimere la storia e l’anti-storia dell’apocalittica, che riportano il
cambiamento.
Il periodo che va dal 150 a.C. al 100 d.C. vede la progressiva affermazione del pensiero
rabbinico in contrapposizione a entrambi i generi. Le origini della classe, pur rimanendo oscure,
sembrano riconducibili al momento dell’incontro con l’ellenismo. Le sue scuole condividono infatti
con quelle filosofiche greche mobilità sociale e ambizioni politiche, per quanto a differenza loro
vivano in continuo contatto con la società, plasmandone l’ideale di vita. Fattore legante per il
popolo ebraico diventa infatti la Legge comune derivata dall’interpretazione rabbinica: una
prospettiva che contribuisce a spiegare la reticenza sul cristianesimo e sui conflitti interni al
giudaismo, individuando una tendenza a non parlare delle divergenze più pericolose e radicali. In
conclusione, i punti forti del sistema educativo creato dagli Ebrei per resistere all’impatto con la
cultura greca si individuano nello stretto legame fra scuola e casa di preghiera e nel significato
religioso del rapporto tra allievi e maestri, all’interno di una piramide educativa che culmina in Dio
stesso. In questa prospettiva il giudaismo può essere definito come un prodotto dell’ellenismo solo
nella misura in cui nasce come modello di resistenza all’ellenismo stesso.
3. Note di contenuto: i motivi della rielaborazione e il rapporto con i testi editi.
Nel processo di rielaborazione del testo GL 1982 risalta il diverso trattamento riservato a ciò che
era stato scritto ex novo per la Efroymson, che viene conservato, rispetto ai materiali provenienti dal
ciclo di Chicago, per i quali si rendono necessari interventi sostanziali.
Una prima riscrittura relativa ai limiti della dimensione apocalittica nei testi rabbinici risponde
essenzialmente a un intento di sintesi e al desiderio di riorganizzare l'argomentazione, attribuendo la
priorità a un dato concreto (la perdita dei libri apocalittici degli Ebrei) piuttosto che a ipotesi ex
silentio. Sulla questione degli scritti orientali, invece, l'intervento di Momigliano mira a restringere
l’orizzonte di indagine proposto a Chicago e a Cincinnati per concentrarsi esclusivamente su testi
ebraici. Va rilevato come nel frattempo la trattazione di scritti egizi o iranici (Cronaca Demotica,
Oracolo del Vasaio, Rivelazione di Istaspe), ancora materia di The Decline nel 1978, avesse trovato
nel 1981 uno sviluppo autonomo dapprima in sede Grinfield e poi, più estesamente, a Chicago (The
Resistance, GL 1981 I e CL 1981 I).
Meno evidenti appaiono le motivazioni del radicale intervento di riduzione del "vecchio" testo su
Qumran. Si può ipotizzare che Momigliano abbia modificato negli anni il proprio pensiero circa la
rilevanza dei testi qumranici rispetto al taglio della sua riflessione sull'apocalittica; l'ipotesi sembra
suffragata dal fatto che in uno dei suoi ultimi testi, che riprende il tema della lecture con diversa
prospettiva – ma alcuni punti di contatto - la presenza di Qumran è ridotta a un cenno appena sulla
scoperta nella caverna IV di frammenti dell'Enoc aramaico6.
La variazione che più colpisce nell’elaborazione Grinfield rimane tuttavia il grande taglio del
finale (caratteri delle scuole rabbiniche, cap. VIII; conflitti interni al giudaismo, cap. IX;
conclusioni, X), che non può essere giustificata semplicemente su base contestuale (ad es. tempi di
esposizione ridotti). Il fatto che Momigliano rimuova il cap. IX sui conflitti interni tra le "sette"
ebraiche ha una ragione evidente: nella riformulazione oxoniense del ciclo al tema è dedicata una
conferenza apposita, elaborata proprio a partire dal materiale tagliato (The Jewish Sects, GL 1982
II). Nel caso della trattazione del rabbinato e dell’intero capitolo conclusivo le ragioni risultano
invece più sfuggenti, per quanto si constati una certa ricorrenza di tagli “in prospettiva”, ossia
rivolti a parti di testo che oltrepassano il contesto giudaico-ellenistico arrivando fino al
cristianesimo o al "salto ... alla Mishnah e alla Tosefta" che Momigliano si dichiara troppo vecchio
6
MOMIGLIANO 1986c.
264
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
per compiere7. Da un lato sembrerebbe quindi ravvisabile un’esigenza di precisa delimitazione
tematica; dall'altro non mancano però anche interventi volti a eliminare le formulazioni più
assertive in merito agli aspetti di unità e continuità del giudaismo: una per tutte, la conclusione del
cap. VIII EL, che insiste nel ridimensionare la varietà del giudaismo ellenistico.
In conclusione, la ricostruzione della storia del testo e delle sue modalità di revisione porta a
concludere come Momigliano non considerasse affatto la versione Efroymson un’espressione
insoddisfacente del proprio pensiero, soprattutto in relazione al pubblico (vicino alle posizioni del
giudaismo riformato) a cui l’aveva presentata. Tuttavia, la riproposizione a distanza di alcuni anni
dello stesso argomento a Oxford dovette verosimilmente sollecitarlo a sottoporre la conferenza a un
vaglio rigoroso finalizzato ad espungerne, insieme a quanto già trattato nel nuovo ciclo GL, ciò che
risultava eccentrico e non strettamente funzionale rispetto al tema proposto, anche nei casi in cui la
riduzione comporta (come nel cap. X) la rinuncia a passi di grande forza suggestiva.
7
L’osservazione è tra l’altro riproposta in tutte le versioni della lecture (P-o 166, 17; P-o 57, 17; P-o 56, 19).
265
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
III
The Decline of History and Apocalypse*8
[Introduction]
In my previous lectures I tried to argue four main points:
1) The Jews found themselves faced by a nation, such as the Greek nation, which not only
claimed for itself superiority of education, but tried to assimilate other peoples by education. The
Jews reacted by creating an education of their own which preserved the unity of Judaism,
geographical and linguistic difficulties notwithstanding. The main sign of Hellenization among the
Jews was that they created an anti-Hellenic system of education.
2) At the level of exchange of ideas communication between Jews and non-Jews was very
limited. No doubt the Jews were more interested in Greek ideas and institutions than the Greeks
were in Jewish ideas and institutions, but even the Jewish interest in Greek culture did not go very
deep. There were no Jewish mathematics, astronomy, geography, theory of politics, medicine, etc.
worth comparing with the Greek ones. In any case two are needed to make a dialogue: the Greek
intellectual was seldom prepared to speak to the Jew.
3) Historiography represents the partial exception. Jews and Greeks discussed each other’s
claims about antiquity and achievements. But even these discussions did not go very far: the Greeks
knew very little of Jewish history, and the Jews very little of Greek history.
4) What is more, the attitude of the Jews to their own life precluded them from being able to
account for their own internal factions and parties.
Whoever cares to talk about Sadducees and Pharisees with a sense of responsibility has to reckon
with the two facts that we have no historical account of them and have not yet recovered their
libraries, if any, as we have for the Qumran group.9
I want now to return to the third and fourth points for further probing10. As we know11, [1]12 the
Jews of the Hellenistic age had behind them a tradition of religious thought in which historical
events mattered enormously. The Biblical God, at higher or lower levels of ethical refinement,
demonstrated his existence, his power, his preferences, and even the inaccessible nature of his
thoughts, by direct interventions in the affairs of the Hebrew nation. Specific historical events such
as Exodus, the Revelation on Sinai, the conquest of the Promised Land, the building and the
destruction of the First Temple, had demonstrated God’s choice of Israel and his approval – or
disapproval – of Israel’s behaviour. The most significant events concerning the Chosen People,
from Abraham’s vocation to the destruction of the First Temple, were told in a continuous series
against a background of world history. Parts of this history, albeit not yet with the precise ritual
which obtains today, were read in the Synagogue. The festivals themselves re-enacted some of the
past events. However blurred the contours, Jewish history was in fact seen as emerging from
Adam’s fall, Cain’s murder and Noha’s merits – though the theological implications of these
* Documento preso come base: P-o 166, ds. di 40 cc., in parte originali e in parte c.c., che documenta con accuratezza
i cambiamenti apportati sul testo GL 1982 a partire da quello EL 1978: le cc. originali testimoniano le aggiunte GL,
mentre le parti in c.c. riproducono la versione EL e risultano interessate da cospicue eliminazioni (le più estese delle
quali sono riportate integralmente nell’Appendice – Tagli al testo Efroymson, pp. 277-86). Si segnalano inoltre in
apparato eventuali discrepanze tra P-o 166 e P-o 57, ds. di 31 cc. che documenta l’ultima versione EL 1978 e di cui la
sezione c.c. di P-o 166 è copia.
8
P-o 166: Grinfield Lecture III, 3.2.82, tsf, mgdx ds.; (amended Efroymson VI). [pp. 1, 11, 14, 15, 18-22 new. Old 15,
16, 18-31 of Efroymson not used in Grinfield version], msb[AMM].
9
P-o 166: Whoever cares to talk about Sadducees ... Qumran group, mginf con segr, msb[AMM].
10
P-o 166: to the third and fourth points for further probing <-> to this fourth point, msb[AMM].
11
P-o 166: testo fin qui su c. non numerata, assente in P-o 57.
12
P-o 166: tsf: VI – The Decline of History and Apocalypse and the Defence against the Romans – I, ds,; [Efroymson
lecture VI], mgsupmsb[AMM]; 9.10.78 – 2 cc's to Chicago, mgsup,dxmsn[AMM]; P-o 57: VI – The Decline of History and
Apocalypse and the Defence against the Romans – I.
266
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
primeval events may still have been hazy. Whatever the date of the final redaction of this Biblical
history may be, the essential fact is that there was no comparable sustained attempt to turn the
events of the Second Temple period into a continuous sacred history.
The reconstruction of the Temple, or rather the reconstruction of the Jewish State, especially
under Ezra and Nehemiah, was still included in the sacred story. But a gap was left between the
history of the First Temple and the construction of the Second Temple: there is no biblical history
of the exile in Babylon. Nor has the Bible any continuous account of the events under the Persians
and the Greeks. Until the revolutionary situation of the time of Antiochus IV posed new problems
of a quite unprecedented nature, what [2] one finds in the Bible – and outside it – is a series of
mainly biographical episodes. They differ greatly from the main body of Biblical history, though
occasionally they go back to patterns of the patriarchal age. Esther13 and its14 Greek additions, or
the Letter of Aristeas and the account of the Tobiads utilized by Josephusi, are no more than
accounts of important episodes. So are the Second Book of Maccabees, a festal book to justify the
celebration of Hanuccah, and the so-called Third Book of Maccabees, which is an account of an
episode of persecution of the Jews by Ptolemy IV Philopator. None of these books presents itself as
part of a continuum. The First Book of the Maccabees is a partial exception, being a conscious
imitation of the Books of Kings. It is representative of a dying outlook; and it does show the
weakness of the tradition in its unclear patterns of thoughts. Daniel with its Greek additions is of
course different. It offers no less than three different summaries of universal history. But it is a
universal history of the pagan world - that is, of world empires: clearly of non-Jewish inspiration.
When Daniel turns to specifically Jewish history it tells either biographical episodes concerning
Daniel and his friends or specific events, such as the persecution of Antiochus IV15.
A further 16 restriction of the historical horizons is implied in the separation between the
Pentateuch and other Biblical texts which emerged during the Hellenistic age. In the synagogue
only the Pentateuch was read completely by sections. The other Biblical texts were read only in
selection and the choice of the passages to be read was not as a rule dictated by their value as
historical documents17. The consequence was that for the members of a synagogue continuous
history went from the creation of the world to the death of Moses. After the end of Moses history as
a continuum stopped: only specific episodes were recalled. Thus for the ordinary synagoguefrequenting Jew historical development stopped with the death of the legislator Moses. The Torah
given on Mount Sinai became the end of continuous history. Oral law was not excluded, because, as
we know, oral law too was supposed to have been entrusted by God to Moses on that occasion.
Even the conquest of Canaan lost its most profound appeal as the leading motif of Jewish life. At
the same time the word ‘Torah’ was increasingly confined to designate the Pentateuch. The first
formal identification of the Torah with the Pentateuch seems to be the Greek prologue of
Ecclesiasticus, but there are precedents in the Books of [3] Ezra (3, 2; 7, 6) and Nehemiah (8, 3).
The text of Ecclesiasticus, originally written in Hebrew, still sees the whole history from the origins
to Nehemiah as a unity. At the end of the first century B.C., if this is the right date for the Wisdom
of Solomonii, Wisdom leads history only until the age of Moses.
II18
We must be clear about this elementary point. The Jews were encouraged by the Bible to take an
interest in the past of the Hebrew nation which was incomparably deeper and more exacting than
the interest taken by the Greeks in their own past. For a Jew to come into a world dominated by
13
14
15
16
17
18
P-o 166: Esther, -> Daniel, del. ; P-o 57: corr. def.
P-o 166: its <-> their, msb[AMM]
P-o 166: Daniel with its Greek additions... of Antiochus IV, mginf con segr, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
P-o 166: A further <- But there is more to add, del.
P-o 166: historical documents -> though it might be suggested by historical allusions, del.; P-o 57: corr. def.
P-o 166, 57: num. II, msb[AMM].
267
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Greek culture did not necessarily mean coming into a world dominated by Greek history, and even
less by Greek historiography. The position of history – and of its conscious registration,
historiography – was by no means central and secure in Greek education and ordinary intellectual
life. Historians had appeared on the Greek horizon fairly late. History became a specialized craft
only in the fifth century B.C., and even then it was something of an ill-defined subject. One of the
two recognized masters, Herodotus, encouraged the study of foreign customs; the other,
Thucydides, was a model for the description of Greek wars and political struggles. It was never
quite clear for whom the historians wrote – and for what precise purpose. Rhetoricians claimed,
with considerable success, though never decisively, that historiography was a form of rhetorical
encomium. The majority of the philosophic schools never took history seriously, as it was not
conducive to understanding what is permanent and therefore important. The most significant
exception is Aristotle, not because he liked the look of the historiography he had before his eyes,
but because he encouraged an alternative form of historiography which consisted in collecting
certain facts in order to construct theories of politics and ethics. The study of individual political
constitutions would lead to a theory of politics, the study of individual biographies would lead to a
typology of human behaviour. Schools did not teach history, even Greek history, systematically,
though some historical writers were read for their eloquence, historical allusions in poetical texts
were commented upon, and in general historical situations [4] were used as themes for declamations
or as examples in them.
The gradual change in the Jewish attitude towards the Hebrew past which is evident in the
Hellenistic period is to a certain extent an adaptation to the more frivolous mood of the Hellenistic
Greeks with respect to their own history. Polybius who was serious lived in a different world,
Rome19. In many ways the Jews imitated some of the most superficial products of Hellenistic
writers in their accounts of the past. This explains both why Jews and non-Jews found it easier to
communicate through history than through philosophy or poetry and why their communication was
on a superficial level20. The Second Book of Maccabees, and, presumably, the historical book by
Jason of Cyrene which it epitomizes, are in the style of the pathetic historiography of Phylarchus
criticized by Polybius. The stories of Judith and Esther are comparable with Hellenistic novels. The
similarity is more evident in stories written in Greek, such as that of the family of the Tobiads told
by Flavius Josephus. Recently a competent scholar, J. A. Goldstein, developed the theory that
Flavius Josephus summarized the authentic autobiography of the Tobiad Joseph (Studies for Morton
Smith, III, 1975, 85-193iii). This raises the interesting question whether in an age given to frivolous
novels even autobiographies would be indistinguishable from novels. But perhaps it is, after all,
more natural to take the story of Joseph the Tobiad as a novel, and leave it at that.
Young Joseph the Tobiad is an even less attractive imitation of the biblical Joseph; and it was
observed long ago that Flavius Josephus also turned the story of the biblical Joseph into a
Hellenistic novel. In fact we have another story by an anonymous author which purports to produce
a new chapter of the life of the biblical Joseph. The Story of Joseph and Aseneth develops the
biblical hint that Joseph married Aseneth, the daughter of the priest of Heliopolisiv. Aseneth is the
beautiful and virtuous proselyte for love. Like the model woman proselyte for love, Ruth, she
repeats, though in many more words, the archetypal promise: “Your people become my people,
your God is now my God”v. As professor G. D. Kilpatrick demonstrated in a classical papervi, there
are serious religious aspects to the story of Aseneth which touch upon mystery. But the general
pattern is that of a Hellenistic novel; and even without going [5] along too far with Professor R.
Merkelbachvii, one has to admit that religious episodes and motifs found a ready reception in Greek
novels, as a fairly recent addition to fragments of novels in papyri, Lollianus’ Phoenician History,
has shown. We are led to suspect that in the Hellenistic period the Jews consolidated their national
consciousness more effectively by opposing Jewish novels to Greek novels than by opposing
Jewish historiography to Greek historiography. This tendency to choose the isolated episode as an
19
20
P-o 166: Polybius who ... Rome, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
P-o 166: This explains both why Jews ... level, interl. con segr, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
268
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
expression of faith is even more conspicuous in another literary genre which is represented in both
Greek and Roman literature but seems to have prospered particularly in Roman times. Following
Plato’s inspiration, Greek biography was traditionally very attentive to last words and testaments. A
special branch of Greek biography specialised in preserving the memory of what illustrious and
brave men had done and said in their last hours. But it was in the first century A.D. that political
and philosophic opposition to the Roman emperors found expression in accounts of exitus virorum
illustrium. There are obvious similarities, which may be due to direct influence, between this type
of literature and some of the last words of the rabbis. The most famous of the latter were
conveniently collected by Israel Abrahams under the title of Hebrew Ethical Wills (Philadelphia
1926) – a book which also illustrates the revival of this genre in medieval Judaism. One thinks
immediately of the Talmudic report (Bab. Pesahim 112 a) about R. Akiba, the martyr of the
Hadrianic period. It collects what he said in prison before execution, and one would like to think
that21 there is22 a mark of authenticity in the surprising things he is supposed to have uttered23:
“Live not in a city whose heads are scholars, enter not thy home suddenly, still less thy neighbour’s
house ... If thou wishest to be strangled, hang thyself on a big tree, and when thou teachest thy son,
teach him out of a correct book” (cf. Berakhot 61 b).
III24
Though last wills were often reported in biographies of Greek philosophers, it was not the legal
document that interested the Jews. They were alert to the possibilities inherent in combining
Biblical precedents with Greek models. The literary form of testament was, so to speak, a biography
without history.
[6] Whether it was applied to the patriarchs of old or to the recent rabbis, it brought the audience
close to a great figure at that supreme moment when the wisdom acquired throughout a lifetime had
to be communicated in the most urgent and concentrated message. Last words characterized a man,
indicated his peculiarities, among which his prophetic gifts, but did not place him in a definite
historical situation. It was in relation to the legendary figures of the past that the “last words” or
testament genre could most effectively exercise its function of creating a link with history without
producing historiography. The patriarchs were interpreted in new terms and became the carrier of a
new message from the profoundest strata of Hebrew tradition. The ultimate model was of course in
the blessing of Jacob (Genesis 49). The patriarch was evoked in his last deeds and words. He was
asked to take a share in the new ambiguity of death created by the new hopes of immortality in what
we conventionally call Pharisaic thought.
A text which seems to represent rather well some of the subtle attitudes of this literary genre is
the Testament of Abraham, apparently dating from the first century A.D. It is not a superficial
idealization of Abraham and it takes full account of the belief in immortality. Abraham had lived
his span of 999 years when God decided that it was time for him to die. His life had passed “in
quietness, mildness and justice; he had been just and hospitable”. But Abraham refused to die. One
of his moves to delay death was to ask, and to be permitted, to see the whole of the inhabited world.
Not being used to transgressions, what he saw was a shock to him. As he had not sinned, he had no
mercy for the sinners. God had to tell Abraham: “I made the world, and I do not want to destroy any
of it” (ch. 10, ed. M. Stone 1972viii). Abraham was more acceptable to God when he prayed to
improve the fate of the dead (14). The belief in intercession for the dead had grown up with the new
belief in immortality and resurrection and is, for instance, to be found in II Maccabees (13, 44). If
F. Schmidt was right in finding the influence of the description of the shield of Achilles in the
21
22
23
24
P-o 166: one would like to think that, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
P-o 166: there is -> perhaps, del; P-o 57 corr. def.
P-o 166: is supposed ... uttered <-> could utter, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: corr.def.
P-o 166, 57: num. III, msb[AMM].
269
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Iliadix on certain cosmographic details of the Testament of Abraham, contacts with Greek sources
would be reinforced (Rev. Hist. Rel. 185, 1974, 122-126).
[7]
IV25
The suppression of history in the name of piety and wisdom went together with an increased
sense of premonition about the end of the world. The patriarchs who were there at the beginning
were expected to play a part at the end. Every patriarch was an antithesis to Adam, as Adam had
been weak, and they were strong. As the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch of the late first century A.D.
sums up: “O Adam, what have you done to all of those who are descended from you” (48: 42).
Because of their clear Messianic references, it would be important to be certain about the origins
and date of the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs, which are the most notable specimen of the
testament genre. In Genesis Jacob had predicted the future of each tribe. In the Testaments of the
XII Patriarchs each of the sons continues the story with special reference both to the moral lessons
to be derived from his personal experience and to the destiny of his tribe. The present text is, of
course, Christian. But the opinion, probable in itself, that behind a superficial Christian façade there
is a solid Jewish construction has received some support from the discovery of Aramaic fragments
very similar to one of the Testaments, the Testament of Levi, in Qumran Caves 1 and 4. On the other
hand the Testament of Naphthali 5, 8 makes better sense if composed at a time when the Romans
were not yet in Judaea. As the terminus post quem seems to be represented by two probable
references to the desecration of the Temple by Antiochus IV in Testamentum Levi 14 and 17, the
natural inclination would be to put at least one version of the text of all Testaments in the second
century B.C. But the uncertainties of this conclusion make it difficult to utilize with sufficient
confidence the probable allusion to a second Messiah coming not from the descendants of Judah
and David, but from Levi, which is to be found in Testamentum Levi 18. The Qumran people, as we
all know26, also operated with the notion of two Messiahs.27
[8] Other respectable figures like Enoch, Daniel, Moses and even Esdras were given the task of
reporting about the end of mankind in indisputably Jewish texts. Enoch comes up from the depths
of Genesis 5, and Genesis 5 seems to know more than it says about Enoch. Daniel, the non-Jewish
mythical figure who has a dominant role in Ugaritic texts, makes his first appearance in the Bible in
Ezechiel (14, 14 and 28). In an ironical passage28, Ezechiel 28, 3, the King of Tyre is wiser than
Daniel: no secret can be hidden from him. As Genesis 5 on Enoch belongs to the priestly source
which is probably not earlier than Ezechiel, we may well ask whether in the sixth and fifth centuries
B.C. there were already Hebrew texts dealing exclusively with Daniel and Enoch. The Book of
Jubilees of the late second century B.C. makes Enoch the son-in-law of Daniel (4, 20). When the
Book of Jubilees was written, at least sections of the surviving Books of Daniel and Enoch were in
circulation. [The oldest part of the so-called Pentateuch of Enoch is probably the Book of Watchers
(929-31 of the Ethiopic text), which may contain an even older nucleus in 6-19. The Book of
Watchers looks like a text of the early second century B.C., yet unaffected by the Maccabaean
revolution. It contains a simple vision of the end of the Age of Evil and of the beginnings of the
Golden Age. By contrast the Book of Dreams (83-90) describes a battle which seems to be the
25
P-o 166, 57: num. IV, msb[AMM].
P-o 166: as we all know, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
27
P-o 166: two Messiahs. -> The Manual of Discipline contains the formula “the Messiahs of Aaron and Israel”, and
the so-called Order of Congregation, which seems originally to have been a section of the Manual of Discipline,
presents the order of a banquet in which the Chief Priest [8] has precedence over the Messiah of Israel. What at least we
can say is that a Christian author would hardly have involved himself in Messianic speculations presented under cover
of testaments of patriarchs without Jewish precedents, del.; P-o 57: corr. def.
28
P-o 166, 57: an ironical passage, interl.msb[AMM].
29
P-o 166, 57: 9 <-> 1, msb[AMM].
26
270
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Battle of Betheur in 164 B.C., a victory of Judas Maccabaeus. This section of Enoch is therefore
likely to be almost contemporary with the Maccabaean chapters in Daniel.]30
V31
A Davidic Messiah was not a necessary ingredient of the new and final world which the
apocalyptic writers were trying to anticipate by their imagination. The Book of Daniel which
became a model for apocalyptic thinking does not contemplate an individual Messiah, or
alternatively32 alludes to him (7, 13) in such a way as to make him unrecognizable. In the composite
Ethiopic Enoch the [9] Davidic Messiah, if such a one is meant, plays a secondary role in ch. 90,
which belongs to the Book of Dreams. The much more prominent Son of Man from the section of
Parables was apparently absent, together with that whole section, from the copies of Enoch in the
possession of the Qumran sectarians at the beginning of the first century A.D. Apocalyptic
expectations are spread over a wide spectrum and we must accept variety and surprise. At one
extreme of the spectrum there is the expectation of a personal Messiah who will free and unite the
people of Israel, subdue his enemies and reign with justice and piety – which is more or less what
we find in the XVII Psalms of Solomon, probably33 of the first century B.C. At the other extreme
we find the great cosmic dramas which insert the Messianic hopes into the picture of universal
judgement. Such are the Syrian Apocalypse of Baruch (which is a translation of a Greek translation
of an Aramaic text) and the book variously transmitted and variously called Apocalypse of Ezra, II
Esdras and IV Esdras (in the Vulgate), both belonging to the period between A.D. 70 and A.D. 100
after the destruction of the Temple. Near the middle of the spectrum we may perhaps place the
Assumption of Moses, a text which is probably earlier than A.D. 70 and later than 4 B.C., though it
may contain Maccabean elements not easy to isolate34. There is no Messiah, and it is doubtful
whether the description of God’s intervention on behalf of Israel in ch. 10 amounts to a universal
judgement: astral immortality, not a reign in this world, is what seems to be reserved to the faithful.
One of the principal functions of the apocalypses was to describe the shape and the activities of
“the world to come” in the double (and therefore ambiguous) meaning of Heaven and the future
world. Physical nature and mankind are treated as being involved in the same destiny. A new
genesis is in sight. In a devious way apocalypses took cognizance of the geographical and
intellectual horizon within which Hellenistic Jews had to live. Apocalypses, it has often been
observed, have the function of universal history – of that universal history of which Polybius,
Diodorus, Nicolas Damascenus and [10] Trogus Pompeius were producing samples of the Greek
variety in the same centuries. [The succession of empires for which Daniel is famous was known to
the pagan culture of the same age. The idea may have come from Persia and was spread by the
Romans by Licinius Sura, a Syrian as the name suggestsx, who is quoted by, or interpolated into,
Velleius Paterculus (I, 6).] 35 But the point of Jewish apocalypses is that universal history is only a
quick introduction to the lengthy process of the end of the world. Both Greco-Roman universal
history and Jewish apocalypse presuppose the large horizons opened up by the conquests of
Alexander the Great: in their mature forms both also presuppose the Roman rule over the
Mediterranean basin. But Jewish apocalypse, quite unlike Greco-Roman universal history, is a
protest against Hellenistic civilization and Roman imperialism: it indicates the Jewish refusal to
accept either.
30
P-o 166: [The oldest part ... in Daniel], parentesi quadre mss.; P-o 57: parentesi assenti.
P-o 166, P-o 57: num. V, msb[AMM].
32
P-o 166: alternatively, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
33
P-o 166: probably <-> perhaps, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
34
P-o 166: though it may contain ... to isolate <-> It survives in a partial Latin translation which could be called more
correctly the Testament of Moses, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
35
P-o 166: [The succession ... (1-6)], parentesi quadre mss.; P-o 57: parentesi assenti.
31
271
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
VI
[11] 36 By implication I have already assumed – and I do not claim it is a very original
assumption - that the writer of an apocalyptic book does not necessarily expect the end of the world
to happen next morning. The mere fact that the prophecy or vision of the end is most often
attributed to great men of the past absolves the real anonymous37 author from too serious a
commitment to what he writes. No doubt38 the anonymous writers felt that they had to face real and
powerful enemies. The author of Daniel was moved to write by conflicts in the Eastern
Mediterranean which involved the profanation of the Temple of Jerusalem. He was well aware that
the operations of Antiochus IV in Judaea had to be understood within the framework of the conflict
between Egypt and Syria and of the Roman intervention to save Egypt. Daniel after all virtually
says that he belongs to a group of intellectuals who prided themselves of their knowledge of the
situation: he was aware of the limitations of Judas Maccabaeus’ party. The oldest sections of Enoch
equally reflect the situation of the second century and add a social dimension to it. The Dead Sea
Scrolls have now given us the opportunity of seeing an apocalyptic community in operation. The
simple catalogue of the Qumran library indicates that the Qumran community was a storehouse of
apocalyptic books. But it is not easy to define in what precise sense the Qumran community or
indeed the intellectuals surrounding pseudo-Daniel lived in the belief that they were the last
generation at the end of age. The Cosmic Order was not left to look after itself. The mixture,
however variable and unequal, of straight Messianism and cosmic revolution allowed plenty of
room for human intervention. Judas Maccabaeus and the author of Daniel not only co-existed but
complemented each other: so did Bar Kochba and the author of the Apocalypse of Baruch. The
trouble of course is that human intervention very seldom fulfils the expectations of apocalyptic
books: history has its own way of discrediting apocalypse.39
[12]40
VII41
As the two centuries in which apocalyptic thinking prospered among Jews – between Antiochus
Epiphanes and the Emperor Hadrian – are also those of the spreading and consolidation of the
synagogal revolution it is tempting to argue that apocalyptic thinking was in fact the obverse42 and
complementary side of synagogal piety43.
The argument would run approximately like this. Apocalyptic thinking tried to answer the
questions and to express the anxiety raised by the corporate life of the Synagogue. The Jews loved
God deeply and felt his presence continuously. They loved even more the Torah, that stern daughter
of God who according to rabbinic legend has been consulted by her Father before he created the
world and had disapproved of the idea. xi [13] The Jews expected happiness from obedience to the
Torah. But more the Jews obeyed the Torah, the more disasters happened. How sure could a Jew be
of having fulfilled God’s commandments? How sure could a Jew be of having understood God’s
intentions? Apocalyptic expectations, though varied in their contents, were united by the
presupposition that the Just would finally find happiness, while the wicked would finally find
lasting punishment. They emphasized the transitory nature of this world in comparison with the
stability of the world to come. As the Torah was eternal, it was the foundation of the world to come.
The world to come would be for those who had observed the Torah. The Second Esdra, because it is
36
P-o 166: c. 11 <-> capp. VI-VII (= cc. 10 - 13 di P-o 57), sull'apocalittica non giudaica. Per il testo caduto, vd.
infra, Appendice - Tagli al testo Efroymson.
37
P-o 166: anonymous, interl.msb[AMM].
38
P-o 166: No doubt, interl.msb[AMM].
39
P-o 166: The trouble of course ... apocalypse, mginf msb[AMM].
40
P-o 166: [12] <-> [13], msr[AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
41
P-o 166: VII, msb[AMM].
42
P-o 166: obverse <-> reverse, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
43
P-o 166: synagogal piety <-> rabbinic thinking, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
272
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
the most mature and articulate of the Apocalypses, is also the one which best shows the structural
link between the world of apocalypses and the world of the synagogue. The eternity of the Torah is
reaffirmed, but at the same time it is made clear that God created this world for the many and the
next world for the few. The end of the world implies a choice from among the chosen.
But tempting as it is to argue in this way and to treat the apocalypses as the hidden dimension of
Jewish piety44, the evidence, as a whole, is not in favour of this theoryxii .
[14]45 First of all, the Jews literally lost their apocalyptic books. Most of what survives of the
Jewish apocalyptic literature of Antiquity has been transmitted to us through Christian channels and
often in Christianized versions. While the original texts were lost, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac,
Ethiopic, Slavonic and other translations multiplied on Christian initiative.
Secondly, there is no valid evidence that religious leaders wrote apocalyptic books. Even Rabbi
Akiba, who believed in the Messianic nature of Bar Kochba’s leadership and sacrificed his life for
it, had shown himself hostile to non-canonical books and therefore to apocalyptic books (M. Sanh.
10, 1). The Mishnah keeps out of apocalyptic speculations. Apocalyptic speculations were of course
known to the rabbis, and some of them indulged in them, as later Talmudic texts show. But such
participation in apocalyptic thinking remained marginal and extraneous to the collective life of the
synagogue.
Simple Messianic expectations were rooted in the Bible and necessary for survival in difficult
times. Even so, after the disaster of Bar Kochba’s revolt individual rabbis seldom favoured
Messianic movements. Perhaps the most telling expression of the prevailing rabbinic attitude is
what three rabbis at the end of the third century A.D. are reported to have said about the Messiah:
“May he come, but I do not want to see him” (Sanhedrin 98 a).
The Mishnah, which only once refers to the demons in the aberrant treatise Abot (5, 6), has also
only one page about the Messiah. That page testifies how badly equipped rabbinic Judaism was to
define in legal terms the nature of the Messianic age – and to give clear guidance about the problem
of how to recognize the true Messiah. The signs of the Messianic age indicated in that page, at the
end of the treatise Sotah, could hardly be of any use to anyone. They amount to a conventional
description of disorder, shortage and criminality. With great common sense, but no great theology,
Rabban Gamaliel defended Jesus’s apostles in the Synedrion. His [15] argument was: if their work
comes from men it will not last, if it comes from the God you cannot fight against it (Act. 5, 40).
Success only, in these terms, could decide whether the Messiah was authentic. The later history of
Judaism confirms how difficult it was for the Jews to determine the authenticity of Messianic
claims. Professors Gershom Scholem has shown how vague and haphazard were the criteria which
the Jews of the seventeenth century had at their disposal for deciding whether Sabbatai Zevi was the
true Messiahxiii.
One apocalyptic element, no doubt, remained inextricably connected even with the most
simplified version of Messianic hopes: the expectation of the resurrection of the dead. The Amidah
– the central daily prayers for about two thousand years – include in their present form both the
invocation for the Messiah to come and a blessing for the God who gives life to the dead. It was
nevertheless intimated that the Messiah would have to study the Torah – that ultimate guarantor of
permanence.
If a formula has to be produced it is that rabbinic Judaism repressed, in the name of the Torah,
both history and that type of anti-history which is apocalyptic thinking. What historiography and
apocalypse have in common is the description of, and the reflection on, change. The rabbis loved
the Torah and meditated on the Torah, because it was permanence.
It is on the notion of the eternity of the Torah, even in the Messianic age, that Judaism continued
to rest – and therefore to be distinct from Christianity. The Greek-speaking philosophers of
Alexandria who did not give much thought to the Messiah and the Aramaic-speaking rabbis of
44
P-o 166: Jewish piety <-> the rabbinic mind, msb [AMM]; P-o 57: corr. def.
P-o 166: cc. 14-15 <-> cc. 14, 15 e 16 di P-o 57, contenenti una trattazione più estesa degli aspetti apocalittici e
messianici nei testi rabbinici. Per il testo caduto vd. infra, Appendice - Tagli al testo Efroymson.
45
273
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Palestine and Babylonia who were not entirely reassured about his intentions were agreed on this
point. What potentialities they attributed to the word of God as expressed in the Torah is another
matter. Rabbinic Judaism assigned to the prophet Elijah the function of reconciling at the end of
time the conflicting interpretations of the Torah.46
[17]47
VIII
My impression is that between the 150 B.C. and A.D. 100 history and apocalypse competed with
each other and weakened each other reciprocally. That give the rabbis their opportunity for
establishing themselves against both history and apocalypse.48 The men who pushed history and
apocalyptic to the margins of Judaism were also the men who acquired the authority for making
laws. The emergence of their class is still shrouded in mystery, and there is no need for me to
explain here that the attempts, however valuable, of applying form criticism to the various Talmudic
works in which the rabbinic interpretations are recorded are subject to the intrinsic limitations of
every form criticism. A literary form reflects, but does not explain, the situation which provokes a
saying. What is worse, it neither reflects nor explains the long-term situation which gives authority
to a text, if this situation is distant in time or space from the situation in which the text originated.
The question whether about 200 B.C. a particular sage ever uttered the saying “Let your house be a
house of meeting for the sages, sit at their feet, etc.” (Abot 1, 4) is perhaps less relevant than the
other question about the meaning of “house of meeting” and “sages” in this context. Though we do
not know when the sages began to have a distinct physiognomy and therefore a distinct role in
society, they must have started their work when the Jews had to decide day by day how much of
Greek life and thought they were prepared to make their own. Later, after the destruction of the
Second Temple, it was by no means a foregone conclusion that a Jew could survive as a Jew under
the Romans. What changes this implied in the physiognomy of the rabbis is at present difficult to
say.49 To pass from the Qumran texts and the Gospels50 to the Mishnah and Tosefta requires a jump
I am too old to make.
As we see from the rabbis in our earliest texts, mystical journeys to Heaven, miracles and
prophecies were not impossible for them. Some had secret doctrines for their pupils. They lived in a
society where magic was rampant. One would like to know more about this aspect of their
activities, and also whether one is justified in sensing that there was more of it in Babylonia after
A.D. 200 than in Palestine in previous centuries. [18]51 But as they avoided becoming mandarinsxiv,
so the rabbis as a class avoided becoming medicine men. Their concern was rather with holiness.
They were not ascetic, but greatly aware of sin and perdition. They cared about ritual purity and
respected Temple and priesthood. When the Temple was destroyed they made what to us may
appear a pathetic effort to preserve and develop Temple regulations with a view to its restoration.
For all practical purposes they took the place of the priests in controversies about sacred law. They
came to conceive of themselves as depositories of the oral Law which integrated the written Law of
the Pentateuch. They understood oral Law as law given together with the written Law to Moses on
Mount Sinai, but transmitted from generation to generation until it reached the sages themselves.
Thanks to the exemplary work by Harold Cherniss on the Early Academy (Berkeley 1945)xv and
John Patrick Lynch on Aristotle’s School (Berkeley 1972)xvi and to other research, we are now in a
better position to compare the rabbinic schools with the Greek institutions of higher learning than
we could have done forty years ago. The illusion that Greek philosophic schools were universities
46
P-o 166, nota: to page 17, mgdxmsr[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
P-o 166: nella rinumerazione ms. delle cc. il numero 16 viene omesso.
48
P-o 166: My impression is ... history and apocalypse, mgsup e interl. con segr, msb[AMM]; P-o 57: def.
49
P-o 166: to say -> Both the Qumran texts and the Gospels presuppose rabbis in action. But, del.;
50
P-o 166: the Qumran texts and the Gospels <-> them, msb[AMM].
51
P-o 166: nota, pp. 18-22 new Grinfield III, 3.2.82, mgsup,dx msb [AMM]; P-o 166: cc. 18-22 <-> 18-31 di P-o 57,
trattazione in quattro capp. (VII-X) sulle scuole rabbiniche. Per il testo caduto, vedi infra, Appendice - Tagli al testo
Efroymson.
47
274
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
in the modern sense has disappeared; what remains is the image of private institutions, the
continuity of which was essentially founded on the appointment of a successor either by the
incumbent head of the school or (perhaps less frequently) by the surviving teachers of the school.
Mobility of schools was a characteristic among Greeks as among Jews. And social mobility – that
is, recruitment from lower classes – was also common to both. But it is perhaps where the similarity
is greatest that the difference becomes more conspicuous. Both Jewish rabbis and Greek
philosophers had political ambitions. Greek philosophers tried several times to run individual cities
or to act as advisers to sovereigns. They occasionally succeeded for a longer or shorter period. Plato
in Sicily and the Pythagoreans in Southern Italy are the most obvious examples; it is not by chance
that in both places the Greeks were a colonial minority. But unlike the Jewish rabbis the Greek
philosophers never [19] succeeded in establishing themselves permanently as the leaders of their
nation and in impressing their own thought on the social organization of the Greeks at large. The
Greek philosophic schools were fundamentally isolated institutions in the middle of Greek society
and transmitted themselves to posterity as systems of thought. The rabbinic schools, by keeping in
touch with synagogue and elementary education, shaped the conduct of the surrounding society and
transmitted themselves to posterity both as a way of thinking and as an ideal way of life for a nation
– which means that their sphere of action extended to the whole of the Jewish community. what we
do not yet know is when and how this happened. We know only the result.52
What kept the Jewish people together was a common law which basically resulted from the
rabbinic interpretation of Mosaic law. It is this emphasis on the Torah which ultimately explains the
brevity and elusiveness of our sources about conflicts and disagreements within Judaism with which
I dealt in my previous lecture. This restraint is to be found both outside and inside specifically
rabbinic texts, with the only exception – which is therefore a confirmation – of apocalyptic texts.
We have seen how restraint, to the point of blurring the facts, is apparent in Flavius Josephus, who
is most laconic when he speaks of John the Baptist and Jesus.
I do not know of any certain reference to either Jesus or Christianity in rabbinic texts of the
period when Christianity could still be treated as a deviant form of Judaism. The Mishnah, which
was put together about A.D. 200, is silent about Jesus. Its only likely allusion to Christianity – the
prophecy that the kingdom (of Rome) will fall to heretics (leminuth) in the treatise Sotah 9, 15 – is
an addition which was recognized to be later than the conversion of Constantine by J. S. Lauterbach
(Rabbinic Essays, 553)xvii . Later Talmudic references are less relevant to us, inserted as they are in a
situation in which Christianity had ceased to be an internal Jewish problem. Even so, the allusions
are remarkably few and trivial.
An apparent exception is offered by the rabbinic discussions on the status of the Samaritans.
Their credentials for being treated as Jews were formidable; and they posed legal problems,
especially after the [20] destruction of the Temple, which nobody could ignore. “The foolish nation
that dwelleth in Shechem”, as Ecclesiasticus called the Samaritans (1, 25), is treated with altogether
remarkable restraint in rabbinic texts. Allowing for this exception of the Samaritans, the evidence
about Jewish sects in Jewish texts – either Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek – carries with it an
unmistakable indication. The more dangerous and radical the differences, the less likely our
authorities are to speak about them.
The attitude to isolated individuals suspected or convicted of error or deviation is different. The
notion of minuth (roughly equivalent to heresy) must have been formalized in Judaea in the first
century A.D. A prayer against the minim, heretics, or rather a brief formula of a prayer, was
introduced into Jewish liturgy at the end of the first century A.D. But the relation between the
theoretical notion of minuth and the practice of ban or excommunication which developed with it is
by no means clear. Rabbis who disagreed with majority decisions about ritual law in academies
were in danger of being banned by their fellow-academicians. We know that Eliezer ben Hyrcanos,
the teacher of Rabbi Akiba, was both accused of heresy – that is, probably of Christian sympathies
52
P-o 166: What we do not yet know ... result, interl.msb[AMM].
275
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
– before a Roman tribunal and excommunicated by his fellow-rabbis (J. Neusner, Eliezer ben
Hyrcanos, I, 1973, 401 and 423). He remained in the tradition as one of the most honoured rabbis.
Tradition shows him dying on Sabbath eve surrounded by his pupils, as a sage should die. Elishah
ben Abuyah, the pupil of Rabbi Akiba and the master of Rabbi Meir, did not get off so easily. He
remained in the tradition as the prototype of the sage who passed to the other side. All sorts of nasty
things were reported about him, from violation of the Sabbath to collaboration with the Romans.
This was the time of Hadrian, and ben Abuyah’s master, Akiba, had died a martyr’s death. Yet
Elishah ben Abuyah is not rejected with contempt. Tradition preserves and canonizes some of his
aphorisms. It register the devotion of his pupil Meir who went on discussing the Torah with him
[21] and expressed, after the death without repentance of his master, the certainty that he had been
saved. The figure of Elishah ben Abuyah who tried everything – mystical experience, Greek songs
and low forms of prevarication (Jer. Megillah 1, 9; Bab. Hagigah 16b, etc.) – remained the
ambiguous symbol of the attraction of the “other” – the classical world of the Greeks and Romans.
He was not denied the hope of resurrection with the Just.
The situation must not be misunderstood. Elishah ben Abuyah was after all an isolated
individual. The new rabbinic orthodoxy of the second century felt safe in relation to individuals: it
was disturbed by, and therefore silent or reticent about, large movements.
In approaching my conclusion I must return to my starting point. In facing a civilization like
Greek civilization, which was based on education, the Jews had to give themselves an education
which could stand up the Greeks. Whereas Greek schools, even if they put themselves under the
protection of a specific god, were essentially different from prayer-houses, the Jewish school and
the Jewish prayer-house were united by the Bible. They were also united by the religious
significance the Jews attributed to the relation between teachers and pupils.53 The school pyramid
culminated in God himself: “let the fear of thy master be like the fear of Heaven” (Abot 3, 9).
This educational system, which probably received its starting-point and certainly derived its
significance from the Hellenistic surroundings, was taken to be of immemorial origin. Midrashic
texts transferred it back to the patriarchal period. What could Moses do in the forty days spent on
the mountain to receive the Law but study the Scripture in the day-time and the Mishnah at night?
(Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 46, transl. G. Friedländer, p. 359xviii ). Indeed an academy was available
during the forty years of the wandering in the wilderness (Bab. Yoma 28b). God himself had to have
his own academy, his own bet hamidrash, in Heaven where he taught the Law to the righteous –
what was sometimes called the Heavenly Academy. A rabbi even [22] knew the exact part of the
day God reserved for the study of his own Torah: the first three hours of the day (Bab. ‘Abodah
Zara 3b). The common care for the study of the Torah gave a new warmth to the relation between
God and the Jew. Clearly much of these imaginings must belong to the period after the destruction
of the Temple, when Judaism was saved by its school system, and it was felt that “by the breath
from the mouth of schoolchildren the world is sustained” (Bab. Shabbat 119b). One would like
more specifically to know the origin of the tradition according to which the Greek philosopher
Oenomaus of Gadara, a contemporary and an acquaintance of R. Meir in the second century A.D.,
was asked what one could do against the Jews and answered: “As long as the voice of the children
will be heard in the schools and in the synagogues you cannot subjugate this people” (Genesis
Rabbah 65, 20; cf. Pesikta deRab Kahana, ed. M. Friedmann, 121axix). Yet the sages could smile at
their own schools. They told the story of how Moses – the Lawgiver Moses – was allowed by God
to sit on the eighth bench of the school of Rabbi Akiba but was unable to follow the subtle
argument about a point of the Law he had brought down from Mount Sinai (Bab. Menahot 29b).
“Not being able to follow their arguments he (Moses) was ill at ease, but when they came to a
certain subject and the disciple said to the master ‘Whence do you know it?’ and the latter replied
‘It is a Law given unto Moses at Sinai’, Moses was comforted”.
53
P-o 166: and pupils. -> What must be emphasized is that the fear of the master is compared to the peace of Heaven,
del.
276
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
We shall not delude ourselves that Jews and Greeks searchingly examined each other. Much or
what was Greek escaped the Jews, and the Greeks knew very little about Judaism. But the difficult
paradox is that Judaism itself, as we know it, is characterized by intellectual defence against
Hellenism: in this sense Judaism is a product of Hellenism, that is54, Judaism was originally55 a
model for survival under the pressures of Hellenism56. The model was faith in a book and obedience
to it, accompanied by daily communal prayer and instruction both for children and adults. This
model which had its negative consequence in ritual separation, allowed the Jews to live even
without a land of their own.57
Appendice - Tagli al testo Efroymson
Si riportano qui integralmente le sezioni di testo Efroymson (P-o 57) interessate da tagli
sostanziali e interventi di sintesi in vista della versione Grinfield (P-o 166).
1.
Sull’apocalittica egiziana e iranica e Qumran (P-o 57, cc. 10-13).
VI
It is by now a commonplace that the Greco-Macedonian rule, and, later, the Roman rule
provoked deep resentment in the subjected nations which expressed itself in religious hopes, dreams
and utopies. Oracles and prophecies more or less explicitly directed against the Greeks and
Macedonians, and later the Romans, were ascribed to Zoroaster and Hystaspes in Iranian or Iranized
circles and to Amenhotep (Potter’s Oracle) and Tachos (Demotic Chronicle) in Egypt, while the
Sibyls were active everywhere. When the Romans entered Greece, they found religious hostility not
unlike that which the Greeks had met in the East. But what has yet to be demonstrated is that
outside Jewish society real apocalyptics were the expression of immediate political dissatisfaction. I
do not know anything comparable to Daniel or to the apocalyptic Ezdra outside Judaism. The
Demotic Chronicle and even the Potter’s Oracle are modest in their expectations with the cosmic
background of the political struggle envisaged by the Jewish seers. The Potter’s Oracle expects the
Greeks to be destroyed by internal rivalries, not by the Egyptians. To my knowledge [11] (and, of
course, I may be misinformed) only in Jewish apocalyptics is there a clear interdependence between
cosmic revolution and actual political struggles. The closest parallel to Jewish apocalyptics is the
Revelation of Hystaspes, but it is clear from Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 6, 5, 43) that it had
received Christian interpolations. What Lactantius reports about it in the fourth century may
therefore be affected by Jewish and Christian ideas.
Not every Jewish apocalyptic book is inspired by an immediate emergency. But there is no
generic Weltschmerz. The anonymous writers felt they had to face real and powerful enemies. The
author of Daniel was moved to write by conflicts in the Eastern Mediterranean which involved the
profanation of the Temple of Jerusalem. He was well aware that the operations of Antiochus IV in
Judaea had to be understood within the framework of the conflict between Egypt and Syria and of
the Roman intervention to save Egypt. Daniel after all virtually says that he belongs to a group of
intellectuals who prided themselves on their knowledge of the situation. He was aware of the
limitations of Judas Maccabaeus’ party. The oldest sections of Enoch equally reflect the situation of
the second century and add a social dimension to it. The Dead Sea Scrolls have now given us the
opportunity of seeing an apocalyptic community in operation. The simple catalogue of the Qumran
54
P-o 166: in this sense Judaism is a product of Hellenism, that is <-> it becomes the story of how the Jews learned to
live as Jews without a land of their own, msb[AMM].
55
P-o 166: originally, interl.msb[AMM].
56
P-o 166: under the pressures of Hellenism, interl.msb[AMM].
57
P-o 166: This model allowed the Jews to live as Jews without a land of their own, mginfmsb[AMM]; which had its
negative consequence in ritual separation, interl.msb[AMM]; End of Grinfield III, msb [AMM] mginf,dx.
277
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
library indicates that the Qumran community was a storehouse of apocalyptic books. This does not
mean that the members of the community were the authors of the majority of the books collected. It
would be arbitrary to speak of Enoch and Jubilee as Qumran books. But the Qumran community
lived in the belief that they were the last generation at the end of the age. The Rule of the
Congregation begins with the words “This is the order for all the Congregation of Israel in the last
days when they are gathered”. Last generation”, “day of slaughter”, “day of vengeance” and “day of
judgment” are recurrent terms. The Qumran people had not broken with official Judaism; it remains
arguable that they sent their offerings to [12]Jerusalem like any other Jews. But they disapproved of
the other Jews outside the community and considered themselves the “elect”. They had or rather
had had a leader, the “Teacher of Righteousness” who had been persecuted. They did not claim for
him miracles or other indications of supernatural powers. They expected the Messiah or rather two
Messiahs, neither of whom had apparently anything to do with the Teacher of Righteousness. The
grievances of these people seem at first sight to have been disproportionate to their apocalyptic
conclusions. Furthermore, while their grievances were against other Jews, the apocalyptic war they
were expecting between the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness was a fight between Jews –
perhaps good Jews only – and non-Jews. The tribes of Levi, Judah and Benjamin were expected to
go into the final battle against Ammonites, Moabites and Edomites. The ability to produce an
apocalyptic situation out of a comparatively minor disagreement inside Judaism is evident. We shall
be less surprised to find apocalyptic writings emerging from the destruction of the Temple and the
rebellion of despair under Hadrian led by Bar Kochba. The Cosmic Order was not left to look after
itself. The apocalyptic writers were impatient. The mixture, however variable and unequal, of
straight Messianism and cosmic revolution allowed plenty of room for human intervention. Judas
Maccabaeus and the author of Daniel not only co-existed but probably understood each other: so
did Bar Kochba and the author of the Apocalypse of Baruch.
VII
What I have said should not conceal that there are similarities both in basic presuppositions and
in important details between Jewish and Iranian apocalyptic thought. Satan, who is mentioned in the
Bible as a specific individual only three times – Job 1, Zacharias 3 and I Chronicles 21 (none of
them, in all probability, pre-exilic) – may well have become the leader of the bad spirits under
Iranian pressure. His cohorts of devils are foreign to Biblical Hebraism. Somehow the seven
archangels dear to apocalyptic lore (Enoch 40; 87 etc.; II Esdr. 5, 20; cf. Tob. 12, 15) must be
connected with [13] the Zoroastrian Amesha Spentas, even if the Amesha Spentas were originally
only six. And the angels who protect specific individual and nations may owe some of their
peculiarities to the Zoroastrian fravashis – the pre-existing Souls of all good men and women. After
all the appearance of the Magi in the Nativity story must have Jewish roots: it is not simply a riposte
to the visit of the Magi to the Emperor Nero, as has been suggested (cf. Plin. N.H. 30, 1, 16; Suet.
Nero 13; Dio Cass. 63, 1, 7). The identification of Zoroaster with the prophet Ezechiel which is
reported by Clement of Alexandria (Strom. 1, 15, 69) seems to have been known to Alexander
Polyhistor in the first century B.C.: it indicates awareness of similarities between Jewish and
Zoroastrian thought.
What the simple analysis of correlations between Jewish and Iranian thought does not explain,
however, is the sudden need the Jewish felt for celestial armies to fight their wars against all sorts of
external and internal enemies, and most conspicuously Greeks and Romans. The celestial cohorts
from Persia were, so to speak, summoned to fight the oppressors and the tempters from the West.
One is reminded of the occasions on which the Jews turned in reality or in hope to the Parthian
armies for help against Greeks and, especially, Romans.
278
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
2. Contro l’interpretazione dell’apocalittica come dimensione nascosta della pietà giudaica
(P-o 57, cc. 14-16)
First of all, there is no valid evidence that rabbis wrote apocalyptic books. Even Rabbi Akiba,
who believed in the Messianic nature of Bar Kochba’s leadership and sacrificed his life for it, had
shown himself hostile to non-canonical books and therefore to apocalyptic books (M. Sanhedrin 10,
1). The Mishnah keeps out of apocalyptic speculations and incidentally never mentions Angels.
Apocalyptic speculations were of course known to the rabbis, and some of them indulged in them,
as later Talmudic texts show. But such participation in apocalyptic thinking remained marginal.
The fact was that the Jews literally lost their apocalyptic books. Fragments of the lost original
Aramaic text of four sections of the Book of Enoch have recently been recovered in the caves of
Qumran. Most of [15] what survives of the Jewish apocalyptic literature of Antiquity has been
transmitted to us through Christian channels and often in Christianised versions. While the original
texts were lost, Greek, Latin, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Slavonic and other translations multiplied on
Christian initiative.
The third-century Rabbi Hillel – a grandson of Judah Ha-Nasi – reached the point of denying the
future coming of the Messianic King by saying that the Messiah had already come with King
Ezekiah in the eighth century B.C. (Bab. Sanhedrin 99 a). This was unusual. Simple Messianic
expectations deprived of the cosmic speculations which went with them were seldom or never
repudiated by the rabbis. They were too strongly rooted in the Bible. Even so, after the disaster of
Bar Kochba’s revolt individual rabbis seldom favoured Messianic movements. Perhaps the most
telling expression of the prevailing rabbinic attitude is what three rabbis at the end of the third
century A.D. are reported to have said about the Messiah: “May he come, but I do not want to see
him” (Sanhedrin 98 a).
The Mishnah, which only once refers to the demons in the aberrant treatise Abot (5, 6), has also
only one page about the Messiah. That page testifies how badly equipped Rabbinic Judaism was to
define in legal terms the nature of the Messianic age – and to give clear guidance about the problem
of how to recognize the true Messiah. The signs of the Messianic age indicated in that page, at the
end of the treatise Sotah, could hardly be of any use to anyone. They amount to a conventional
description of disorder, shortage and criminality. With great common sense, but no great theology,
Rabban Gamaliel defended Jesus’s apostles in the Synedrion. His argument was: if their work
comes from men it will nor last, if it comes from God, you cannot fight against it (Act. 5, 40).
Success only, in these terms, could decide whether the Messiah was authentic. The later history of
Judaism confirms how difficult it was for the Jews to determine the authenticity of Messianic
claims. In his great book about Sabbatai Zevi, Professor Gershom Scholem has shown how vague
and haphazard were the criteria which the Jews of the seventeenth [16] century had at their disposal
for deciding whether Sabbatai Zevi was the true Messiah. His prophet Nathan of Gaza had to
adduce visions to buttress his faith.
No simple formula of course does justice to the relations between apocalyptic thinking and
rabbinic Judaism. But if a formula has to be produced it is that rabbinic Judaism repressed, in the
name of the Torah, both history and that type of anti-history which is apocalyptic thinking. What
historiography and apocalypse have in common is the description of, and reflection on, change. The
rabbis loved the Torah and meditated on the Torah, because it was permanence.
One apocalyptic element, no doubt, remained inextricably connected even with the most
simplified version of Messianic hopes: the expectation of the resurrection of the dead. The Amidah
– the central daily prayers for about two thousand years – include in their present form both the
invocation for the Messiah to come and a blessing for the God who gives life to the dead. It was
nevertheless intimated that the Messiah would have to study the Torah. If the rest of the Bible
ceases to be binding in the Messianic age the Book of the Torah will remain in force (Jer. Megillah
1, 5 (4), 70 d in the name of Rabbi Jochanan, third century A.D.).
279
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
The rabbis saw to it that the Torah did indeed remain the principle regulating the life of the Jews
in this world. In doing so they obviated the demoralization and the disintegration of a nation which
had been left without land and without normal political institutions.
It is ultimately on the notion of the eternity of the Torah, even in the Messianic age, that Judaism
continued to rest – and therefore to be distinct from Christianity. The Greek-speaking philosophers
of Alexandria and the Aramaic-speaking rabbis of Palestine and Babylonia were agreed on this
point. What potentialities they attributed to the word of God as expressed in the Torah is another
matter. Rabbinic Judaism assigned to the prophet Elijah the function of reconciling at the end of
time the conflicting interpretations of the Torah.
3 - Sulle scuole rabbiniche e le correnti giudaiche (P-o 57, cc. 18-31).
[In Palestine the] [18] rabbinic rain-makers were perhaps fewer, the situation less humorous.
Honi ‘the circle-maker’, a learned and celebrated rain-maker of the first century B.C. (Megillat
Ta’anit 3, 8), was stoned to death when he refused to curse one of the factions in conflict and
prayed: “Master of the Universe, these men are thy people”. (Jos. Ant. Jud. 14, 24). But as they
avoided becoming mandarins, so the rabbis as a class avoided becoming medicine men. Their
concern was rather with holiness. They were not ascetic, but greatly aware of sin and perdition.
They cared about ritual purity and respected Temple and priesthood. When the Temple was
destroyed they made what to us may appear a pathetic effort to preserve and develop Temple
regulations with a view to its restoration. For all practical purposes they took it upon themselves to
decide in controversies about sacred law. They turned themselves into judges about their superiority
over the individual priests. They came to conceive of themselves as depositories of the Oral Law
which integrated the Written Law of the Pentateuch. They understood Oral Law as law given
together with the Written Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, but transmitted from generation to
generation until it reached the Sages themselves. This is the doctrine of Oral Law that made it
increasingly difficult for Sadducees to join the Sages, as the Sadducees treated additions to the
Mosaic law as post-Mosaic and collected them in a written Book of Ordinances which became a
bone of contention between Sadducees and Sages (Megillat Ta’anit 4, 1, and its commentary).
The relation, if any, between the Sages and the so-called confraternities of Pharisees is equally
obscure: indeed the very nature of the Pharisaic confraternities (haburot), which (as already hinted)
seem to have been modelled on Greek eranoi (friendly societies) for communal meals and funerals,
is far from being clear.
In the late first century B.C. Hillel and Shammai organized their “houses” on the lines of Greek
philosophic schools. Like Greek philosophic [19] schools they sought and obtained influence and
clienteles. Some public remuneration is documented. Inherited wealth helped, but some Sages, as I
said, were proletarians who supported themselves by work. Direct payment by adult students to
teachers does not seem to have been usual or respectable; but there were good people who
maintained both a Sage and his pupils, though the story of Genesis Rabbah 72, 5 on Zebulun the
trader and Isachar the scholar is not to be taken literally. There was formal ordination of rabbis by
imposition of hands. At first the teacher ordained his best pupils; but when Rabbi Akiba died,
another rabbi ordained his pupils. The earliest evidence about ordination is analogical: it is in the
Acts of the Apostles. The main material for our picture naturally comes from Palestine and
Babylonia, where the most prestigious rabbinic academies had their residences, but rabbis existed
elsewhere. About A.D. 95-96 a delegation of scholars from Palestine found in Rome a religious
leader, Theudas (Thaddeus), whom they considered not very learned, but respected as a man. They
are said to have sent him a message: “If you were not Theudas we would excommunicate you”
(Bab. Pesahim 53 b; Midrash Tehillim 28). Later in the second century A.D. an academy led by a
Palestinian rabbi of repute, Mattia ben Cheresh (Bab. Sanhedrin 32 b), existed in Rome.
Thanks to the exemplary work by Harold Cherniss on the Early Academy (Berkeley 1945) and
John Patrick Lynch on Aristotle’s School (Berkeley 1972) and to other research, we are now in a
better position to compare the rabbinic schools with the Greek institutions of higher learning than
280
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
we could have done forty years ago. The illusion that Greek philosophic schools were universities
in the modern sense has disappeared; what remains is the image of private institutions, the
continuity of which was essentially founded on the appointment of a successor either by the
incumbent head of the school or (perhaps less frequently) by the surviving teachers of the school.
Some estate was tied to the school, but how the estate was transmitted through generations is not
always clear: in some cases it is certain that [20] the head of the school directly inherited it from his
predecessor (which was easy if he had been designated by his predecessor). Public places (such as
the Academy, the Lycaeum and the Stoa Poikile in Athens) were used by the schools together with,
or in substitution of, private buildings. Each school was associated with some religious symbols and
had communal meals: in the case of the Epicureans there was even some worship of the founder
Epicurus. But there is no evidence that the school as such was a religious association or thiasos. The
only learned institution which had real religious status was the Museum of Alexandria which was in
the charge of a priest appointed by the king (Strabo, 17, 794 c), but we are not entitled to
extrapolate from this case: the Museum of Alexandria was chiefly a library, and libraries often were
religious institutions in the Near East. Either fees (e.g. Diog. Laert. 4, 12) or gifts (Plato, Ep. 13) or
both helped the school, but teachers contributed from their wealth, if any. The schools lasted for
centuries, but while there is evidence that Stoics and Epicureans continued to flourish in the first
and second centuries A.D., the continuity of the Academy and of the Peripatos, that is, of the
Platonic and of the Aristotleian schools, seems to have been interrupted for a couple of centuries
(cf. Seneca, Nat. Quaest. 7, 32, 2, Diog. Laert. 10, 9; Acta Apost. 17). Nor is it certain that the
establishment of four endowed chairs of philosophy in Athens for the four main philosophic
doctrines by Marcus Aurelius (Philostr., Vit. Sophist. 2, 2, p. 566xx; cf. Dio Cass. 72, 31, 3) means
that all schools went back to full activity. The neo-Platonics who felt persecuted by Justinian and
left Athens in 532 A.D. (Agathias II, 30) were probably the continuators of a fifth-century revival
rather than the direct heirs of Plato. On the other hand it is clear that the teaching of the doctrines of
the main philosophic sects existed outside Athens; there were Platonists in Syria, Aristotelians in
Alexandria, Stoics at Rhodes, Epicureans at Naples in various times and circumstances. Mobility of
schools was as characteristic among Greeks as among Jews.
[21] There are indeed so many obvious similarities and differences between Jewish rabbis and
Greek philosophers that it would be a waste of time to dwell on each of them. But it is perhaps
where the similarity is greatest that the difference become more conspicuous. Both Jewish rabbis
and Greek philosophers had political ambitions. Greek philosophers tries several times to run
individual cities or to act as advisers to sovereigns. They occasionally succeeded for a longer or
shorter period. Plato in Sicily and the Pythagoreans in Southern Italy are the most obvious
examples; it is not by chance that in both places the Greeks were a colonial minority. But unlike the
Jewish rabbis the Greek philosophers never succeeded in establishing themselves permanently as
the leaders of their nation and in impressing their own thought on the social organization of the
Greeks at large. It is of course probable that the Jewish rabble would not have succeeded but for the
destruction of the Temple. Whatever the explanation, the difference remains. The Greek
philosophic schools were fundamentally isolated institutions in the middle of Greek society and
transmitted themselves to posterity as systems of thought. The rabbinic schools shaped the conduct
of the surrounding society and transmitted themselves to posterity both as a way of thinking and as
an ideal way of life for a nation – which means that their sphere of action extended to the whole of
the Jewish community.
There were indeed customary ties between diaspora and Palestine, such as the pilgrimages to
Jerusalem and the annual contribution to the Temple which were collected among the diaspora
Jews. But the basic connection was the organization of the Jewish communities. Notwithstanding
the variety of states and political regimes in which the Jews lived there remained enough uniformity
in Jewish institutions to ensure conformity of thought and similarity of achievements. The
synagogue became the centre of communal life everywhere outside Jerusalem, even in Judaea. The
leaders of the synagogue were recognized as communal leaders. The Greek, the Parthian and the
281
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
Roman authorities accepted, either officially by charter or unofficially [22] by custom, the existence
of some measure of Jewish self-government. It was taken for granted that controversies between
Jews would be settled according to Jewish law either by local courts or by local arbitrators. In
difficult cases the local Jewish administrators would turn for advice either to better provided
communities or to rabbis of recognized authority. The Talmud recalls the advice asked by the
Alexandrian Jews of Joshua ben Chaninah, a Palestinian teacher of the second century A.D. (Nidd.
69 b). Philo himself wrote extensively on legal problems arising from Mosaic texts. In the last
century Heinrich Graetz thought that Philo might reflect in his De specialibus legibus the
regulations of the dissident temple of Onias in Egypt (Gesch. der Juden, ed. 1905, II, 29 ff.xxi ).
More recently E. R. Goodenough tried to prove that Philo, who was after all a communal leader of
Alexandrian Jewry, wrote to guide the local courts of his native cityxxii . There is no evidence for
either theory. Philo may well have done nothing more than expound Mosaic Law to the best of his
own reflections. What remains important is that Philo could not avoid interpreting Jewish Law.
Whether he did so to offer a Jewish counterpart to Plato’s law or an Alexandrian counterpart to the
contemporary rabbinic legal exegesis (Halakhah) of Jerusalem or Babylonia does not alter the basic
fact that any serious involvement in Jewish religion implied involvement in details of Jewish Law.
Philo warned his fellow allegorists that allegorical interpretation of the Law was not to be construed
as an excuse for not observing it (Migr. Abrah. 88).
The rebels of the Qumran were of the same opinion. They fought against the priests of
Jerusalem, but they stuck to Jewish Law more or less in the form which was current in their time.
This was recognized by the great Louis Ginzberg when the only document of their sect was still the
so-called Zadokite text found in the repository of the synagogue of Old Cairo at the end of the last
century (Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte, 1922xxiii ). The documents found in the caves near the
Wadi Qumran in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea since 1947 have confirmed this attitude of the
sectarian [23] followers of the Teacher of Righteousness. One of the great merits of the admirable
Qumran Studies by Chaim Rabinxxiv is to have emphasized the legalism of the sectarians, though it
would be difficult to follow Rabin in his inference that the sectarians were Pharisees in retreat.
The Hellenistic age of Judaism has often been defined as the age of variety. The interpretation
goes back to Flavius Josephus who tried to present to a pagan audience the Jewish sects of
Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Variety has indeed to be emphasised. But before we emphasise
it, let us be clear that what is remarkable is the relative uniformity of Jewish life. The spreading of
the Jews along the Mediterranean coasts and in the Middle East had been due to the most diverse
circumstances, from military settlement to deportation, from trade to slavery. What kept all these
people together was a common law which basically resulted from the rabbinic interpretation of
Mosaic Law. If Homer, the Delphic Oracle, the Olympic games and the philosophers kept the
Greeks together, Moses, the Jerusalem Temple, whether operating or destroyed, the Synagogue and
the rabbis kept the Jews together.
IX
One feature of Judaism under the Romans deserves more attention than it normally receives: the
extraordinary restraint and brevity of our sources about conflicts and disagreements within Judaism.
This restraint is to be found both outside and inside specifically rabbinic texts, with the only
exception, which is therefore a confirmation, of apocalyptic texts. Flavius Josephus is our only
systematic informant about the three sects of Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and he is very
brief. On John the Baptist and Jesus he is even more laconic; and there are later interpolations in his
text. Philo has nothing about Sadducees and Pharisees, but much about Essenes and a great deal
about the Therapeutae of Egypt on whom he is our only source. Essenes and Therapeutae were for
Philo the representatives of [24] two different religious attitudes, one ascetic, the other
contemplative. He may have invented the Therapeutae in order to describe his ideal of monastic
contemplation. More probably the Therapeutae were a short-lived community inspired by Philo or
by somebody like Philo. After all, according to the Karaite al-qirqisani, in the tenth century the sect
282
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
of the Magharians used a work by the “Alexandrian” who must be Philo (N. Golb, JAOS, 80, 1960,
348xxv ).
The Qumran community seems to have remained unknown to all the ancient sources. It is now
fashionable to treat the Qumran brethren as Essenes, because Pliny the Elder placed the Essenes
near the Dead Sea, were the residence of the new sect was found (N.H. 5, 15, 73). But neither Philo
nor Josephus connect the Essenes with the Teacher of Righteousness who looms large in the
Qumran texts. Nowhere is it said that the Essenes lived – as the Qumran brethren undoubtedly lived
– in the expectation of an imminent Messianic age. Prudent scholars must therefore conclude that
the identification of Essenes and Qumran is far from proved. The silence of ancient sources about
Qumran remains striking.
Even more striking is the reticence of rabbinic sources about the Pharisees. If many modern
scholars are convinced that the Pharisees by their insistence on Oral Law created rabbinic – that is,
Talmudic – Judaism, the rabbis who put together what makes up the Talmud are not conscious of
this filiation, and mix praise and blame in the rare cases in which they mention the Pharisees. The
Mishnah attributes to Rabbi Joshua of the first century A.D. the following saying: “A foolish Saint
(hasid), a cunning wicked man, a woman who is a Pharisee and the self-inflicted wounds of those
who are Pharisees, these wear out the world (Sotah 3, 4). Pharisaic men and women are here treated
as severely as in the contemporary Gospels by a rabbi who is supposed to have been one of them.
I do not know of any certain reference either to Jesus or to Christianity in rabbinic texts of the
period when Christianity could still be treated [25] as a deviant form of Judaism. The Mishnah,
which was put together about A.D. 200, is silent about Jesus. Its only likely allusion to Christianity
– the prophecy that the kingdom (of Rome) will fall to heretics (leminuth) in the treatise Sotah 9, 15
– must be an interpolation later than the conversion of Constantine (J. Z. Lauterbach, Rabbinic
Essays, 553xxvi ). Later Talmudic references, even if authentically going back to rabbis of the first
century, are less relevant to us, inserted as they are in a situation in which Christianity had ceased to
be an internal Jewish problem. Even so, the allusions are remarkably few and trivial.
Before Christianity the Samaritans had been the greatest scandal within Judaism. They
considered themselves Jews, they were Jews. They had a text of the Pentateuch which was
essentially identical with that preserved in Jerusalem. Jews and Samaritans had parted company in
circumstances which nobody in Antiquity knew exactly and nobody in modern times has been able
to clarify convincingly. The account of Josephus combined events of the time of Nehemiah in the
fifth century B.C. with events under Samballath whom we know from recently discovered texts to
have governed in Samaria in the fourth century B.C. “The foolish nation that dwelleth in Shechem”,
as Ecclesiasticus called the Samaritans (1, 25), is treated with altogether remarkable restraints in
rabbinic texts. The brief Talmudic treatise Kuthim, of uncertain date but with old material,
concludes with the words: “The Samaritans in some of their ways resemble the Gentiles and in
some resemble Israel, but in the majority they resemble Israel”.
As a whole the evidence about Jewish sects in Jewish texts – either Hebrew or Aramaic or Greek
– carries with it an unmistakable indication. The more dangerous and radical the differences were,
the less likely our authorities are to speak about them. The Essenes who were the least dangerous
are the most spoken about. Qumran recusants and Christians are not mentioned or mentioned
sparingly. The Sadducees, who as conservative [26] defenders of the primacy of the Temple cult
and of the literal application of the Mosaic law lost to the Pharisees, play a minimum role in the
tradition. Even the Pharisees, who with their doctrines on the Oral Law, the immortality of the Soul
and the subordinate importance of the Temple sacrifice had a special right to attention, are relatively
seldom allowed to appear and are treated with detachment. Not even Josephus, a declared Pharisee,
identifies himself with them. The most defiant profession of Pharisaism comes from St. Paul.
This attitude can be observed in other respects of Jewish life and may help us to understand the
Jewish-Hellenistic attitude toward recent history. As we have already had occasion to mention, in
the Hellenistic age the Temple of Jerusalem had not been alone in receiving the sacrificial worship
of the Jews, as required by a doctrine which had become official in the late seventh century B.C.
283
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
The Jewish tradition forgot about the temple of the Tobiads, the evidence for which, if any, is
archaeological; and speaks very little – and never bitterly – about the Egyptian temple.
Even more curious is the attitude to individuals suspected or convicted of heresy. Heresy
(minuth) is a concept which must have been formalized in Judaea in the first century A.D. A prayer
against the minim, heretics, or rather a brief formula of a prayer, was introduced into Jewish liturgy
at the end of the first century A.D. Some practice of ban or excommunication developed with it.
Rabbis who disagreed with majority decisions about ritual law in academies were in danger of
being banned by their fellow-academicians. It is not difficult to visualize the historical situation
which led to this closing of the ranks. It added a new crime to that of blasphemy, for which there is
no need to go beyond Acts and Mishnah, Sanhedrin. The more remarkable is rabbinic mildness and
even the sympathy towards individuals tainted with heresy. Eliezer ben Hyrcanos, the teacher of
Rabbi Akiba, was both accused of heresy – that is, probably of Christian sympathies – before a
Roman tribunal and excommunicated by his fellow-rabbis [27] (J. Neusner, Eliezer ben Hyrcanos,
I, 1973, 401 and 423). He remained in the tradition as one of the most honoured rabbis. Tradition
shows him dying on Sabbath eve surrounded by his pupils, as a Sage should die. Elishah ben
Abuyah, the pupil of Rabbi Akiba and the master of Rabbi Meir, did not get off so easily. He
remained in the tradition as the prototype of the Sage who passed to the other side: he was called
Aher, the other. All sorts of nasty things were reported about him, from violation of the Sabbath to
collaboration with the Romans. This was the time of Hadrian, and ben Abuyah’s master, Akiba, had
died a martyr’s death. Yet Elishah ben Abuyah is not rejected with contempt. Tradition preserves
and canonizes some of his aphorisms. It register the devotion of his pupil Meir who went on
discussing the Torah with him and expressed, after the death without repentance of his master, the
certainty that he had been saved. According to one of the Talmudic legends on the subject Meir
spread his mantle over his master’s grave and reassured his soul: “Rest here in the night; in the
dawn of happiness the God of mercy will deliver thee; if not, I will be thy redeemer” (Bab. Hagigah
15 a). The daring reference to the words of Boas in the Book of Ruth (3, 13) is explicit in the text.
The figure of Elishah ben Abuyah who tried everything – mystical experience, Greek songs and low
forms of prevarication (Jer. Megillah 1, 9; Bab. Hagigah 16b, etc.) – remained the ambiguous
symbol of the attraction of the “other” – the classical world of the Greeks and Romans. He was not
denied the hope of resurrection with the Just.
The situation must not be misunderstood. Elishah ben Abuyah was after all an isolated
individual. The Qumran people had probably lost importance after A.D. 70. The silence of the
Mishnah about Christians is not the whole story. The feelings of Jews towards Christians, when we
can test them, were no kinder than the feelings of Christians towards Jews. But playing down
differences and keeping endless discussion going between disagreeing individuals and disagreeing
branches of Judaism was perhaps not less important [28] than the reorganization of communal life
in helping to maintain some sort of unity and consequently surviving against overwhelming odds.
Whereas Greek schools, even if they put themselves under the protection of a specific god, were
essentially different from prayer-houses, the Jewish school and the Jewish prayer-house were united
by the Bible. They were also united by the religious significance the Jews attributed to the relation
between teachers and pupils. “Let the honour of thy disciple be as dear to thee as thine own; and the
honour of thy schoolfellow be like the fear of thy master, and the fear of thy master be like the fear
of Heaven” (Abot 3, 9). The school pyramid culminated in God himself.
This educational system, which probably received its starting-point and certainly derived its
significance from the Hellenistic surroundings, was taken to be of immemorial origin. Midrashic
texts transferred it back to the patriarchal period. What could Moses do in the forty days spent on
the mountain to receive the Law but study the Scripture in the day-time and the Mishnah at night?
(Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer 46, transl G. Friedländer, p. 359). Indeed an academy was available during
the forty years of the wandering in the wilderness (Bab. Yoma 28b). God himself had to have his
own academy, his own bet hamidrash, in Heaven where he taught the Law to the righteous – what
was sometimes called the Heavenly Academy (Bab. Baba Metziah, 86 a; Deut. Rabbah 7 in a text
284
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
attributed to the third century, Joshua b. Levi; Tanna debe Eliyahu R. 1, 4). A rabbi even knew the
exact part of the day God reserved for the study of his own Torah: the first three hours of the day
(Bab. ‘Abodah Zara 3b). The common care for the study of the Torah gave a new warmth to the
relation between God and the Jew. Clearly much of these imaginings must belong to the period
after the destruction of the Temple, when Judaism was saved by its school system, and it was felt
that “by the breath from the mouth of schoolchildren the world is sustained” (Bab. Shabbat 119b).
One would like more specifically to know the origin of the tradition according to which the Greek
philosopher Oenomaus of Gadara, a contemporary and an acquaintance of [29] R. Meir in the
second century A.D., was asked what one could do against the Jews and answered: “As long as the
voice of the children will be heard in the schools and in the synagogues you cannot subjugate this
people” (Genesis Rabbah 65, 20; cf. Pesikta deRab Kahna, ed. M. Friedmann, 121a). Yet the Sages
could smile at their own schools. They told the story of how Moses – the Law-giver Moses – was
allowed by God to sit on the eighth bench of the school of Rabbi Akiba but was unable to follow
the subtle argument about a point of the Law he had brought down from Mount Sinai (Bab.
Menahot 29b). “Not being able to follow their arguments he (Moses) was ill at ease, but when they
came to a certain subject and the disciple said to the master ‘Whence do you know it?’ and the latter
replied ‘It is a Law given unto Moses at Sinai’, Moses was comforted”.
X
If Judaism, as I have tried to show, is the answer given in different languages and with different
emphases to Hellenism, the answer must be declared effective. The Torah kept the Jews together.
Not only was Judaism the only pre-Hellenistic national culture to survive in the Mediterranean
zone; it also created a model for survival. The model was faith in a book and obedience to it,
accompanied by daily communal prayer and instruction both for children and adults. By giving
birth to Christianity Judaism produced that religious movement which ultimately revived the dying
national cultures of the Roman Empire. It was Christianity which brought to life Coptic, Syriac,
Armenian, Celtic and other literatures and gave a new purpose to the Latin and Greek cultures of
several Roman provinces, such as Africa, Gallia and Cappadocia. From this point of view,
Christianity did for several nations what synagogal Judaism had done for the Jews several centuries
before.
It is easy to imagine how weak and dispirited the Jewish diaspora in Greek lands must have
become after the failure of the great rebellion under Trajan – a more serious disaster than BarKochba’s rebellion in Palestine [30] under Hadrian. The destruction of the great synagogue of
Alexandria became symbolic of the loss. Every year, for at least a century, in the village of
Oxyrhynchus the residents celebrated the defeat of the Jews: a reversal of Hanuccah (<P.Oxy. 705,
coll. 1-2>).
We must also assume numerous conversions to Christianity among Greek-speaking Jews. And it
was the rise of a powerful Christian culture in the Greek language at Alexandria that permanently
changed the conditions of life for Greek-speaking Jews and made them relinquish to Christianity
not only the Septuagint and much of the apocryphal literature, but even Philo and Josephus. In the
fourth century the legend began to circulate that Philo had become a Christian convert. Flavius
Josephus was very probably interpolated to make him a witness for Christianity. The Jews defended
themselves – where best they could – in Palestine and Babylonia, but they had to take refuge in the
Aramaic language. Even Hebrew yielded to Aramaic as the main rabbinic idiom. Remarkably
enough, when Greek was lost, Hebrew also faded out, though not so totally. The two Talmuds were
written in Aramaic dialects, while the Mishnah had been written in Hebrew. Like many other
historical developments, the elimination of Greek from Judaism can be envisaged both as a
necessity and as a distortion. To judge from the evidence we have, Greek had never represented for
the Jews a vehicle for meeting Greek culture, even half-way. It had been turned by the Jews into a
285
Grinfield Lectures 1982 – B e t w e e n S y n a g o g u e a n d A p o c a l y p s e
III. The decline of History and Apocalypse
second language for reading and justifying the Torah and for defining the difference between Jew
and Gentile.
There is another story to tell – a story which has never been told properly – of how the culture
which produced both Philo and the Mishnah was replaced by the culture which produced the
Jerusalem and the Babylonian Talmud two or three centuries later. The story of which I have tried
to define some salient features in these lectures is on the whole the story of the only nation which
survived Hellenization and Romanization without loss of continuity and creativity. But it is also by
implication a story in which the alien cultures of Greece and Rome were respected and the sense of
a common [31] humanity was finely perceived. Let us therefore conclude with an anecdote which
goes back in all probability to the Mishnaic period, but is transmitted in the Babylonian Talmud and
in another post-Mishnaic text (Genesis Rabbah 13, 4-6) and may thus symbolize an element of
continuity in the name of humanity between these two periods.
A Gentile said to Rabbi Jochanan ben Zaccai – or according to the other version to Rabbi Joshua
ben Karcha: “we have festival seasons and you have festival seasons, we have a calendar and
Saturnalia and Kratesis, and you have Passover, Pentecost and Tabernacles. What is the day in
which you and we can rejoice together?” Rabbi Jochanan answered: “The day in which the rains
fall”. As another rabbi explained: “The day of rain is more important than the day of resurrection,
for the day of resurrection is for the righteous only and not for the wicked, while the day of rain is
for the righteous and for the wicked” (Talmud Bab. Ta’anit 7 a).
i
Ios. Ant. 12, 154-241. Cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1932c (=Tobiadi).
Per i problemi di datazione del libro della Sapienza si rimanda a SCARPAT 1967 (articolo plausibilmente letto
da Momigliano) e ID. 1989, 258-64. Per quanto la questione relativa al terminus ante quem del libro resti aperta, il
terminus post quem di composizione può essere fissato con relativa certezza intorno al 30 a.C. ca.
iii
GOLDSTEIN 1975.
iv
Per una precedente valutazione momiglianea su Giuseppe e Aseneth, con bibliografia relativa, si rimanda ad
Alien Wisdom (= MOMIGLIANO 1975F) 117-8.
v
Ruth 1, 16; cfr. Giuseppe e Aseneth, 11-13.
vi
KILPATRICK 1952-3.
vii
MERKELBACH 1962.
viii
STONE 1972.
ix
Il. 18, 478-607.
x
Per la confutazione dell’ipotesi di un’origine sira del cognomen di Emilio Sura cfr. invece GL 1980 I
(Universal History), c. 12, in cui Momigliano preferisce ricondurlo alla voce latina sura, -ae, “polpaccio”).
xi
Momigliano potrebbe aver tratto la storia della consultazione di Dio con la Torah e dell’esitazione di
quest’ultima – riportata senza identificarne la fonte - dal cap. I, vol. I, di GINZBERG 1909, volume contenuto nella sua
biblioteca personale. L’ed. italiana dell’opera (cfr. bibliografia) risulta dotata di un apparato di note, in cui si rimanda
per il passo in questione a Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, 3 [7] e a Yalqut Re'ubeni a Gen. 1, 3.
xii
Cfr. RIVKIN 1978.
xiii
SCHOLEM 1957.
xiv
Cfr. Appendice II, CL 1977 II (The Temple), c. 32 (ripresa Q). Momigliano segue la lettura di WEBER 1920 nel
contrapporre il rabbinato al mandarinato cinese inteso come casta accentratrice di privilegi e beni materiali all’interno di
uno stato patrimoniale.
xv
CHERNISS 1945.
xvi
LYNCH 1972.
xvii
LAUTERBACH 1951.
xviii
FRIEDLÄNDER 1916.
xix
Pesikta de Rab Kahna, 15, 5. Momigliano cita dall’ed. di FRIEDMANN 1880.
xx
W. WRIGHT 1952.
xxi
GRÄTZ 1807-1911. Vol. III, t.2.: Geschichte der Judäer von dem Tode Juda Makkabis bis zum Untergange des
judäischen Staates, 5. verb. und verm. Aufl. bearb. von M. Brann, Leipzig 1905.
xxii
Cfr. part. GOODENOUGH 1926; ID. 1929; ID. 1938.
xxiii
GINZBERG 1922.
xxiv
RABIN 1957.
xxv
GOLB 1960.
xxvi
LAUTERBACH 1951.
ii
286
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
Sedi e date:
NL 1977 II (24 gennaio, cfr. D-a 1)
CL 1977 II (aprile-maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 415)
Documenti
- [Old] The Temple and the Synagogue
a) NL 1977 II
P-o 7, P-o 76 mss.
P-o 8 top c. di P-o 7.
P-o 9, P-o 10 (a) c.c. di P-o 8.
P-o 17 (a), P-o 78 (a): xerox da una c.c. di P-o 8.
P-o 6, P-o 10 (b), P-o 17 (b), P-o 78 (c) aggiunte.
P-o 77 nuova versione basata su P-o 10 (a-b), con correzioni.
P-o 11, P-o 12 (a), P-o 31 (c), P-o 32 (b): c.c. di P-o 77.
b) aggiunte (prob. Per CL 1977 II-III)
P-o 12 (b) ms.
P-o 78 (b), P-o 32 (a) xerox di P-o 12 (b).
- [New] The Temple and the Synagogue
a) CL 1977 II
1
P-o 31 (a) c.c. delle pp. 14-26 di P-o 5 , (c) c.c. delle pp. 1-19 di P-o 77, (b)
aggiunte mss.
P-o 36 nuova versione basata su P-o 31 (a-b-c), top c.
P-o 18, P-o 23 (a): c.c. di P-o 36.
31 79(GL 1979 II = EL 1978 II The Greeks outside) P-o 7,8 , 9, 10, 11
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
Il testo qui proposto (ds. P-o 31), preparato in vista del ciclo di Chicago 1977, offre la trattazione
più ampia che Momigliano abbia mai dedicato al tema “Tempio e sinagoga”: 35 cc. risultanti
dall’unione della sezione finale della NL 1977 I (The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism)
con la successiva NL 1977 II (The Temple and the Synagogue), che Momigliano stesso dovette
reputare eccessivamente lunghe per una pubblica lettura, finendo per proporre come CL 1977 II la
versione abbreviata testimoniata dal fascicolo P-o 36.
Il ripensamento delle modalità di indagine conseguente alla “svolta storiografica” dal ciclo
Efroymson 1978 (per cui cfr. l’introduzione generale alle pp. 20-22) determina la rimozione di un
intervento volto a isolare il binomio Tempio-sinagoga come tema a sé stante e la concomitante
predilezione per un reinserimento dell’analisi di genesi e sviluppi delle due istituzioni nel contesto
persiano (The Jews inside) o resistenziale (Defence).
Benché il diverso focus provochi la caduta di osservazioni e riflessioni non irrilevanti, il pensiero
– e i materiali di lavoro – non si perdono con la lezione. Ad alcuni argomenti (il proselitismo,
l’astrologia) Momigliano dedicherà in altre sedi (in particolare, ma non esclusivamente, in Jews and
Gentiles) ampia considerazione. Altri saranno invece marginalmente recuperati in trattazioni
specifiche di taglio diverso, come è il caso della lezione dedicata ai libri dei Maccabei (From
Maccabees) all’interno del terzo ciclo di Chicago.
La lettura della versione estesa di The Temple and the Synagogue permette di osservare
significative riprese di intere porzioni testuali, recuperate pressoché verbatim, rappresentando così
un prezioso strumento di comprensione della progressiva evoluzione della riflessione di
Momigliano sul tema, dai prodromi Northcliffe fino al ripensamento di Cincinnati.
1
NL 1977 I (The Religious Foundations of Hellenistic Judaism).
287
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
2. La caduta delle Religious foundations: riprese e scarti.
Nel 1977, a Londra, la riflessione sulle “religious foundations” del giudaismo ellenistico, nello
specifico di un’analisi dei rapporti tra Tempio e sinagoga, è proposta come aspetto cruciale
dell’indagine storica relativa: “only through a clear understanding of the tension between Temple
and Synagogue can we arrive at proper appreciation of how Judaism defined itself in relation to
Hellenism and ultimately survived it”. È nel solco di questa indicazione, e in concomitanza di una
rielaborazione della lecture di apertura del ciclo di Chicago (Prologue), che si colloca la successiva
scelta di dedicare al tema un’unica trattazione, autonoma ed esaustiva, articolata in quattro capitoli
(di cui due provenienti dalla fine di NL 1977 I e due dall’inizio in NL 1977 II).
La dissoluzione della lecture in coincidenza del ripensamento Efroymson porterà a ridistribuirne
le riprese in due lezioni, EL 1978 III (= GL 1979 III, The Jews inside) e EL 1978 IV (= GL 1979
IV, The Defence)2. Nella prima confluiscono soprattutto le sezioni relative ad aspetti politici e
istituzionali (riprese A, C), economici e sociali (riprese B, E) del Tempio, o comunque pertinenti al
tema persiano (ripresa I); il ritorno, in forma molto abbreviata, al tema della preghiera (ripresa F)
testimonia una modifica del punto di vista relativo all’influsso greco su questa pratica. Nella
seconda lezione si riscontra invece una maggiore attenzione agli aspetti culturali, più
specificamente connessi all’educazione (riprese G, H, L, M, N, P, Q), oltre al tema cruciale della
tentazione politesitica e dell’attrazione esercitata dal mondo greco (ripresa D).
Due recuperi di rilievo riguardano invece la EL 1978 VI – GL 1982 III (The Decline):
ricompaiono qui alcuni paragrafi sulla sacertà dello studio della Torah (ripresa O) e il cenno, di
chiara ascendenza weberiana, alla mancata evoluzione del rabbinato in mandarinato (ripresa Q). La
natura e la distribuzione dei recuperi, generalmente improntati a un’accentuata attenzione alla
dimensione sociale, appaiono conformi al ripensamento del precedente approccio monografico
all’interno di una nuova struttura i cui centri d’interesse sono rappresentati dal contatto degli Ebrei
con altri popoli e dai fattori identitari del sistema educativo e del libro sacro.
Con l’eliminazione della lezione, ad ogni modo, non tutte le parti vengono riprese. Il confronto
tra “scarti” e “riprese” permette di apprezzare due distinti livelli di intervento. In primo luogo, non
trovano più posto argomentazioni eccentriche rispetto al percorso individuato, come ad esempio
quelle a esclusiva connotazione religiosa; cadono quasi interamente le prime tre cc. del cap. I, in cui
si sottolinea la “dimenticanza” ebraica del periodo persiano che “fece degli Ebrei una teocrazia”3; si
perdono, all’inizio del cap. III, i cenni alle visioni del Tempio in sogno e le trattazioni della
confessione e della preghiera.
A un secondo livello di interventi si collocano invece veri e propri mutamenti di prospettiva.
L’opinione espressa riguardo all’ipotesi di Bickerman circa l’influenza greca sul nucleo
dell’Amidah (c. 17) è soggetta a modifiche nel passaggio da Chicago a Cincinnati: considerata
prima “bold, but non impossible”, diventa in The Jews inside oggetto di una decisa dichiarazione di
scetticismo (c. 12). Nella stessa direzione di allontanamento dalle tesi di Bickerman punta
significativamente la mancata ripresa di una lettura della crisi del Tempio dal 167 agli Asmonei in
cui è sottolineato con enfasi il ruolo svolto dai conflitti interni alla società ebraica (c. 8).
Fondamentale appare il cambiamento di prospettiva che investe la Sinagoga: vengono cancellati
passaggi cruciali che ne definiscono la centralità funzionale e il nesso con fattori di innovazione
originati dal rapporto con la civiltà dei Greci, come la fine del cap. II (in cui l’istituzione sinagogale
è indicata come “the effective Jewish answer to the Greek challenge”), o come un breve ma
importante passo del cap. III (cc. 21-22) che riconnette l'ascesa della Sinagoga con la nascita, in
seno al Tempio stesso, di nuovi orientamenti “grecizzanti”, il cui primo testimone si individua nello
“strano libro” di Qohelet.
Induce infine a riflettere la tendenza a porre in secondo piano (se non a espungere) la funzione
liturgica della Sinagoga: se la scelta trova indubbiamente le sue ragioni nella risposta a un nuovo
progetto argomentativo generale, assai concentrato sulla forza specifica del sistema educativo e
2
3
Per le singole riprese testuali si rimanda alle note a testo della lecture.
Per cui cfr. Ebrei e Greci (= MOMIGLIANO 1976A), 15.
288
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
cronologicamente delimitato dalla fine del Secondo Tempio (la preghiera sinagogale sostituirà il
culto del Tempio solo dopo la sua distruzione), non può tuttavia sfuggire la consonanza di questa
scelta con la posizione privilegiata che i talmudisti attribuivano allo studio nei confronti della
preghiera (cfr. e.g. gli episodi relativi a grandi rabbi in R.H. 35 a; Shab. 10 a; Er. 65 a).
3. Argomento della lecture
Limitano la conoscenza delle origini del giudaismo del Secondo Tempio la scarsità di
informazioni risalenti al periodo della dominazione persiana e il silenzio delle fonti storiografiche
greche, in particolare di Erodoto. Benché gli osservatori greci di età ellenistica guardino agli Ebrei
come a un eterno stato-tempio, l’instaurazione di un governo di tipo sacerdotale si data in età postesilica per diretta opposizione dei Persiani a eventuali sviluppi statali ispirati alle poleis greche. Lo
stato-tempio di Gerusalemme assume nel tempo caratteri specifici: privo di proprietà terriera, con
un capitale dipendente dalle decime, vede lo sviluppo di un enorme corpo normativo e di un
conseguente specialismo legale di origine laica, destinato a evolvere in forme di convergenza tra
interessi dei laici e dei dominatori greci. La perdita dei privilegi dei Leviti e la formazione di
correnti settarie sono alcune delle conseguenze dei conflitti sociali interni che concorrono, sotto
Antioco IV, alla crisi di cui almeno una parte della classe sacerdotale appare responsabile.
Gli eventi del 167-64 precipitano la trasformazione della classe sacerdotale dominante in un
gruppo disomogeneo e non strutturato. In questo clima rinnovato, dominato dall’ingresso di Roma
sulla scena politica, il Tempio fallisce nel tentativo di fornire una guida morale e intellettuale o una
politica religiosa coerente. La perdita di centralità nella vita e nel culto trova risposta
nell’istaurazione del rivale e successore dell’istituzione, la sinagoga, la cui tensione con il Tempio è
un fattore fondamentale per la comprensione del Giudaismo ellenistico.
L’origine della sinagoga non è riconducibile al periodo dell’esilio babilonese, come vorrebbe
un’interpretazione forzata della pubblica lettura in Neemia: la documentazione archeologica relativa
non permette infatti di risalire oltre il I sec.a.C. La sua funzione è quella di insegnare agli adulti che
non accedono all’accademia, la yeshivah; il significato del movimento sinagogale non può tuttavia
essere compreso se non alla luce della centralità che il libro acquisce in età ellenistica. L’educazione
giudaica condivide con quella greca la dipendenza da un libro (però sacro) e la mancanza di una
dimensione creativa, differenziandosi per il ricorso a ogni livello di formazione del corpus biblico e
soprattutto per l’unione di religione e educazione. Il sistema tende a differenziarsi a seconda dei
luoghi (molto greco in aree di cultura greca, come Alessandria) ma condivide ovunque il fine di
individuare una via verso Dio. Diventa problematica la possibilità di estendere il sistema a tutti gli
Ebrei: lo studio continuo che richiede risulta troppo impegnativo, così come costituisce un ostacolo
il nesso fra sinagoga e scuola. Da ciò il prodursi di articolazioni sociali che prevedono la condizione
di popolano incolto, ma non lo sviluppo parallelo di un mandarinato, in assenza di un potere politico
di supporto.
289
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
The Temple and the Synagogue*4
<I>
To begin with, these Jews had been the subjects of Persia for two hundred years before they
passed under the rule of the Greeks. We know little about the Persian period. Indeed it is a problem
by itself why the Jews, when they became the subjects of Hellenistic kings, remembered so little
about Persian rule. But the consequences of Persian rule were immense. The Jews became a
theocracy under the Persians. They were recognized as a theocracy by the Greeks.
Among the books of my own private library I particularly cherish there is one entitled Hérodote
historien du peuple hébreu sans le savoir. It is anonymous and was allegedly published in The
Hague in 1786. It defends a previous book by l'Abbé Guérin du Rocher, Histoire véritable des
temps fabuleuxi, and is clearly written by l'Abbé Guérin himself. He has a theory that Herodotus in
writing his book on Egypt told the history of the Jews under Egyptian names; apparently the
Egyptians told Herodotus the history of the Jews instead of telling their own. This fancy is by no
means isolated in eighteenth century historiography. It tries to answer a question which already
troubled the mind of Flavius Josephus and other Jews in antiquity and was inherited by Christian
historians: Why is Herodotus silent about the Jews, while we knows so much about Egyptians and
Phoenicians? It must be admitted that I should probably be here to tell a different story if Herodotus
had gone up to Jerusalem instead of stopping at the sinful harbour of Tyre.
Two prophets, Haggai and Zechariah, suddenly lighten up the sky of Judaea about 520 B.C. and
allow us to see something of the return of the exiles from Babylonia. About seventy years later
Nehemiah was writing down his memoirs in what must have been for the Jews, as it was for the
Greeks, a new literary genre - which we call autobiography, [2] using a term probably invented5 in
A.D. 1793ii. Either a few years earlier than Nehemiah, about 458 B.C., or more probably many
years later about 398 B.C., Ezra the Scribe also compiled his own memoirs. If the evidence is not
badly misleading, both Nehemiah and Ezra gave an account in self-defence of their struggles to
reorganize the state of Judah. How and when their memoirs were mutilated, used, integrated and at
least partially recomposed to make the present Books of Ezra and Nehemiah is unknown. This is all
- or about all - we have of primary literary evidence about the birth of Judaism, such as it passed
ledor vador, from generation to generation, even to us. Archaeology, epigraphy and numismatics
help, but not very much. In so far as they help, they accentuate the paradox of our ignorance. For
archaeology and numismatics leave us in no doubt that Greek traders and mercenaries went up and
down in Palestine during the Persian regime in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. The first coins of
Judaea acknowledge this fact and display the Hebrew word Jehud together with the Athenian owl to indicate that the Athenian silver currency was respected.6 The Greeks and the Jews evidently
knew each other on the daily scene, but ignored each other on the literary scene. Before Alexander
the Great the Greeks seem to have ignored even the name of the Jews.7 The Jews did have a name
for the Greeks - the one current throughout the East, Yawan - and knew about them as nasty slave
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 31, ds. di 35 cc. testimone della versione di Chicago 1977 e risultante dall’unione
della sezione finale della NL 1977 I (Foundations) con l’inizio della successiva NL 1977 II (The Temple [old]). Si
riportano in apparato eventuali lezioni alternative di P-o 7, ms. alla base del testo NL, della sua top c. P-o 8 e delle
successive c.c. P-o 9 e 10, allo scopo di evidenziare l’evoluzione della lecture a partire dalla prima stesura. Le lezioni
di P-o 11, se segnalate, individuano divergenze del testo edito rispetto a una seconda versione NL (= P-o 77),
accresciuta in preparazione al testo di Chicago. Le successive riprese in GL 1979 II (Greeks outside) vengono
segnalate tramite riferimento al ds. base, P-o 79. Per un sintetico commento alle parti di testo riproposte nelle lectures
successive, cfr. infra, Note sulle singole riprese testuali, alle pp. 305-7.
4
P-o 31: tit. ms. [AMM]; Northcliffe II, p. 1, tsf, ms[AMM]; AMM's copy. pp. 1-13bis given to mrs Donahne for retyping new version of lecture I, 15.6.77, ms[AMM], del.;cc. 1-13 = NL 1977 I (Foundations) cc. 14-26.
5
P-o 31: invented -> by Isaac Israeli, del.
6
P-o 31: respected. -> It was more easily obtainable than the golden Persian darici coveted by the venal Greeks, del.
7
Among the books of my library … even the name of the Jews: cfr. P-o 79, cc. 1-2.
290
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
traders. But they were not much wiser as a result. Athens and Sparta are unknown to the Hebrew
Bible, and the Hochmat-Yewanit, the wisdom of the Greeks, was a thing of the future. Greek
civilization was unknown to the Jews before Alexander.
[3] When Palestine became a part of the Macedonian kingdom of Egypt under the dynasty of the
Ptolemies this reciprocal ignorance was no longer possible. The Jews had to learn to speak Greek to
their new masters who were also the new tax collectors. They received employment from their new
masters, especially in the army. In the new social mobility created by the Greco-Macedonian
hegemony, extending from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus river, there was relief for the demographic
pressure and class struggles in Judaea. The Jews emigrated from Palestine either to lands where
Jewish colonies already existed, such as Mesopotamia and Egypt, or to other countries where Greek
or Aramaic was spoken. By becoming the subjects of a Macedonian king instead of being the
subjects of a Persian king, the Jews faced Greek as a cultural language for the first time. Aramaic
dialects remained predominantly the spoken language of Jewish Palestine itself; and Aramaic
dialects remained the medium for internal use and international exchange beyond the Euphrates.
But along the Nile and the greater part of the Mediterranean coasts the Jews had to speak Greek to
be understood.
When the first Greek observers began to take notes on Judaea for the satisfaction of their
curiosity or the benefit of the Macedonian rulers, they had no doubt that Jerusalem had always been
a temple-State, such as those which were numerous in Asia. Hecataeus of Abdera who wrote about
the Jews before 300 B.C. firmly stated that the famous and good man Moses built the Temple and
put a High Priest in charge when he was compelled to leave Egyptiii. A hundred and fifty years later
Polybius defined the Jews as those who live around the Temple called Hierosolyma (Jos. Antiq.
Jud. 12, 136 = Polyb. <xvi 39.4>).
In the Hellenistic age it was indeed impossible to be aware that when in 538 B.C. Cyrus, the
King of Persia, decided to allow the [4] Jews to rebuild their Temple he did not
contemplate the creation of a temple-state. Mysterious as may be the process of the return RIPRESA
of the exiles – the first substantial batch of exiles appears only in 520 B.C. and the (A) -> EL
III e
Temple was dedicated in 515 B.C. – there seems to be little doubt that the leader of the 1978
GL 1979
return was Zerubbabel, a member of the previous royal family. The prophets Haggai and III - The
Inside
Zechariah did their best to turn him into a Messianic king. It was a marvelous dream, with Jews
the Persian
the universalism one can expect from members of a world empire. The new community, Empire,
cc.
Zechariah asserted, will include many nations, and the days of fast will be turned into inizio,
1-2
days of joy, when many people and strong nations shall come to see the Lord of hosts in
Jerusalem and to pray before the Lord. Haggai is even more sanguine in his prophecy IL
TEMPIOwhen he speaks of the nations bringing tribute to the Temple, obviously as they did to the STATO E
Persian king (2, 7-10). Six centuries later his words still echoed in the mind of the author L'UNIVER
-SALISMO
of the Epistle to the Hebrews (12, 26-28). Admittedly about 520 the Persian Empire was
only just beginning to take shape, but Jerusalem was controlled by a Persian governor,
even if not yet formally part of the satrapy it was soon to become. Zerubbabel disappeared
from history as quickly as he had appeared.
The process of reconstruction was slowed down for 70 years. The Messianic dream was
postponed indefinitely. Prophecy assumed a more subdued form - whatever date we are inclined to
attribute to Joel and Malachi. The younger prophet who is now the second part of Zechariah turned
against prophets altogether (13, 5) without noticing the irony of his position. Malachi took
cognizance of the offerings the Jews had to make to the pehah, that is, the Persian governor (1, 8).
Any hope of reviving the kingdom of Judah was repressed, and the vassal city of Jerusalem came
into being with about 1.000 square [5] miles of territory. Though the priestly character of the new
organization revived memories of Melchisedek, King of Salem and priest of the highest God, to
whom Abraham had paid tithes in exchange of bread, wine and blessing (Gen. 15, 17-20), there was
no continuity or even similarity between Melchisedek's Salem and Persian Jerusalem. The Jewish
priestly government, as Eduard Meyer squarely put it, was a creation of the Persian government.
291
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
Even more precisely it was imposed, after hesitations and internal crises, by a lay, though Jewish,
agent of the Persian government, Nehemiah. It was Nehemiah who reorganized the Jewish
settlement and to begin with gave Jerusalem its new walls. Nehemiah's behaviour has been
compared with that of Solon, or less flatteringly, with that of Pisistratus. It certainly had some of the
features of the Greek reforms: new legislation, cancellation of debts, reassignation of land,
resettlement of population, and a new social equilibrium between town and country8. He had to
reconcile various parties and to persuade the priests and the intellectuals who had returned from
exile to co-operate with those Jewish families which had remained on the land and had repeatedly
had to change their status, either for the better or for the worse. But what distinguished his actions9
from anything that had happened in Greece was the purpose of his reform - namely to give the Jews
what they were not used to, a priestly government. One of his most urgent tasks was to find a new
formula of compromise for the old claims of the Levites against the priests. The fiction that the
priests were a privileged branch of the Levites had probably been accepted long before Nehemiah.
What he could do was to interpret it in such a way as to give a share in the cult of the Temple, and
consequently a share in the tithes, to the Levites.
[6] Nehemia’s settlement was of course in broad agreement with Persian policy of support for
national religions and organizations within the Empire. One has the impression that the Persians
favoured, whenever possible, the politicization of the Temples as an alternative to civic autonomies
which, whether Greek or modeled on Greek poleis, were proving very difficult to handle. Many of
the temple-states so interestingly described by Strabo in Book XII of his Geography did well under
the Persians, even if they were born before their coming. In some case we can even go back to the
Hittite period and see how the great temple of the goddess Hepat of Cumana in Cappadocia
struggled through the centuries against the kings of the land for privileges and exceptions from
taxes (A. Archi, Parola del Passato 64, 1975, 329-44)10. But there is no primitive element in these
temple-states. If they had a god to thank for their prosperity under the Persians it was Ahura-Mazda.
This applies to the Temple of Jerusalem, too.
The Temple of Jerusalem, however, was not a landowner, as most of the temples
of the East were. The land of the country was in private hands, though it is by no means
clear whether at least in principle it remained inalienable within the clans. The priesthood
was dependent on the contributions it received. It was even subsidised by the sovereigns, RIPRESA
that is, successively by the kings of Persia, Egypt and Syria. It was reinforced by the (B) - > EL
III e
offerings of the Jews of the diaspora and of gentiles who for one reason or another were 1978
GL 1979
interested in the Temple. But above all it relied on the tithes Palestinian Jews had to pay. III - The
Inside
No wonder that the enforcement of the tithes produced a body of regulations and customs Jews
the Persian
to delight any lawyer. As capital accumulated in the Temple of Jerusalem, financial Empire,
cap.Itransactions multiplied around it, as they did around all the other temples. But it does not fine
inizio cap.
follow that the priest were the only or [7] even the biggest profiteers. Laymen were II, cc. 6-7.
involved in the financial administration of the Temple. Tax collectors for the foreign SOCIETA'
sovereigns, backed as they were by foreign troops, became desirable partners in the E ECOcollection and administration of the Temple revenues. The powerful Jewish sheiks of NOMIA
Ammanitis – the Tobiads, who had already given trouble to Nehemiah – became royal
tax collectors in the late third century B.C. and as such acquired a foothold in the Temple.
Even the superintendents of the Temple treasury do not seem to have been invariably
loyal to the priestly class as a whole. The story, by which the Second Book of Maccabees
begins, shows one of them calling the attention of King Seleucus IV to the amount of
money which was stored in the Temple. The King sent Heliodorus to steal the money; and miracles,
in good Hellenistic style, followed to save it for Yahveh.
8
9
10
Nehemia’s behaviour… town and country: prosegue ripresa (A).
P-o 31: actions <-> wisdom, ms[AMM].
Nehemia’s settlement was of course… 329-44): prosegue ripresa (A).
292
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
The priestly class was itself divided: we know of conflicts, violence and even murder within it.
We also dimly perceive that the Levites, whom Nehemiah had brought to Jerusalem, did not keep
their rights and privileges and, as far as the Temple was concerned, became indistinguishable from
the singers and the vergers.
Laymen become more involved in the service of the Temple. They increasingly shared with the
priests the knowledge of the Law and at least from 200 B.C. onwards they began to organize
themselves into sects or groups with specific religious outlooks. Elements of social tensions and of
conflicting interests - between upper-order priests and lower-order priests, and between priests and
laymen - where inherent in the organization which Judaea received from Nehemiah in the middle of
the fifth century. The prestige of the higher priests was affected when they proved themselves
unable or unwilling to defend the Temple against the attempt by Antiochus IV to desecrate it and to
transform it into a syncretistic cult of Zeus - with a [8] corresponding transformation of the
character of Jerusalem. The events of 167-164 B.C., in which at least part of the priests and of the
Jewish upper class collaborated with Antiochus IV, was both the culmination and the turning point
of a social conflict which had matured within the Temple State created by Nehemiah.
II
Until the Maccabaean rebellion, a foreign governor controlled the land of Judaea: first
a Persian satrap with his subordinates, then a Macedonian hyparchos or strategos, sent RIPRESA
(C) - > EL
by the Ptolemaic kings, until about 200 B.C., and by the Seleucid kings between 200 and 1978 III e
1979
140 B.C. circa. The hereditary High Priest was recognized as the representative, the GL
III - The
leader and perhaps the supreme judge of the Palestinian Jews. His moral authority Jews Inside
Persian
extended to the diaspora. The difficulty in interpreting the evidence is mainly due to the the
Empire,
fact that literary sources attribute undisputed, albeit undefined, supremacy to the High cap. II, cc.
Priest, whereas texts with some claim to being considered juridical show the High Priest 8-9
surrounded and to a certain extent controlled by Jewish lay elements.
IL
The legend reported by Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud. 11, 8, 5) that Alexander the Great SOMMO
SACERDO
entered Jerusalem hand in hand with the High Priest implies that the High Priest was the TE
supreme Jewish authority of the land. The legend is certainly without foundation.
Alexander, like Herodotus, never saw Jerusalem. But the legend assumes that the status
of the High Priest was recognized by everyone. About 200 B.C. the author of
Ecclesiasticus described the dignity of the High Priest Simon in the same vein. On the
other hand in 410 B.C. the Jewish settlers of Elephantine in Egypt appealed for help to the Persian
governor of Judaea, to the High Priest Johannes, to his colleagues the priests who are in Jerusalem,
to a man simply called [9] Ostanes brother of Anani and to the nobles of the Jews. It is clear that at
that moment, fifty years after Nehemiah, the High Priest and his priestly colleagues shared some
power with a council of notables. The man Osthanes brother of Anani was probably the president of
the council of notables. Even more surprisingly, about two hundred years later, when Ben Sira was
writing Ecclesiasticus, Antiochus III of Syria in a letter reported by Flavius Josephus (Ant. Jud. 12,
3 <3, 138-144>) defined the Jewish community as composed of a senate, priests, scribes, sacred
singers and other people. This document shows that about 200 B.C. the Seleucid King, having
succeeded the Ptolemies as ruler of Judaea, treated Jerusalem as a polis ruled by a senate or
gerousia. His letter does not explain who presided over the council and how it was constituted. The
High Priest is not specifically mentioned. Such evidence as we have favours the conclusion,
therefore, that the council of the city of Jerusalem was not necessarily presided over by the High
Priest.
At this point we must ask ourselves whether the senate about which the Greek sources speak is
identical with the Sanhedrin of the Talmudic sources. Sanhedrin is of course a good Greek word
(synedrion); and there is no ancient source to support the modern conjecture that Jerusalem had two
senates or two sanhedrin, one political, the other religious. Indeed the Talmudic sources never
293
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
imply that the Sanhedrin was presided over by the High Priest. Consequently there is a prima facie
case both for identifying the Sanhedrin with the council of Jerusalem mentioned in Greek sources
and for accepting the theory that the High Priest was not ex officiis the head of the Sanhedrin. If
Mishnah, Tosefta and Gemara give a description of the Sanhedrin which is very different from that
of the Greek sources the reason seems to be that they provide an idealized picture, or rather a
utopia. One third-century rabbi even required a knowledge of seventy language in each of the
seventy (or seventy-one or seventy-two) members of the Sanhedrin (Bab. Sanh. 17 a). We are no
wiser about the competence of the Sanhedrin in the matter of capital punishment or other such
controversial issues, but we can at least conclude that the power of the High Priest was neither
necessarily nor regularly founded upon the presidency of the Sanhedrin. The High Priest's authority
was real but precarious.11
The desecration of the Temple in 167 precipitated changes in a ruling class which lacked not
only homogeneity, but a rigorous hierarchical structure. This time it was not destruction of the
Temple and of the city, as with the Babylonians. It was something less cruel, but more offensive,
because the attempt to turn the Temple of Yahveh into a syncretistic cult of Zeus was supported by
a section of the priests and of the Jerusalem upper class. The crisis was too short-lived to allow
serious agitation among the Jews of the diaspora. The old cult was restored three years [10] later in
164. In Judaea the rebellion led by the Hasmonean family - the Maccabean brothers - took on the
aspects of a civil war. The victory of the Maccabees naturally confirmed and increased the devotion
to the Temple, but at the same time made a transformation of the government inevitable. In 152
Jonathan became High Priest, to be succeeded about 142 B.C. by another of the Maccabean
brothers, Simon, who was called both a High Priest and a Prince. A later member of the family,
Alexander Jannaeus, had himself called King, though remaining High Priest. Some of the
dispossessed priests escaped to Egypt and established with Ptolemaic support a schismatic temple in
Leontopolis.
It was soon realized that restoring the purity of the cult in Jerusalem was not enough to eliminate
the problems of surviving in a Hellenistic world and of keeping together the various groups which
had produced the victory. In order to fight the Macedonians Judas Maccabaeus had to open the
doors to the Romans - who would have entered anyway even if they had not been asked to come,
because they were determined to interfere with that was left of the Seleucid Empire. Furthermore, to
make the State economically and militarily viable, the Hasmonean had to embark on a policy of
territorial expansion accompanied by forced conversion to Judaism, which produced dubious
subjects and dubious Jews. The introduction of Hellenic customs which had been stopped on the
battlefields reasserted itself in the mere process of having to live as a vassal state of the Romans.
Chapter 8 of the First Book of Maccabees which was perhaps written about 130 B.C. is a
characteristic document of this concern of the Jews with Roman power: it is a report on a remote
country which is considered to be both friendly and formidable.12 About seventy years later, in 63
B.C., it was impossible to stop Pompey from penetrating defiantly into the Holy of Holies. In 55
B.C. the Romans themselves must have been surprised to find among their newly minted coins one
presenting Bacchius Iudaeus as a conquered enemyiv. This was an allusion either to a Jewish rebel
called Bacchius or Dionysus, who is mentioned by Josephusv, or more probably to the identification
of Yahveh with Bacchus-Dionysus [11] which Hellenizers had fostered, but the Maccabees had
hoped to have eliminated for good. At last the Hasmoneans were replaced by a leader coming from
a family of recent converts to Judaism. Herod, imposed by the Romans, made the splendour and
11
P-o 31: At this point we must ask ourselves whether... but precarious <-> This is exactly what the Talmudic sources
say about the Sanhedrin - a good Greek word (synedrion). Consequently there is a prima facie case both for
indentifying the Sanhedrin with the council of Jerusalem and for accepting the theory that the High Priest was not ex
officiis the head of the Sanhedrin. His authority was real, but precarious, ms[Mom] su f. 9bis (con nota msr [AMM]:
Handwritten insertion here)
12
P-o 31: Chapter 8 ... formidable., mginf con segr, ms[AMM].
294
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
prosperity of the Temple one of the corner-stones of his political and economic programme, but
pious Jews could not trust him.
It would be ridiculous to suggest that Judaea fell to the Romans because the Hasmoneans were
unable to produce a coherent religious policy. As Plinio Fraccaro was fond of repeating, all the
Hellenistic states were subjugated one after the other by the Romans because, unlike the Romans,
none was able to raise four legions each yearvi. But it was under the Hasmoneans that the Temple of
Jerusalem, though more than ever the emotional centre of Jewish life, was patently no longer
capable of giving moral guidance and intellectual satisfaction to the faithful.
The traditional temptations of the Canaanite Baalim, against which the prophets of the First
Temple had had to fight, had disappeared for good. The prophets themselves had disappeared
together with those temptations. The two events can be placed in the fourth century B.C. In Egypt
about 400 B.C. the Jews of Elephantina still combined the cult of Yahu (another name for Yahveh)
with that of Ishumbethel and Anathbethel. It would be surprising if residues of polytheism had not
survived in Judaea for a while after the restoration. But the Jews of Egypt soon turned to a more
rigorous monotheism. If there were still polytheists among the Palestinian Jews, they
must have imitated their Egyptian brethren. The evidence such as it is does not seem to
indicate that except for the period of Antiochus IV the tendency to combine – or alternate RIPRESA
– the cult of Yahveh with the cult of other gods was a problem in [12] Hellenistic (D) - > EL
III e
Palestine. I cannot find facts in favour of the theory so vigorously presented by Morton 1978
GL 1979
Smith in his epoch-making Palestinian Parties and Politics that shaped the Old III - The
Inside
Testament (1971) that the Hellenizers in Jerusalem of the Maccabean era simply Jews
the Persian
continued the traditional struggle of the syncretistic worshippers of Yahveh against the Empire,
VI, c.
followers of the “Yahveh alone” party. It is very doubtful whether any of the new cap.
21 bis; EL
devotees of Zeus Olympios who filled the new gymnasium of Jerusalem felt any nostalgia 1978 IV e
GL 1979
for the ancestral Baalim.
IV - The
Nor were the worshippers of Jerusalem unduly troubled by the new demons arriving Defence
from Persia. Stories which can be confidently dated after the exile, such as the Book of Against
Hellenizati
Tobit, allow us to see that Persian demonology was making some impression on Jews. on, cap. VI,
The evil demon Asmodaeus who killed the seven successive husbands of Sarah daughter cc. 21-22
of Raguel in the Median city of Ecbatana was of course of good Iranian stock. But after TENTAthe earthly paradise of Adam and Eve and before the earthly paradise of Marx and ZIONI
DEL POLIEngels, occasional forays of foreign devils have never been a surprise to either Jew or TEISMO E
RISPOSTA
gentile.
EBRAICA
The attempt of Antiochus IV to assert the prestige of Zeus Olympios and of a Greek
way of life in Jerusalem makes sense if there were Jews who appreciated the surrounding Greek
civilization and its religious attitudes. It does not make sense as a return to Semitic polytheism. The
Greek gods represented after all a passport to free circulation in the Hellenistic territories; and the
Jews experienced every day how difficult it was for them either to travel or to settle among gentiles.
Neither the old Canaanite polytheism nor the new demonology was the real problem. But the very
course of events under the Hasmonaeans had confirmed that the answer to the questions put by
Hellenistic civilization [13] was not to be found in the Temple – at least not in the Temple alone.
Even before the Maccabean crisis, the raise of the laity and its increasing part in religious life
had expressed itself in a new institution. After Antiochus IV this new institution steadily increased
in popularity and efficiency. We shall call this new institution by its Greek name - synagogue,
though Hebrew names are not lacking, to emphasize the paradox that ultimately the Synagogue
proved to be the effective Jewish answer to the Greek challenge. The correlated paradox is that the
Synagogue was not originally meant to replace the Temple or even to supplement the Temple. It
was, and in a sense is even now, an expression of love for the Temple. But the tension between
Synagogue and Temple is the first and perhaps the most important feature of Hellenistic Judaism. If
the synagogal movement derived new impetus from the victory of Judas Maccabaeus over
Antiochus IV, it was already going strong before it: perhaps it even made this victory possible.
295
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
Only through a clear understanding of the tension between Temple and Synagogue can we arrive at
a proper appreciation of how Judaism defined itself in relation to Hellenism and ultimately survived
it.13
[14]
III14
The Temple was there again. It had not been rebuilt easily, it did not live on easily. But it was
there. In the emptiness of the Holy of Holies which only the High Priest visited once a year, the
God of the Father was again present15. The people rejoiced at the event. As God's feelings were
transparent to the Jews, the people also rejoiced in God's joy at having found his people again. The
Temple had been seen by Ezechiel in his vision. It did not matter much that Ezechiel's dream was
not verifiable in all its details. Dream after dream came to support Ezechiel's dream. Dreams in
Hebrew, like that of the Temple Scroll from Qumran, the publication of which we still
await from Professor Yigael Yadin, who has however already given us some of the
essential facts for its appreciationvii. Dreams in Greek, like the description of the ideal
Jerusalem in the Letter of Aristeas, almost certainly of the late second century B.C.
Chapter 50 of Ecclesiasticus by Ben Sira indicates perhaps better than anything else how RIPRESA
(E) -> EL
a Jew with his eyes open saw the majesty of the Temple and of its High Priest more than 1978 III e
1979
three centuries after its rebuilding, when all the illusions might well have been spent: "as GL
III - The
the sun shining upon the temple of the most High, and as the rainbow giving light in the Jews Inside
Persian
bright clouds”. The mere pleasure of being together – men of different social classes and the
Empire,
of different places – remained an attraction to the end of the Second Temple and was fine cap. II,
remembered still later. Philo, who was once a pilgrim in Jerusalem (De Providentia II, cc. 10-12
<64>), recorded this pleasure: “Friendships are formed among those who hitherto knew RITI ED
not each other, and the sacrifices and libations are the occasion of reciprocity of feeling ETHOS
and constitute the secret pledge that all are of one mind” <(De Special. legibus, 1, 70)>.
The Mishnah says that [15] even King Agrippa brought his own basket on his shoulder
when he came to offer the first fruits to the Temple (Bikkurim 3, 4). In such rabbinic
stories King Agrippa – that is almost certainly King Agrippa I, the contemporary and
client of the Emperor Claudius – is, like King Alfred, the symbol of the good old days. This unity
included the peasants and gives to the Judaism of the Second Temple the curious mixture of
aristocratic and plebeian features which did not escape the trained eye of Max Weber. Social
conflicts did exist: they almost produced a disaster under Antiochus IV and under Pompey; they
certainly contributed to the disaster of A.D. 70. But one of the functions of the Temple was to
mitigate the contrasts and to provide a common ground for worshipping and rejoicing. This, as we
shall see, was more difficult, though not impossible, for the Synagogue.
If we take the final redaction of Leviticus as the product of approximately the time of Nehemiah
we can find in it – together with a pedantic punctiliousness in the matter of cultic purity which is the
expression of the priestly class – a genuine preparation and anticipation of the togetherness which
was to become characteristic of the ethos of the Second Temple. Within the same chapters of
Leviticus, purity norms alternate with direct appeals to love one’s neighbours. The Jews are asked
to respect the old, the orphan and the widow and to provide a minimum of subsistence for them.
The neighbours were not only the other Jews but the foreigners in the land. The Jews are reminded
that they had themselves been strangers in the land of Egypt (Lev. 19, 34).
By itself the ritual of the Temple, with its daily round of sacrifices and the annual offering of
first fruits, had long ceased to fulfill basic needs of Jewish social life. The concentration of the cult
in Jerusalem had cut the direct link which had existed [16] before Josiah’s reform of 621 B.C.
13
P-o 31: fine testo NL 1977 I (Foundations).
P-o 31: III -> II The Temple and the Synagogue, del; 2nd Northcliffe lecture (revised), tsfmsl; Re-typed version
24.3.77, ms[AMM], del.; cc. 14- 32 = NL 1977 II (The Temple [old]) cc. 1-19.
15
P-o 9: the God of the Fathers was again present, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 7, 8: there was again the God of the Fathers.
14
296
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
between sacrifices and eating animal food. The ordinary killing of animals for the purpose of
consumption was no longer a sacrifice to God. Also the seasonal festivities had lost their direct
bearing on agricultural life. This may explain the very strange information in the Book of Nehemiah
(ch. 8) that the Jews under the guidance of Ezra celebrated the feast of booths (Sukkot) as they had
not done since the days of Joshua son of Nun. As Sukkot was the traditional yearly celebration of
grape-gathering, one can only suspect that the novelty was its celebration in Jerusalem, that is, away
from home, in new surroundings. While the cult ceremonies had become divorced from daily life at
home, prophetic thought had spread the notion that it was not the sacrifices in themselves but
circumcision of the heart and justice which were pleasing to God. There is evidence that this
teaching had sunk into the heart of those who visited the Second Temple. The relation between the
Psalms and the cult of the Temple remains mysterious, because very few Psalms are reflections on
ritual practices – which is significant enough.
There is much to be said for taking the Songs of Ascent (120-134) in the traditional way as
connected with the pilgrimage to the Temple. They contain16, as we all know, some of the most
intense expressions of joy at seeing Jerusalem. They also firmly connect purity of heart with
religious elation. But there is no allusion to the ceremonies and sacrifices the pilgrims were
expecting to witness.
If anything, these march songs are prayers in the ordinary sense. Prayers were not the
most conspicuous feature of the Temple ritual, though the High Priest prayed for the
community on the Day of Atonement. No doubt special prayers in times of distress or of RIPRESA
(F) -> EL
joy had always been uttered in the Temple.The intensely personal [17] prayer of King 1978 III e
1979
Ezechias of Judah for his own health, as reported by Isaiah, ch. 38, at the end of the eighth GL
III - The
century B.C., connects songs with the “House of God”, that is, the Temple. Prayers became Jews Inside
Persian
an essential experience in Jewish life only after the Babylonian exile. Daniel is supposed to the
Empire,
have prayed three times a day (6, 10) and Psalm 55, 18 seems to imply the same habit, fine cap II,
which may help to date the Psalm itself. Prayers were17 retrospectively introduced into the c. 12
history of the Temple. The marvellous prayer of King Solomon for the dedication of the LA
Temple (I Kings 8; II Chron. 6) has all the signs of a post-exilic product. One suspects that PREGHIE
RA
if, according to the Mishnah (Tamid 5,1), the priests who had offered the daily sacrifices
went into the Chamber and recited the Decalogue, the Shema' and additional blessings, this
must be a recent innovation of the Pharisaic period. (Elias Bickerman even suggested that
under Greek influence the Jews began to pray for Jerusalem in the Temple about 200 B.C. - and this
would be the oldest nucleus of what we know as the Amida18, the Eighteen Benedictions (Harv.
Theol. Rev. 55, 1962, 163-185). A bold, but not impossible view.
Praying was an important ingredient of Hellenistic culture. Even Greek philosophers composed
their own private prayers: Aristotle to Virtue, Cleanthes to Zeus. If the rabbis were, as we shall later
see, the Jewish counterpart of the Greek philosophers, it is not surprising that some of the rabbis,
too, should wish to compose their own prayers. According to the Jerusalem Talmud (Y. Ber. 4, 4)
the great and unconventional R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanos of the late first century A.D. “would pray a
new prayer every day”. Though19 the Psalter as a whole has something to do with the Temple, it
became available to individuals as a collection of prayers and hymns for private recitation and
singing. As God always does what a good Jew does, God too began to pray. God prays, according
to the Babylonian Talmud – or rather to Rab Zutra bar Tobiah (Berahot 7 a), that [18] his anger and
his other attributes may not overcome his mercy20.
16
P-o 9: There is much to be said… contain, interl.msb[Mom] <-> P-o 7, P-o 8: But at least one group of Psalms had
a direct connection with the pilgrimage to the Temple. These fourteen Psalms (119- 133) contain.
17
P-o 31: were; P-o 8 became.
18
P-o 9: the Amida, inter.msb[Mom]; P-o 8: def.
19
P-o 9: Thought <-> if; P-o 8: If.
20
P-o 8: that his judgment may not overcome his mercy.
297
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
One old ritual undoubtedly kept its emotional value: the collective confession of sins which was
part of the Kippur (Atonement Day) ceremonial and was also practised in hours of stress. Both Ezra
and Nehemiah organised collective confessions. But here again individual confession tended to
prevail, not necessarily in the Temple, but rather as a precept of moral integrity. As the Book of
Proverbs says, “The just is the first to accuse himself”. The date of the Seven Psalms which the
Church calls penitential is of course uncertain, but they seem to be post-exilic. This particularly
applies to the most heart-searching of them all, Psalm 51, which is put into the mouth of David, an
attribution contradicted by the text itself. Further doctrinal development, for instance the notion that
confession before death is the final atonement for sin, presupposes belief in life after death and
therefore no longer belongs to the traditional lore about confession as put into practice in the
Temple (cf. Mishnah, Sanhedr. 6, 2).21 There was yet little concern with complex speculations
about the relations between stars and gods. Babylonian astrology was of course well known to the
Jews. It had troubled earlier prophets, especially Jeremiah (10, 3) and the Deutero-Isaiah (47, 13).
In the period of the Second Temple the Jews seem to have been rather proud of their own
indifference towards the stars. The Jewish third book of Sibylline oracles which belongs to the
second century B.C. praises the Jewish people for refraining from astrology (III, 219-33). The Book
of Jubilees, which again can be dated in the late second century B.C., depicts the patriarch Abraham
as abandoning astrology (12, 16). In a passage which seems fairly early, that is, second century
B.C., the Book of Enoch (8, 3) includes astrology among the sinful sciences of the primitive giants.
[19] Philo is against astrology. Exile in the land of astrology at least partially, or let us say
officially, 22 immunized the Jews against astrology for some centuries. Perhaps we may add absence
of astrology to the plebeian traits of Jewish culture during the Persian and the Greek periods. One
must have leisure to elaborate a working astrological lore.
It was under the Romans, as Josephus testifies (Bell. 6. 288 ff.), that astrology came to dominate
the Jewish mind. Some rabbis tried to reassure themselves and their fellow-Jews by stating that all
the other nations are subject to the stars, but not Israel. As Rabbi Yochanan put it, there is no star
(planetary influence) for Israel (B. Shabb. 156 a). It was too late. In the Roman world very few
entirely escaped astrological beliefs. The majority of the Talmudic sages came to believe in the stars
and the Jews began to be appreciated as competent astrologers. To judge from the letters the
Warburg Institute receives, they have kept this reputation until now.
Still as a Temple phenomenon, but pointing in the direction of the Synagogue, I should finally
like to consider the multiplication of religious texts in Jerusalem in the Hellenistic age. The text of
the Pentateuch was more or less in the form we have it before Samaritans and Jews
definitely parted company, which on any hypothesis must have happened before 170 B.C.
Not only the four major prophets, but the twelve minor ones constitute a corpus for Ben RIPRESA
(G) -> EL
Sira who wrote about 200 B.C. The Book of Kings was read in a form substantially 1978 IV e
1979
identical with our own by the Levitic compiler or compilers of Chronicles, a work23 which GL
IV - The
can hardly be later than 250 B.C. and is probably much earlier. The concern with the text Defence
of the Bible is obvious from Ezra the Scribe onwards. The second [20] letter which Against
Hellenizati
prefaces II Maccabees (late second century) reports the legend of a library of holy texts on, inizio
IV, c.
built up by Nehemiah and adds that Judas Maccabaeus also had one. The writer offers to cap.
9
send copies of these books to the Jews of Egypt, if they need them. Later there were
stories of manuscripts of the Law preserved in the Temple which were duly collated to BIBLIOTE
CHE E
establish the correct reading (Sopherim 6, 4; Abot de-Rabbi Nathan 46, ed. Schechter p. SCRIBI
129). The rabbis adopted the reading given by two Mss. and discarded the reading given
by one MS. only (J. P. Siegel, The Severus Scroll, Missoula 1975). Quite clearly the Jews
21
P-o 9: Sanhedr. 6,2) -> We are still within the boundaries of the Temple cult, but by now very near the territory of
the new Synagogue, when we observe that there was little concern with complex speculations about the relation
between stars and gods, del.; P-o 7,8: corr. def.
22
P-o 9: at least partially - or, let us say, officially – <-> P-o 8: obviously, interl.msn[Mom].
23
P-o 10: a work; P-o 8: def.
298
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
were now living in a civilization which appreciated libraries and knew how to prepare critical
editions. The Museum of Alexandria was spreading its influence. The writers of the letter included
in II Maccabees were giving polite notice to the Jews of Alexandria that they too had libraries and
were ready to provide copies of books. It was no inane boast, for we know that they sent a
translation of Esther to Egypt. In Judaea, as in the diaspora, the availability of texts and their
authentication had unique consequences. Laymen now had the means of reading and studying
sacred texts. The scribes, whose existence was recognized by Antiochus III about 200 B.C., were or
became predominantly laymen: if priests and Levites, they owed their authority not to their ritual
status, but to their learning.
Thus, emphasis on prayer, on purity of heart and on confession; care for the humble; love and
study of books - and their multiplication - were developing in the Temple in a way that pointed to a
new religious attitude. However contradictory it may seem to us, this development did not reduce
the importance of the rules of ritual purity. The opposite is true. Just because the differences
between laymen and priest decreased, the laymen were [21] increasingly submitted to the purity
rules of priests and levites.24 The priestly city of Jerusalem was giving birth to her companion, rival
and ultimate successor, the synagogue. Both the new orientation of Temple activities after
Alexander the Great and the rise of the synagogue near the Temple are conditioned at a visible
distance by Greek institutions, Greek cultural values and Greek linguistic modes. We should,
however, never entirely understand what made the synagogue such a necessary integration of the
Temple, if one stray word and one stray book did not allow us to postulate a phase of anxiety and
doubt in Jewish history which otherwise left no evident trace.
The word is of course Apikuros, Epicurean, which in Mishnaic Hebrew is the current
denomination of any sort of unbeliever and scoffer among the Jews. How the word penetrated into
Hebrew and who among the Jews was firstly labelled "Epicurean" is beyond our reach. But the
word indicates that the Epicureans, that is, the most thoughtful deniers of the intervention of the
gods in human affairs, had become known among Jews and had created a type. Philo confirms from
his own point of view that Epicureanism was the only Greek philosophy incompatible with
Judaism.
The stray book is of course Qohelet, Ecclesiastes. Its whimsical author called himself
"King of Israel in Jerusalem". He must have lived in Jerusalem, because he speaks of the
RIPRESA
Temple with assured familiarity: “Guard your steps when you go to the house of God; to (H) -> EL
draw near to listen is better than to offer the sacrifices of fools” (6, 1). The friend who 1978 IV e
GL 1979
edited his work assures us that Qohelet “taught the people knowledge, weighing and IV - The
searching and fashioning many proverbs” (12, 9). The word Qohelet, if it means Defence
Against
“speaker, assembler”, may bear out that he was a popular teacher, [22] such as one met in Hellenizati
Hellenistic cities. But we do not know when he lived and are not always sure of on, inizio
cap. IV, c.
understanding what he believed - or doubted. The Hellenistic atmosphere seems to be 9
indisputable, and if Ben Sira, the Ecclesiasticus, read the Ecclesiastes and reacted against
QOHELET
him, his date must be earlier than 200 B.C., though presumably later than 300 B.C. Two
historical allusions, which must have been clear to contemporaries, are lost on us: one is
to a king “who came out from the prison-house to rule” (4, 13-14), the other to a small
city which “was besieged by a great king and saved by the wisdom of an obscure citizen” (9, 1415).25 Qohelet was concerned about his own God whose existence and power he did not question:
what he was not able to perceive was a pattern in God’s actions, especially in the retribution of
wickedness. He was not an Epicurean or a Cynic or any other kind of Greek philosopher. No Greek
thinker ever centred his meditation on man’s inability to discover the meaning of God’s work which
is under the sun. But Qohelet was an Apikuros, an Epicurean in the sense the Hebrew word came to
24
P-o 10: However contradictory it may seem… levites, mginfmsb[AMM]; P-o 8: def.
P-o 7: (9, 14-15) -> Qohelet was not an Epicurean or any other kind of Greek philosopher, because man cannot
discover the meaning of God’s work which is under the sun, del.
25
299
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
take of a man who doubts what cannot be doubted: God’s justice.26 Yet his work was canonised,
treated as holy and made part of the Bible. The canonization did not happen without resistance, but
one of its supporters was Hillel, the sage of the first century B.C. who more than anybody else
contributed to the foundation of rabbinic Judaism. No doubt the fact that the author or rather his
editor implicitly identified King Qohelet with King Solomon helped, for anything could be
expected of King Solomon. It is also possible that a few interpolations smoothed the original text,
but we must not be too confident of having discovered them: the contradictions of the present text
may well be characteristic of the author's mind. What is obvious is that the rabbis who canonized
Qohelet must have considered his questioning legitimate and must have felt that it would ultimately
lead to the true recognition of God’s Work on earth. [23] There is an analogy in their acceptance of
the Book of Job, though it is only a partial analogy, and the Book of Job was in any case much older
than Qohelet. By implication the rabbis both shared Qohelet's doubts and went beyond them. When
in the second part of the first century A.D. Rabbi Eleasar ben Arach taught "know what answer to
give to an Apikuros" (Ab. 2, 19), the situation was already under control27. Qohelet was canonized
by people who had already found the path leading out of the forest in which he had lost himself.
The path is indicated very simply in what is now an appendix to the Sayings of the Fathers: "The
Torah is superior to kinghood and priesthood"viii.
IV28
As long as the Temple of Jerusalem was standing, the Jews were ready to die for it,
but they survived because at some time in some place, while the Second Temple was still RIPRESA
their centre, they created the synagogue. According to one of the early Midrashic (I) -> EL
III e
compilations - Numbers Rabbah (11, 2) - God jumps and leaps from synagogue to 1978
GL 1979
synagogue so that he may bless Israel. This is a very unbiblical vision of God. Though III - - The
Inside
scholars, ancient and modern, have tried to find traces of the synagogue in the Bible, Jews
the Persian
most particularly in a passage of Ezechiel 11, 6, there is no evidence in the Bible for the Empire,
inizio cap.
existence of the synagogue.
III, cc. 13The theory that the synagogue had its origins in the Babylonian exile has obvious 14
attraction and still commands support. It is suggested by Talmudic texts29. As far as I ORIGINI
know, it was first proposed in scholarly terms by Carlo Sigonio in his De republica DELLA
RIPRESA
(L) -> ->
Hebraeorum (1583). Sigonio was one of the first students of Roman institutions to apply SINAGOGA1978
EL
his humanistic still to the interpretation of Jewish institutions. He was a contemporary of IV e GL
Azariah [24] de' Rossi, and there is research to be done on their relations30. But I do not 1979 IV believe that the evidence favours Sigonio's hypothesis. The Book of Nehemiah has the The
Defence
paradigmatic scene of the reading of the Law by Ezra and Nehemiah before the Against
assembled people. The historicity of the scene is hardly to be doubted, though it is most Hellenizati
on, cap. V,
unlikely that both Ezra and Nehemiah were present. But if the scene is basically c. 15
authentic, it has an implication: about 450 B.C., after their return from the Babylonian CURSUS
exile, the Jews had as yet no institution for the regular reading and interpreting of the DI STUDI
Torah.
Archaeology is of no real help until much later, in the second and third centuries A.D.,
when the specific architectural features of what we call a synagogue become identifiable.
What we are told by archaeologists about the synagogues of the first century A.D., which they
claim to have found at Herodium and Masada, is at best likely. Language and epigraphy are more
helpful for the Hellenistic centuries - at least if we are prepared not to know too much. Late Biblical
26
27
28
29
30
P-o 31: qui segr probabilmente per un’ inserzione (che però manca).
P-o 9: When in the secondo part … control: mginf con segr, msn[Mom]; P-o 7, 8 def.
P-o 31: IV <-> III.
P-o 9, 10: It is… texts, interl.ms[9 Mom, 10 AMM].
P-o 10: He was … relations, interl.msb[AMM].
300
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
and Mishnaic Hebrew distinguishes bet ha-midrash, house of learning, and bet ha-knesset, house of
assembly. Bet ha-midrash, house of learning, seems to have applied mainly to higher learning. By
the third century A.D. it was apparently already traditional to call the elementary Bible school bet
sefer (house of the books)31 and an intermediate school for the study of the Mishnah bet talmud
(T.J. Meg. 3, 1, 73 a32). Bet ha-knesset, house of assembly, was increasingly used to indicate the
house of prayer and was translated into Greek either by proseuché or by synagogé. In the early third
century A.D. the witty and profound sage Joshua ben Levi ruled that a house of assembly (bet haknesset, synagogue) can be turned into a house of learning (bet ha-midrash) but not vice versa,
because the house of learning is the place where the Torah is exalted, whereas the house of
assembly (bet ha-knesset) is the place where prayer is exalted.
[25] All would be simple if we could really be certain that the school was kept separate from the
prayer-house. But Philo calls a synagogue a place of instruction (De Vita Mosis III, 27), and even
more precisely a Jerusalem inscription in Greek of the first century A.D. defines the synagogue as a
place for the reading of the Law (Torah) and for instruction about the commandments (Corpus
Inscr. Jud. 1404). There is no way of isolating the school from the synagogue, for the simple reason
that the service in the synagogue included reading, interpretation and translation of the Bible scholastic activities, if any. A saying of the Fathers variously attributed to Samuel the Small (first
century A.D.) or to Jehudah ben Tema (date uncertain)33: “at five years for the Mikrah (the
Scripture), at ten years for the Mishnah, at thirteen years for the fullfilment of the commandments,
at fifteen for the study of the Talmud” (5, 21). But the same Sayings of the Fathers allow
astronomy and geometry as “hors-d’oeuvre” to Wisdom (3, 19). What Mishnah and Talmud may
mean in this context I shall not try to define. Even R. Meir and R. Judah disagreed about the
meaning of Mishnah (Bab. Kiddushin 49 b), one took it to be Halachoth, the other Midrash34. The
student was not left off easily: "Stuff him like an ox" was the pedagogical advice of one of the
Sages at the beginning of the third century A.D., no doubt on good precedent (B. Ket. 50 a). The
same Rav declared that anyone who insults a scholar is an unbeliever (Apikuros) (B. Sanh. 99 b). At
the top of this education there was the academy, the yeshivah, the first evidence for which is
perhaps in the final chapter of Ecclesiasticus, written, as we know, at the beginning of the second
century B.C. When the "houses" of Shammai and Hillel emerged in the late first century B.C. the
institution was already well established.
[26] It was the convinction that education in the Torah never ends that blurred the distinction
between the school and the synagogue, between the house of learning and the house of prayer. The
adult who was not interested in or suitable for the specialised instruction of the academy would find
further instruction in the synagogue where the Bible was read, translated and commented upon, and
sermons were preached. Thanks to the great work by Jacob Mann on The Bible as read and
preached in the Old Synagogue and the discussions and criticism it provoked, we now know more
about the structure of such synagogal teaching. I am not aware that any Hebrew or Aramaic sermon
which has come down to us can safely be dated before the fourth century A.D. The sermon by R.
Tanhum of Neva preserved in the Babylonian Talmud (Shab. 30, a-b) should belong to the second
part of that century, and the rich collection of the Pesikta de-Rav Kahana is generally considered a
Palestinian compilation of the fifth century including earlier material. But there is much in Philo
which can legitimately be treated as lectures in the synagogue; and the Fourth Book of Maccabees
is probably a sermon of the first century A.D. preached at a place like Antioch where veneration for
the seven brothers who suffered martyrdom under Antiochus IV was particularly intense. Philo
himself in his Life of Moses (II, 216) and elsewhere alludes to sabbath school meetings,
Didaskaleia.
31
32
33
34
P-o 9: “house of the books”, interl.msn[Mom]; P-o 8: def..
P-o 8: (T.J. Hag, 1, 7, 7 b.c. compared with T.J. Meg. 3,1,73 b); mgsnmsl[Mom?].
P-o 8: gives the stages of such education and confirms its religious character; P-o 31: def.
P-o 10: Even R. Meir … Midrash, mgsnmsb[AMM]; P-o 8: def.
301
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
Seen as a whole this educational movement has its evident significance. Just as the interpretation
and the transmission of the text of the Bible must be evaluated within the context of scholarly
activities of the Hellenistic world, so the diffusion, if not the creation, of the synagogue happened in
the typically Hellenistic context of multiplication of schools and religious [27] associations. In both
cases the purpose of the Jews was not to imitate the Greeks, but to preserve and develop their own
heritage in a world dominated by Greek culture and institutions. The Jewish notion of education, as
it appears to have been elaborated by the Sages (Hachamim)35 in the dual and interlocking structure
of school and synagogue, agreed with the Greek notion of education in three essential points: a man
must have a teacher; education must be for its own sake; it must guide daily behaviour. But other
features separated Jewish from Greek education. Jewish education never disdained manual work.
Teaching a trade was a duty for parents only second to teaching of the Torah. The RIPRESA
teachers themselves often practised a trade of manual work, though this was apparently (M) -> EL
IV e
more frequent among the earlier Sages than with the rabbis of Late Antiquity. On the 1978
GL 1979
36
other hand physical training was never a part of Jewish education. [27bis] There is, IV - The
however, an isolated rabbinic rule that a father is supposed to teach his son to swim Defence
Against
RIPRESA
(Bab. Kiddushin 29 a). The Greek gymnasium was, at least in certain periods, the symbol Hellenizati
(N) cap.
-> EL
on,
V,
of what a young Jews should avoid in order to remain a Jew. This is not to said that there 1978
c. 15 IV e
was not, among Jews, keen interest in athletic games – or even widespread desire to be GL 1979
- The
EDUCAadmitted to the gymnasium. We know that in Alexandria admission of the Jews to the IV
Defence
ZIONE
Against
FISICA
gymnasium was a serious issue under the Emperor Claudius.37
More decisively, Jewish education was an education based on a Holy Text and Hellenizati
on, cap. V,
therefore giving great importance to interpretation. As such it was not essentially c. 15 e cap.
different from Hellenistic education. The Bible represented, in terms of schooling, a VI, c. 22
selection of various literary genres which in scope and variety was not inferior to or EDUCAZ.
E
incommensurable with the selection of Greek classics studied by Greek boys. GRECA
EBRAICA
Creativeness was not encouraged in either type of education. The very notion of - COMPAintellectual creativeness is not exactly translatable in either ancient Greek or ancient RAZIONE
Hebrew. Where Greek and Hebrew education really began to be incommensurable was
at the upper level. The Greeks went for eloquence, philosophy or, more seldom, a
combination of mathematics and philosophy. Law became a subject for study by itself in
Rome, not in Greek cities. At this level the Jews were increasingly concerned with the
relation between written law and oral law, and with the exact formulation of the latter.
We need not discuss here to with extent the notion of a double law – Biblical and oral – was
peculiar to the sect of the Pharisees, nor how widespread the sect of the Pharisees was either in the
first century B.C. or in the first century A.D. Supplementation of the written texts by oral tradition
became in any case the dominant issue in Jewish intellectual life as we know it in the Greco-Roman
period. It must have affected the upper strata of Jewish education at least from the first century B.C.
onwards, if not earlier. For those who accepted the existence of a second Torah transmitted orally
since Moses it became necessary to memorize what by definition could not be [27 ter] written
down. On the other hand it became possible to extend the Torah by additional material according to
recognized rules. This double - and partly contradictory - process of memorizing the oral law and
extending it is still very obscure, both in its theological implications and in its logical rules. We
have the finished product - the Mishnah - of about A.D. 200, but we know very little of what led to
it in the previous centuries which are our concern. When the rabbinic schools had stabilized their
procedures no [27] man was entitled to present himself to his prospective bride as a "tanna", as a
35
P-o 9: Hachamim; P-o 8: def.
P-o 31: Insertion (attached) - Insertion: handwritten pp. 27bis and ter, mgsn e interl.msr[AMM].
37
P-o 31: On the other hand… Emperor Claudius <-> P-o 7, 8: On the other hand physical training was never a part
of Jewish education. Indeed the Greek gymnasium was, at least in certain periods the symbol of what a young Jew
should avoid in order to remain a Jew. There is, however, an isolated rabbinic rule that a father is supposed to teach his
son to swim (Bab. Kiddushin 29a).
36
302
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
professional transmitter, if he did not know by heart "Torah, Sifra, Sifre and Tosefta" - quite a lot
for the connoisseur (Bab. Kiddushin 49 b). The rabbis themselves knew that simple memorization
made a "basket full of books", not a sage (Bab. Megillah 28 b). Still, the most humane of
RIPRESA
the rabbis, R. Meir, insisted that "he who forgets a single word loses his soul" (Abot 4, (O) -> GL
12). The whole question of why the rabbis - in contrast to temple priests and Qumran 1982 III The
sectarians - and incidentally to apocalyptic writers - put such [28] emphasis on oral Decline of
learning deserves further enquiry. But one wonders whether in any Hellenistic school History and
Apocalypse
creativeness was encouraged. I am here to describe a culture, not to assess its , cap. VIII,
comparative merits.38 A look at the Declamationes attributed to Quintilian or to Libanius' c. 21-22 e
App.
Meletai indicates what a young Jew was spared39. The Bible was the common ground (Esau e
and was the natural link between school and synagogue. Whereas Greek schools, even if Giacobbe,
in Defence
they put themselves under the protection of a specific god, were essentially different Against
from prayer-houses, the Jewish school and the Jewish prayer-house were united by the Hellenizati
on, c. 14)
Bible. They were also united by the religious significance the Jews attributed to the
relation between teachers and pupils. “Let the honour of thy disciple be as dear to thee as LO
STUDIO
thine own; and the honour of thy schoolfellow be like the fear of thy master, and the fear SACRO
of thy master like the fear of Heaven” (Abot 3, 9). The school pyramid culminated in
God himself.
This educational system, which probably received its starting-point and certainly
derived its significance from the Hellenistic surroundings, was taken to be of immemorial origin.
Midrashic texts transferred it back to the patriarchal period. We are told that Esau and Jacob went
together to an elementary school, to a bet hasefer, until they were thirteen, and then parted company
– Esau for the house of idols and Jacob of course for an institution of advanced learning, the bet
hamidrash (Genes. R. 63, 9). And what could Moses do in the forty days spent on the mountain to
receive the Law but study the Scripture in the day-time and the Mishnah at night? (Pirke de R.
Eliezer 46, transl. G. Friedländer, p. 359). Indeed an academy was available during the forty years
of the wandering in the wilderness (B. Yoma 28b). God himself had to have his own academy, his
own bet hamidrash, in Heaven where he taught the Law to the righteous – what was sometimes
called the Heavenly Academy40 (B. Baba Metziah, 86 a; Deut. R. 7 in a text [29] attributed to the
third century, Joshua b. Levi; Tanna debe Eliyahu R. 1, 4). A rabbi even knew the exact part of the
day God reserved for the study of his own Torah: the first three hours of the day (B. A.Z. 3b)41.
Clearly some of these imaginings belong to the period after the destruction of the Temple, when
Judaism was saved by its school system, and it was felt that “by the breath from the mouth of
schoolchildren the world is sustained” (B. Shab. 119b). One would also like to know the origin of
the tradition according to which the Greek philosopher Oenomaus of Gadara, a contemporary and
an acquaintance of R. Meir in the second century A.D., was asked what one could do against the
Jews and answered: “As long as the voice of the children will be heard in the schools and in the
synagogues you cannot subjugate this people” (Genesis Rabbah 65, 20; cf. Pesikta deRab Kahna,
ed. M. Friedmann, 121a). Yet the Sages could smile at their own schools. They told the story of
how Moses – the Law-giver Moses – was allowed by God to sit on the eighth bench of the school of
Rabbi Akiba but was unable to follow the subtle argument about a point of the Law he had brought
down from Mount Sinai (Bab. Menahot 29b). “Not being able to follow their arguments he (Moses)
was ill at ease, but when they came to a certain subject and the disciple said to the master ‘Whence
38
P-o 31: I am here... merits., interl.msb[AMM].
P-o 31: More decisively [37 bis] … was spared <-> P-o 7, 8: More decisively, Jewish education was an education
based on a Holy Text and therefore ultimately limited to interpretation. Creativeness was not encouraged. But one
wonders whether in any Hellenistic school creativeness was encouraged.
40
P-o 10: the Heavenly Academy, interl.msb[Mom] <-> P-o 7, 8: the Upper Yeshivah.
41
P-o 9: A rabbi… 3b), interl.msb[Mom]; P-o 7, 8: def.
39
303
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
do you know it?’ and the latter replied ‘It is a Law given unto Moses at Sinai’, Moses was
comforted”.42
With the Jews spreading from Persia to Spain and conditions changing rapidly from the conquest
of Alexander to the fall of the Temple, it would be absurd to expect uniformity of syllabus
or of teaching methods. As we shall soon see, differences of language had a determining
impact on Jewish life. Here it is enough to say that where Jews were Greek speakers,
exclusive attention to Jewish matters was practically impossible. In the first century A.D. RIPRESA
[30] Philo of Alexandria himself displayed a refined Greek education and attributed an (P) -> EL
IV e
exceptionally wide and varied education to his exemplary Jew, Moses, who like him had 1978
GL 1979
been educated in Egypt. Philo had a clear notion of what the Greek encyclopedia (general IV - The
education) stood for and presented it as subordinate to philosophy (De congr. erud. 79). Defence
Against
Like any Greek philosopher, he quoted Greek poets and historians: in fact Epicurus was Hellenizati
cap. V,
more restrained than Philo in such a display. Philo tells us that he was present at a on,
cc. 17-19
performance of Euripides (Quod omnis 141). Many of his quotations are probably secondhand from florilegia, but this was the custom of the age. His knowledge of Plato is FILONE
PROSELIundoubtedly first-hand and not superficial. As for Moses, Philo presented him as learning TISMO
mathematics and symbolism from the Egyptians, language and astronomy from the
Assyrians and the rest of the encyclopedia from the Greeks: a truly international education
(Vita Mosis43 I, 23-24). But Philo’s ideal education was no criticism of, or alternative to,
the Palestinian and Mesopotamian type of instruction. The goal remained the same, that is the
understanding of the word of God as transmitted to the Jews in order to fulfil the covenant between
God and Israel. As Philo says in a passage of the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain: “the fountain of the
devout contemplation of the only wise being, on which Israel’s rank is based, is the habit of service
to God” (120, transl. F. H. Colson). For Philo, as for the Palestinian rabbi, education was the road to
God.
This conception of education automatically opened up two problems: the possibility of making it
available to all Jews and the legitimacy of making it available to non-Jews. To us the second
question may seem to be more serious, but in fact the first question proved to be far more
intractable. For Philo, as for his [31] contemporaries in Palestine who were accused of compassing
sea and land to make one proselyte (Matt. 22, 31), the Torah was meant for all men, indeed was
meant to establish the "ways of peace" among men (B. Gitt. 59). Partial or total conversion to
Judaism were a fairly common event. Some of the most authoritative rabbis - from Shemaia and
Abtalion, the teachers of Hillel, to Rabbi Meir, the pupil of Akiba, were said rightly or wrongly to
have been proselytes or sons of proselytes: Rabbi Meir was even made out to be a descendant of the
Emperor Nero, who in the East had a better reputation than in the West. How proselytism could be
made to agree with the election of Israel was, no doubt, a subject for reflection: but in practice
Jewish education was available to the outsider, and there are good stories about impatient proselytes
and patient rabbis or vice versa. It was an authentic proselyte, Aquila, who provided a new
translation of the Bible into Greek when the attraction of the Septuagint began to fade at the end of
the first century A.D.
On the other hand economic barriers and intellectual limitations remained operative against what
Jacob Neusner has called the ideal of rabbinizing all the children of Israel. An effort to make
education available to everyone in the Palestinian villages is known to have
been set on foot before A.D. 70 (B. Baba Bathra 21 a), though the exact date RIPRESA (Q) -> EL 1978 IV
e GL 1979 IV - The Defence
and the details are uncertain. It was not entirely successful. The link between Against Hellenization, cap.
school and synagogue was probably just as serious an obstacle as the lack of VI, c. 19-20
(mandarini, in GL 1982 III educational facilities or the lack of intellectual ability to pursue the subject. The Decline of History and
Not everyone was willing to study the Torah day and night or to encourage Apocalypse, cap. VIII)
GLI ESCLUSI DALL'
his own son to do so. Superficially, the uneducated among the Jews, the amEDUCAZIONE
42
43
P-o 10: “Not being able … comforted”, interl.msb[AMM]; P-o 8: def.
P-o 9: Mosis <-> Moysis; P-o 7,8: corr. def.
304
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
haarez, is similar to the agrikos or rusticus of Greco-Roman civilization: the name am-haarez,
people of the earth, points to the peasants, as do the names agroikos and rusticus. But the [32] name
– am-haarez was also a man who did not care for ritual purity and scrupulous payment of tithes.
Only by progressive simplification of the situation did he become the ignorant man par excellence
who does not care to have a teacher. With the increasing belief in the next life, his position became
dubious both in this world and in the world to come (Abot de Rabbi Natan 41; Mishnah, Demai 2,
1, 2, 3; B. Sotah 22 a etc.). The way was open to an aristocratic and arrogant conception of learning
which produced in later centuries the not altogether admirable character of the Talmid Hacham, the
pupil of the Sage, who exploits a society ready to give him credit. The process cannot be separated
from the role the rabbis increasingly assumed of defenders and regulators of the purity laws.
Though anthropologists - and most especially the anthropologists of University College London44 have done much to make us understand obsessions with purity in other cultures, there are still a lot
of puzzles in the Jewish notions of ritual purity. But the rabbis as a whole never degenerated into a
mandarin class. They remained faithful and responsible servants of the society which produced
them, and shared the pains of common people. Jewish life was not of a type to allow of a
mandarinate. There was no political power to support it.45
Note sulle singole riprese testuali
RIPRESA (A) -> EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, inizio, cc. 1-2. IL TEMPIO-STATO
E L'UNIVERSALISMO.
Il testo viene recuperato, con qualche piccola modifica (menzione di Ecateo ed Ezra 4, 1-2 su Zerubbabel), come inizio
di The Jews Inside (cc.1-2), fino al cenno alla persistenza di speranze universalistiche nella Lettera agli Ebrei. Vi si
ricorda il carattere di stato-tempio di Gerusalemme, noto ai Greci fin dal primo ellenismo (Ecateo, Polibio), e quello di
‘re messianico’ attribuito a Zerubbabel dai profeti Aggeo e Zaccaria. Rispetto a The Jews inside, The Temple illustra
con maggior ampiezza i modi e le ragioni dell'infrangersi delle aspettative post-esiliche, e dedica diverso taglio alla
riforma di Neemia, per cui cfr. c. 5 e 8 di The Jews Inside.
RIPRESA (B) - > EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, fine cap. I - inizio cap. II, cc. 6-7.
SOCIETA' E ECONOMIA.
Dell’azione di Neemia la ripresa in The Jews inside sottolinea il carattere di svolta verso la città-stato piuttosto che
verso il governo sacerdotale; viene evocato un parallelo con Roma tramite la questione dei Leviti (affrontata più
brevemente) e si menziona la restrizione del corpo civico in base alla nozione di purezza.
Risulta quasi identica l'espressione dell'accordo di Neemia con la politica persiana, compresi i riferimenti a Strabone e
all'articolo di A. Archi; all'osservazione sul "debito di riconoscenza" con il mazdeismo si sostituisce però, nella ripresa,
una considerazione di tipo politico. Le caratteristiche dell'economia del Tempio vengono riproposte fedelmente, ma si
apprezza un’estensione del coinvolgimento dei laici nell’amministrazione, piuttosto che nel ristretto ambito finanziario.
L'ordine degli argomenti appare leggermente mutato e viene affrontata con maggiore ampiezza la storia delle relazioni
dei Tobiadi con il Tempio, di cui si esplicita il carattere esemplare nell’analisi delle implicazioni sociali del giudaismo.
RIPRESA (C) - > EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, cap. II, cc. 8-9. IL SOMMO
SACERDOTE
Nella ripresa vengono sviluppate con maggiore ampiezza la menzione della leggenda della visita di Alessandro al
Tempio e la trattazione sulla lettera in cui Antioco III si rivolge a Gerusalemme come a una polis; Momigliano accentua
il punto di vista esterno e greco nella valutazione del documento come fonte per la ricostruzione delle istituzioni
gerosolimitane e propende per l'ipotesi che il Sommo Sacerdote presiedesse al concilio dei notabili; ripropone infine,
quasi verbatim, la menzione della richiesta d'aiuto degli Ebrei di Elefantina (410 a.C.).
44
P-o 31: University College of London, interl.msb[AMM] <-> P-o 11: our own College.
P-o 10: There was no political power to support it, mgdxmsb[AMM]; P-o 31: c. 32 tagliata, dal confronto con P-o 77
(NL 1977 II, the Temple [old]), c. 19, si ricostruisce: This brings us back to the leaders of the Synagogal revolution, the
rabbis themselves. The relation of the rabbis or Sages (hachamim) in various periods to the priests, to the Pharisees, to
the pious (chasidim) and to the scribes (sopherim) was uncertain to the ancients and consequently remains uncertain to
us, etc. (ts. poi recuperato all’inizio della CL 1977 III Rabbis, cfr. Appendice II).
45
305
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
RIPRESA (D) - > EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, c. 21 bis e > EL 1978 IV e GL 1979
IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cc. 21-22. TENTAZIONI DEL POLITEISMO E RISPOSTA EBRAICA
Sia in The Jews inside che in The Defence si ripropone in modo pressoché uguale, contro le teorie di Morton Smith, la
distinzione fra il sincretismo di età ellenistica e i residui politeistici dell'età del primo Tempio. Altri temi recuperati
sono l'apprezzamento ebraico dei vantaggi del politeismo greco, sotto Antioco IV, e il carattere non problematico del
vecchio politeismo cananeo e della nuova demononologia. Su quest’ultimo punto The Temple contiene qualche
considerazione in più che non sarà però recuperata neppure nella trattazione su Tobit in GL 1981 II (Some Exemplary).
Importante appare soprattutto la diversa risposta che The Temple fornisce, rispetto a The Defence, alla fondamentale
domanda su ciò che gli Ebrei contrapposero all’ellenizzazione: The Defence va in direzione dell’individuazione di un
sistema educativo autonomo, mentre The Temple guarda al complesso dell’istituzione sinagogale, senza fare ancora
riferimento specifico alla sua funzione educativa.
RIPRESA (E) -> EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, fine cap. II, cc. 10-12. RITI E
ETHOS
La descrizione della socialità religiosa del Tempio è solo apparentemente simile a quella di The Jews Inside; benché le
citazioni da Filone e le osservazioni di Weber siano riprese quasi con le stesse parole, la vecchia versione risulta
improntata a una visione complessivamente meno conflittuale (mancano i riferimenti ai dissidi sul Tempio, alla
conflittuale visione sociale di Ben Sira; e il cenno a momenti non lieti della vita religiosa nel Tempio) e più concentrata
su aspetti religiosi, talvolta mistici (visioni del Tempio in sogno, gioia condivisa con Dio, racconto mishnaico di
Agrippa al Tempio). Se la cesura costituita dal Tempio rispetto ai luoghi e ai tempi delle feste è trattata nelle due lezioni
in modo molto simile (con precisazioni nella più recente), notevole appare però la caduta, in Jews and Gentiles, di
un'affermazione sull'impossibilità per la Sinagoga di emulare il Tempio nel mitigare i contrasti.
RIPRESA (F) -> EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, fine cap II, c. 12. LA PREGHIERA
La ripresa in The Jews Inside si limita a un breve cenno alla presenza di preghiere nel rituale del Tempio, con l'aggiunta
di una precisazione relativa ai dati dell'evidenza documentaria, e a una sintetica connessione con i Salmi.
RIPRESA (G) -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, inizio cap. IV, c. 9. BIBLIOTECHE
E SCRIBI
Come per la maggior parte dei recuperi relativi a temi di cultura, l'interesse di questo – rimasto quasi invariato nel
passaggio alla nuova lezione - risiede nel contesto di difesa contro l'ellenizzazione in cui è collocato. Sulla radice laica
dell'autorità, conferita dallo studio, la nuova lezione torna in più punti. Per la caratterizzazione e il ruolo degli scribi,
cfr. tuttavia soprattutto GL 1982 II (The Jewish Sects).
RIPRESA (H) -> EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, inizio cap. VII, c. 22. QOHELET
In The Jews Inside appare maggiore l'insistenza sulla dimensione sociale dei dubbi di Qohelet, così come più recisa
l’affermazione finale sul carattere non greco di questo apikuros ("no Greek either in language or in soul").
RIPRESA (I) -> EL 1978 III e GL 1979 III - The Jews Inside the Persian Empire, inizio cap. III, c. 13-14. ORIGINI
DELLA SINAGOGA
Nella ripresa non torna il tentativo di messa a punto della relazione, all'interno della sinagoga, fra funzione rituale e
funzione educativa. Il primo aspetto - la casa di preghiera - non sarà più affrontato.
RIPRESA (L) -> -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cap. V, c. 15. CURSUS DI
STUDI
Vedi ripresa (G).
RIPRESA (M) -> -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cap. V, c. 15. EDUCAZIONE
FISICA
Vedi ripresa (G).
RIPRESA (N) -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cap. V, c. 15 e cap. VI, c. 22.
EDUCAZIONE GRECA E EBRAICA – COMPARAZIONE
Vedi ripresa (G). Da notare, però, come la questione (posta subito dopo il testo recuperato) circa la coesistenza di una
dimensione orale accanto a quella scritta nella trasmissione e produzione dei testi ricompaia in modo meno
problematico nella ripresa. La GL 1982 II (The Jewish Sects) darà occasione a Momigliano di argomentare
ulteriormente la propria convinzione della non esistenza di un rapporto esclusivo tra oralità e farisaismo.
RIPRESA (O) -> GL 1982 III - The Decline of History and Apocalypse, cap. VIII, c. 21-22 e GL 1979 IV - The Defence
Against Hellenization, cap. V, c. 14. LO STUDIO SACRO
306
Appendice I: una lezione “dissolta”
The Temple and the Synagogue (CL 1977 II)
L'importanza che Momigliano attribuiva al carattere distintivo - religioso - della scuola ebraica rispetto alla greca è
evidente nella collocazione finale del brano, mantenuto quasi invariato in conclusione dell'ultima lezione dell'ultimo
ciclo.
RIPRESA (P) -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cap. V, cc. 17-19. FILONE –
PROSELITISMO
L'argomentazione sulla finalità tutta ebraica e religiosa dell’"enciclopedia greca" filoniana non varia nella ripresa; anche
nella nuova lezione è subito seguita dalla questione del proselitismo, proposto come un aspetto del più generale
problema relativo alla valutazione dell'educazione ebraica come via verso Dio.
RIPRESA (Q) -> EL 1978 IV e GL 1979 IV - The Defence Against Hellenization, cap. VI, cc. 19-20 (mandarini, in GL
1982 III - The Decline of History and Apocalypse, cap. VIII, c. 18). GLI ESCLUSI DALL'EDUCAZIONE
Il versante sociale del problema dell’estensibilità dell'educazione ebraica accompagna quello religioso in The Temple
come nella ripresa. Nella vecchia lezione, tuttavia, all'esame dello status dell' ‘am-haarez si collega una riflessione sulle
evoluzioni, connesse al tema della purità, della classe rabbinica; al tempo stesso, del rabbinato nel suo insieme si
sottolinea come l’assenza del supporto di un potere ancora politico ne abbia impedito la trasformazione in mandarinato.
Quest’ultima osservazione si perde nella ripresa in The Defence (per tornare, svincolata dal contesto ragionativo di cui
era originariamente parte, nella trattazione sui rabbini contenuta in GL 1982 III), dove lo sviluppo della riflessione
appare piuttosto rivolto a individuare, nell'età ellenistica, le origini di aspetti sociali (le posizioni definite, gli
specialismi culturali e religiosi) che appaiono ben delineati solo nell'età dei tannaim.
i
Vd. GL 1979 II (The Greeks outside), n. i.
Vd. GL 1979 II (The Greek outside), n. ii.
iii
Fr. III A264 F6 Jacoby = fr. 11 Stern.
iv
Per una discussione sul mutamento di rapporti e di forme di contatto in ambito religioso fra Roma e Giudea cfr.
Roman-Maccabees, 757-758.
v
Ios. Ant. 14, 39.
vi
Sulla interpretazione di Fraccaro della radice militare della potenza romana, cfr. MOMIGLIANO 1960B
(=Fraccaro).
vii
Vd. GL 1979 III (The Jews inside), n. xix.
viii
Pirke Aboth, VI, 6.
ii
307
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
Appendice II CL 1977 III The Rabbis and the Communities
Sedi e date
CL 1977 III (aprile-maggio, cfr. GRANATA 2006, 415)
Documenti
a) CL 1977 III
P-o 32 (a) aggiunte ms., (b) c.c. di P-o 771 pp. 20-30, (c) xerox di P-o 21 (a1)
P-o 37 nuova versione basata su P-o 32 (a-b-c), top c.
P-o 23 (a1), P-o 24 [escluse pp. 5-15, usate in P-o 562], P-o 38: c.c. di P-o 37
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati.
La terza CL 1977, The Rabbis and the Communities, è il risultato dell’unione di parti di due
Northcliffe contigue: la sezione finale dalla NL II The Temple, dedicata alla descrizione di sinagoga
e rabbini, e la prima della NL III Attitudes (capp. I-II), grosso modo incentrata sulla situazione
linguistica e sul testo sacro.
Si propone in questa appendice il testo dei soli capp. I-III, provenienti – con aggiunte e
modifiche – dalla seconda parte della NL II The Temple. Non saranno invece riprodotti i capp. IVV, ripresi dalla parte iniziale della NL III Attitudes, perché nel passaggio dalla versione Northcliffe
a quella di Chicago il testo non ha subito modifiche di sorta: per il testo si rimanda all’appendice
III, Attitudes.
P-o 32, scelto come testo base, è il documento che meglio testimonia la maniera in cui la
lezione sui Rabbis venne ricavata a partire dalle due Northcliffe. Momigliano costruisce il nuovo
testo utilizzando copie dss. delle pp. 20-30 di The Temple3 e delle pp. 1-7 delle Attitudes4, in
sequenza, e integrando il testo così ottenuto con l’aggiunta di 6 carte mss.5: un nuovo capitolo
introduttivo e addenda che saldano fra loro le due Northcliffe lectures in un’unica, diversa lezione6.
Gli altri documenti disponibili nell’AAM aggiungono poco o nulla al testo di P-o 32, dal quale
derivano direttamente: si menzionano P-o 37, copia ds. e messa a pulito del lavoro di P-o 32, priva
di annotazioni significative, e le c.c. dello stesso P-o 37 (P-o 38, completa; incomplete, perché in
parte riutilizzate per la Efroymson The Decline, P-o 23 - con un solo intervento ms., riportato in
apparato, c. 1 - e P-o 24).
2. L’argomento della lecture
Il mezzo con cui il giudaismo ellenistico persegue competizione e sopravvivenza all’interno
della dominazione culturale prima greca e poi romana viene individuato nello sviluppo di un
complesso sistema educativo, culturale e religioso, improntato alla singolare combinazione di
sinagoga e scuola da cui resta escluso il popolo minuto (‘am-haarez). È nell’ambito di quella che
appare una vera e propria “rivoluzione sinagogale” che emergono come leaders i rabbini. Rimane
incerta, anche presso gli antichi, la loro relazione con saggi, pii, scribi, rispetto ai quali bisogna
tenere conto della comune appartenenza a un più largo contesto socio-economico ellenistico, incline
alla produzione di specialisti (giuristi, accademici, maestri, bibliotecari).
A partire dalle prime notizie sui saggi (Ben Sira) e agli aspetti magico-segreti della loro attività
si segue lo sviluppo della classe rabbinica, sottolineandone tanto il mancato esito nel mandarinato
quanto, in parallelo, l'oscurità dei rapporti con la setta dei farisei. Nel confronto fra scuole
rabbiniche e scuole filosofiche greche emerge, al di là di molte somiglianze, una differenza
fondamentale: mentre le scuole greche restano luoghi di sola trasmissione di sistemi di pensiero, i
1
2
3
4
5
6
NL 1977 II ([Old] Temple).
EL 1978 VI (Decline).
Dalla c.c. di P-o 77 (cc. 20-30 rinum. 5-7, 9-16 in P-o 32).
Dalla xerox di P-o 21 (cc. 1-7 rinum. 17-23 in P-o 32).
Xerox di P-o 12, b. Inoltre, c. 24 ms. orig. [Mom.] che riproduce l'inizio di c. 8 in P-o 21.
Tale costruzione è descritta da Momigliano in una nota su su c. 1 di P-o 16 .
308
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
rabbini diventano guida della nazione, strutturandone la società e riempiendo il vuoto lasciato dalla
distruzione del Tempio. Alla base della loro autorità si pone la Legge. L'organizzazione delle
comunità di cui sono guida, improntate a forme di autogoverno al cui centro si colloca la sinagoga,
rappresenta ciò che unisce Palestina e diaspora. I caratteri di unità della vita ebraica che emergono
dal quadro finiscono per prevalere sull'interpretazione del giudaismo ellenistico come età della
varietà che risale alla presentazione delle sette in Giuseppe.
Nei confronti delle correnti interne al giudaismo, le fonti (Giuseppe, Filone, Plinio) risultano in
realtà di scarso valore documentario e tanto più reticenti quanto più le differenze appaiono radicali.
L’ultimo capitolo proposto, il III, muove dalla questione per affrontare il problema delle
articolazioni interne (Qumran, i Samaritani) e il concetto di eresia o minuth, e si conclude con una
riflessione sulla tolleranza interna che, per mezzo dell’organizzazione delle comunità, consente agli
Ebrei di sopravvivere in un contesto quasi interamente romanizzato.
3. Una lezione dedicata ai rabbi
Già in GRANATA 1999 si rileva come la lezione, mai riproposta da Momigliano dopo Chicago
1977, identifichi nei rabbini un punto di partenza nella difesa contro l’ellenizzazione. Il
ripensamento strutturale del ciclo Efroymson porterà però la riflessione a riorganizzarsi intorno alle
differenti priorità del sistema educativo e del testo sacro, ponendo rabbini (e sinagoga) alla fine,
piuttosto che all’inizio del processo resistenziale. Ne deriva ovviamente la questione, se tale
rielaborazione conduca a una svalutazione del ruolo di rabbini e sinagoga, o se prescinda invece da
giudizi di valore.
Colpisce, in primo luogo, come i materiali utilizzati a Chicago nella trattazione rabbinica
vengano di fatto riproposti per intero nella EL VI (The Defence), finendo anzi per essere accresciuti
da ulteriori considerazioni in coda. Già questo dato rende implausibile l’ipotesi di una svalutazione,
nel testo Efroymson, del ruolo rabbinico; a indebolire ulteriormente l’ipotesi del deprezzamento dei
rabbi può poi contribuire il confronto tra le sezioni CL recuperate in sede EL e quelle abbandonate.
Un primo spunto di riflessione è offerto dalla definizione dei saggi/rabbini e dal problema
dell’indistinzione formale tra categorie. La lezione di Chicago riflette il punto di vista già espresso
in Ebrei e Greci, in cui i saggi erano definiti “quei maestri e studiosi che acquistarono autorità
individualmente o come scuole dal II sec. a.C. alla fine del II secolo d.C.”7, senza preoccupazioni
tassonomiche di sorta rispetto alla qualifica di rabbi. Identica definizione si ritrova in The Rabbis: i
rabbini sono qui considerati “the scholars and academicians at the highest level of Jewish
education” e vengono riconnessi, senza soluzione di continuità, alla descrizione dei saggi in Ben
Sira. Per quanto manchino riprese verbatim, la qualificazione dei rabbini come accademici rimarrà
essenziale a Cincinnati e a Oxford 1982, dove verrà ribadita l’inestricabilità (cc. 11,12,18) – stante
la situazione delle fonti – dei singoli rapporti tra i gruppi8.
La continuità tra saggi e rabbini non va tuttavia intesa come rappporto di identità. Il punto,
esplicitato in The Defence, c. 2 (“Whether we look at Qohelet… or at Ecclesiaticus… or at Daniel
with his group of mashkilim… we find new types of intellectuals among the Jew of the third and
second centuries B.C. They are the predecessors of the rabbis who were slowly to become the
teachers and the religious leaders in the following centuries”), era già comparso in realtà anche a
Chicago nella forma di un rifiuto a proiettare tout court nel II a.C. la figura del rabbi (c. 4). È in
sede EL, del resto, che Momigliano chiarirà come i rabbini divengano personalità riconoscibili nel I
a.C. (c. 19), identificando come fattore di sviluppo fondamentale la distruzione del Tempio e la
conseguente assunzione rabbinica del ruolo di guida della nazione (c. 21). La centralità dell’evento
sarà integrata, all’interno della più articolata e finale formulazione Grinfield, dall’affiancamento di
un’ulteriore data cruciale, il 167; 9 non risultano però in generale cambiamenti di impostazione circa
7
Ebrei e Greci, 542 (=MOMIGLIANO 1976A)
EL Decline, c. 26 = GL Decline c. 20, cfr. GL Sects, c. 13.
9
Cfr. e.g. STERN 1976, 619: "The Sage is the scribe who has been tempered in the crucible of the repressive decrees of
the time of Antiochus". Nella trattazione di Stern, vicina per certi aspetti (in particolare la caratterizzazione sociale) a
8
309
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
il ruolo sociale dei saggi/rabbini o i tempi e i modi in cui acquisirono una funzione centrale nel
preservare l’identità nazionale. L’incertezza sulle origini del loro ruolo, che Momigliano sottolinea
nell’ultima revisione della lezione ponendosi quasi da un punto di vista risultativo (Decline, c. 19),
appare difficilmente distinguibile da quanto giù scritto sui Rabbis a Chicago, al termine della mai
utilizzata introduzione:
In such a world the Jews took the momentuous decision to build up a system of education capable of
competing with Greek education for the specific purpose of justifying the existence of a Jewish nation
with its claim to be the Holy Nation. The new structure had to conform to certain conditions. It had to
be an elaborate education – capable of opposing classical texts to classical texts, institutions to
instituions, moral outlook to moral outlook, historical tradition to historical tradition, and above all
one God to many gods. This the Jews achieved by their unique combination of synagogue and
schooling. […] the positive pole of which was increasingly represented by the rabbis (cc. 2-3)10.
A sostegno della sostanziale continuità tra la lecture CL e le sue successive riprese va infine la
constatazione che le eliminazioni operate nel passaggio da Chicago a Cincinnati offrano un corpus
troppo esiguo per indicare un mutamento radicale. I tagli più estesi, relativi all’introduzione (cc. 14) e al “finale interno” al terzo capitolo (cc. 15-16), risultano una semplice conseguenza della
ricollocazione dei temi all’interno della EL Decline. L’introduzione CL delinea un quadro della
difesa contro l’ellenizzazione che riecheggia la visione di Alien Wisdom, e in cui il richiamo a
Gibbon ha lo scopo di comprendere la disintegrazione delle culture d’Oriente ad opera di Roma: al
di là dell’eliminazione materiale delle pagine, tale ambito complessivo rimarrà sempre un implicito
sfondo di riflessione. Lo stesso può dirsi del finale del terzo capitolo: sul fatto che l’organizzazione
delle comunità costituisca un aspetto specifico della difesa dell’identità ebraica Momigliano non
cambierà mai idea, benché non si ritrovi più, espressa tanto arditamente, un'opzione emulativa nei
confronti del cristianesimo come "religione universale". Altrettanto unica – ma solo per la forma
esplicita qui assunta – appare l'opinione sul sincretismo, definito nell’introduzione "my favourite
synonim for trivialization" (c. 2)
Gli altri tagli, di scarsa estensione (e che per questo non sembrano rispondere a un'esigenza di
brevità11), mirano piuttosto a ritagliare l'ambito di applicazione della definizione sia di rabbi che di
Sage, escludendone personalità e gruppi variamente apparsi in contatto con l'ellenismo e/o di
particolare interesse per i cristiani. Ѐ il caso della qualifica di rabbi riferita a Filone,
dell'identificazione di Sages (la cui fisionomia è peraltro assai discussa12) a Qumran (c. 4), e
plausibilmente del taglio che colpisce la connessione di Ben Sira con i saggi (cc. 4-5) e che più che
all'intento di rispettare il discrimine cronologico del 167 suggerisce la volontà eliminare dalla figura
del saggio ogni sospetto di diretta derivazione scribale (e, in definitiva, greca).
quella momiglianea, è comparativamente maggiore l'accentuazione dell’aspetto ispirato, elettivo (per cui cfr. URBACH
1975), e più stretto il rapporto dei saggi con farisei e scribi.
10
Per ruolo e caratteristiche dei rabbini cfr. anche MOMIGLIANO 1980c (= Ciò che Flavio), e la formulazione dei limits
of Hellenization nella recensione a MEEKS 1983 pubbl. in Ottavo, 399-402 ("The Rabbis, humane and alert as they
were, chose or were driven to create a new Jewish culture, which touched only the fringes of Greek culture", 401). Per
una breve valutazione di quest’ultima questione punto di vista si rimanda a RAJAK 2001, 337.
11
Poco interesse, sul piano dell'impostazione, ha l’eliminazione di un cenno informativo al tempio di Leontopoli e a
quello dei Tobiadi (c. 13), reso superfluo dalla presenza del tema in altre lezioni di Cincinnati e Oxford (part. Jews
Inside, c. 13). Scompaiono alcune osservazioni filologiche e bibliografiche sul farisaismo (c. 3), riassorbite nel quadro
della più estesa trattazione di Cincinnati, e una breve storia rabbinica, gradevole ma scarsamente funzionale. Analoga
considerazione vale per la rimozione dell’allusione alla regola di Hillel che prescrive di non separarsi dalla comunità (in
c. 6; Abot 2, 15): la notissima "regola d'oro" appariva forse come troppo sfruttata e addomesticata ai più vari contesti
per essere proposta al pubblico di Cincinnati.
12
Cfr. la recente disamina in LANGE 2008.
310
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
4. Note sul tema rabbinico in rapporto all'insieme dei cicli
Per ridimensionare l’ipotesi di una polarizzazione tra il culmine di sopravvalutazione del
rabbinato nella fase Chicago e la successiva perdita d’importanza del tema è sufficiente osservare
come, nella più estesa e cronologicamente scandita struttura delle Efroymson, i rabbini trovino una
collocazione altrettanto soddisfacente all’interno di un rafforzamento (e di un affinamento della
trattazione) degli aspetti più unitari e identitari del giudaismo ellenistico. Sarà soltanto con
l’esclusione, a Oxford, di Roma dal focus d’indagine, e con la conseguente selezione cronologica
che ne discende, che il sistema rabbinico resterà al di fuori della prospettiva di indagine.
Il testo di Chicago testimonia una presa di distanza di Momigliano rispetto alla posizione tutto
sommato anodina sulla continuità tra saggi/rabbini e farisei ancora espressa l'anno precedente13,
presa certo da mettere in relazione con l'approfondimento sul tema delle "sette" giudaiche che
avrebbe trovato esito nella discussione del 1982 (GL II - The Jewish Sects in the Sources) e nel suo
proposito di scardinare l’assunto di un rapporto diretto dei rabbini con i farisei, membri del
giudaismo dagli innegabili tratti "ellenizzati" e troppo spesso ritenuti interlocutori privilegiati nel
primo confronto con il cristianesimo14.
Rimane ineludibile la questione posta dal rapporto fra il trattamento del tema dei rabbini e
quello della sinagoga nel succedersi dei cicli. Uno sguardo analitico alla rielaborazione del
materiale conservato mostra come tale rapporto sia caratterizzato da una crescente attenzione nei
confronti dei rabbini da un lato (prima, come si è detto, della definitiva rinuncia a trattare l'età
romana), e da una corrispondente riduzione del tema della sinagoga, passato all’interno delle nuove
lezioni Jews inside e Defence. Si può avanzare l'ipotesi che i due fatti siano solidali, e testimonino
una sorta di tentativo di Momigliano di porsi al livello di self-awareness dei suoi protagonists15,
stante la reticenza degli Ebrei del Secondo Tempio a parlare della sinagoga, percepita come
istituzione provvisoria e ideologicamente poco connotata rispetto all'ideale di unità ebraica che il
Tempio - pur svilito o distrutto - non cesserà di incarnare16. La stessa vaghezza delle fonti sulla
preghiera in sinagoga trova una certa corrispondenza nel rilievo comparativamente scarso (rispetto
allo studio) che la preghiera assume nella trattazione di Momigliano.
13
Ebrei e Greci (= MOMIGLIANO 1976a) 541-542.
Per il farisaismo come fondamento del giudaismo rabbinico cfr. RAJAK 2001, 335-352. La natura del rapporto
farisei/rabbini è oggetto di una viva discussione, anche successiva alla morte di Momigliano, che coinvolge la
valutazione degli aspetti cruciali di legalismo e pietà, ellenizzazione e identità. Si riconoscono, con forte
semplificazione, una linea Neusner-Hengel che mira ad accentuare la continuità, e quella opposta in cui si collocano S.
COHEN 1984, SANDERS 1990, SCHÄFER 1991. Per un precoce tentativo di messa a punto (che rende conto anche del
trattamento del classico e sempre fondamentale Schürer nelle varie edd.), cfr. DE LACEY 1992.
Alla base della discussione si colloca lo studio seminale di BICKERMAN 1952A, che tracciando una linea continua
tra farisei ellenizzati e estensori della "catena tradizionale" della Legge univa direttamente Mosè ai rabbis post-Yavneh,
per il tramite della figura di Antigono di Soko (BICKERMAN 1951B). All’opposto si colloca la prospettiva di
FINKELSTEIN 1950 che individua le origini della catena non nell’ellenismo ma in una riflessione di tipo genealogicosacerdotale, e alle cui conclusioni Momigliano rimane più vicino. Per la centralità della "catena" nella discussione sul
rapporto farisei-rabbini-cristiani cfr. TRAPPER 2003; sul farisaismo come crocevia di dibattito ebraico-cristiano si
rimanda invece a BASSER 2000.
Per una valutazione specifica dei farisei in Giuseppe cfr. invece Rajak, T., Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe vide: Josephus
and the Essenes, in RAJAK 2001, 219-240: è qui riassunto, con presa di distanza, l'approccio tradizionale discendente da
SMITH 1956 e sviluppato da NEUSNER 1972 e S. COHEN 1979, che identifica nella trattazione flaviana dei farisei il
risultato di una proiezione al tempo prebellico delle istanze politico-religiose successive al 90. Per la critica
Momiglianea di Smith, cfr. GL 1982 II, The Jewish Sects, e la collocazione nella linea Bickerman-Hengel in Prologue.
15
Così Momigliano, a proposito dei Romani, in CL 1987 I, The Self-Awareness of the Protagonists (= MOMIGLIANO
1992D)
16
Cfr. COHEN 1999, part. allle pp. 313 (fonti ellenistiche) e 319-20 (rabbiniche).
14
311
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
The Rabbis and the Communities*17
I
I hope that in my previous lecture I made one point clear. Judaism was, no doubt, organized
or reorganized under Persian rule. But when Alexander destroyed the Persian Empire, the Jews both
of Mesopotamia and of Palestine found themselves in a new political, social and linguistic
environment dominated by the exacting and all-pervasive Greek culture. As Isocrates had already
proclaimed in the fourth century B.C., to be a Greek was to be educated in the Greek way. It was
not a simple question of being accepted socially in States ruled by Hellenized Macedonians with the
support of a Greek or Hellenized bureaucracy. It was a question of competing and surviving in a
situation in which Greek education dominated and eliminated opponents 18 . The Jews of
Mesopotamia probably never felt this pressure as much as the Jews of Palestine and of the diaspora.
About 30 B.C. they became again the subjects of an Iranian state, when the Parthians definitely
replaced the Seleucids as rulers of Babylonia. Yet even after 130 B.C. the Jews of Mesopotamia had
to reckon both with the powerful impact of Hellenism on the Parthian themselves and with the need
of keeping in touch with the Jews who lived in Hellenistic territories.
The Roman intervention in the East did not change this basic situation because the Romans
accepted Greek language, administration, law and education as the foundation of their rule in the
Eastern Mediterranean. If anything, the Romans extended the scope and strength of Hellenization.
They were themselves imbued with Greek education, and their upper class for all practical purposes
was bilingual - with Greek as the second language. In their conquests they had purchased enough
Greek educated slaves to ensure that no well-born Roman boy would be deprived of a Greek
pedagogue. [2]
The consequences of this policy of Hellenization, especially when it was supported by the
Romans, became evident everywhere. Local cultures either disappeared or went underground.
Phoenician culture withered away and became the shadow we can contemplate in the fragments of
Philo of Byblos, perhaps of the first century A.D. The most important centre of Phoenician culture,
Carthage, was wiped out by the Romans in 146 B.C. The disappearance of Egyptian culture is a
more difficult problem simply because Orientalists refrain from reading Gibbon's Decline and Fall
and therefore never trouble to describe the disintegration of the cultures to which they have
dedicated their lives. But the outsider cannot help suspecting that the Greeks and Romans managed
to dissolve Egyptian culture, the most tenacious and coherent of all Oriental cultures, through
financial starvation, political humiliation and above all religious trivialization, which is my
favourite synonym for religious syncretism. On the specific Roman side the repression and partial
destruction of Celtic culture from the Atlantic to the Balkans was the continuation of the same
policy. We shall never know what the wisdom of the Druids was - indeed, whether there was any
wisdom in the Druids - because, if any, it was buried by the Romans after having received its
funeral speech from Posidonius.
In such a world the Jews took the momentous decision to build up a system of education capable
of competing with Greek education for the specific purpose of justifyiing the existence of a Jewish
nation with its claim to be the Holy Nation. The new structure had to conform to certain conditions.
It had to be an elaborate education - capable of opposing classical texts to classical texts,
institutions to institutions, moral outlook to moral outlook, historical tradition to historical tradition,
and above all one God to many gods. This the Jews achieved by their unique combination of
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 32, fascicolo derivante dall’unione della sezione finale della NL 1977 II The
Temple (a cui si fa riferimento come P-o 77; per i paralleli con passi della nuova versione della lecture, vale invece il
testo base dell’edizione, P-o 31) e dalla prima parte della NL 1977 III Attitudes. Si propone qui esclusivamente il testo
dei capp. I-III, provenienti da The Temple; per i capp. IV-V si rimanda all’Appendice III, Attitudes. Si riportano infine
in apparato eventuali varianti testuali presenti nelle c.c. di P-o 32 P-o 37 e 23.
18
P-o 23: It was a question ... opponents. -> text of Zeno papyrus, mgsn ms[Mom], del. [cfr. GL 1979 IV - Defence,
cap. II].
312
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
synagogue and schooling which kept a considerable portion of Jewish men involved in the study
and meditation of the Torah from childhood to old age. It was an educational and religious
establishment which could be more easily [3] accessible to foreign proselytes than to rustic or
neglectful19 Jews. Thus the 'am-haarez, the rusticus, became the negative pole of Jewish education,
the positive pole of which was increasingly represented by the rabbis.
This brings us back to the leaders of the Synagogal revolution, the rabbis themselves. The
relation of the rabbis or Sages (hachamim) in various periods to the priests, to the Pharisees, to the
pious (chasidim) and to the scribes (sopherim) was uncertain to the ancients and consequently
remains uncertain to us.20
This is the first reason why the now fashionable attempts to ascribe the rabbis to definite
Jewish sects or social group are founded on very uncertain ground. If we must remain very sceptical
about the modern reconstructions of the history and organization of the sects of Pharisees,
Sadducees and Essenes (I shall give later in this lecture some reasons for the reticence of our
sources about themi), we must be even more sceptical about the attempts to identify the social
position and the ethics of the Pharisees. Meritorious and pioneering as these attempts have been (for
instance in the well known books and articles by Louis Finkelstein, Ellis Rivkin and Jacob
Neusnerii), they cannot be made to agree with the few data of our scattered sources. For instance
Professor Rivkin in his very valuable paper "Defining the Pharisees", Hebrew Union College
Annual 40-41, 1969-1970, 205-249iii, is unable to explain why no passage of the Mishnah identifies
Sages or rabbis with Pharisees, and why this identification is to be found only in one passage of
Tosefta (Yoma 1: 8) and one of the Babylonian Talmud (Nidda 33 b) and goes against several other
Talmudic passages.
There is furthermore a serious argument which discourages any attempt to determine the
physiognomy of the rabbis purely as members of Jewish society. It was Hellenistic society at large
that made it possible for free men and even slaves to specialize in teaching, librarianship,
commentary on texts, erudition and elaboration of philosophical and ethical systems. The Romans
added to these professions a semi-professional class of lawyers - too late [4] certainly to influence
the beginning of the rabbinate, but not too late to present a pretty problem to any scholar who is
prepared to ponder on the simple fact that the compilation of the Mishnah about A.D. 200 coincided
with the classical jurisprudence of Papinian, Ulpian and Paul, whereas the great compilations of the
two Talmuds in Palestine and Babylonia more or less stretched from the compilation of the Codex
Theodosianus of 438 to the Codex Iuris Civilis of 528 circa. In other words, the social conditions
which made it possible for the Jews both to use and support their school-masters, academicians and
codifiers are those of the Hellenistic world at large. After all the Jews lived the normal economic
life of ordinary subjects first of Hellenistic kings and later of Roman emperors. There was no
ghetto, no restriction or specialization of professions to separate them from the Gentiles. The
surplus on which the Jewish schools, academies and libraries were built was part of the general
surplus produced by the Hellenistic-Roman economies. It would be very strange indeed if Sages or
rabbis were confined to one sect or one social stratum alone. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
has proved that the Qumran sectarians had their own legal authorities - probably those who made up
"the session on the many" (moshab ha-rabbim); and we always knew that Philo was a rabbi in his
own way.
II21
It is therefore wiser to confine ourselves to asking what the rabbis - that is, the scholars and
academicians at the highest level of Jewish education - looked like. Ben Sira was the first to
19
20
21
P-o 32: negletful <-> negligent, msb[AMM].
P-o 32: This brings us back to the leaders ... to us: verbatim dal cap. II di NL 1977 II - Temple (P-o 77, c. 19).
P-o 32: num. II, interl.msb[Mom].
313
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
describe the sages22. According to him, they gave their mind to the Law of the Most High, they
sought out the wisdom of the ancients and were occupied in prophecies; they served among great
men and appeared before princes (39, 1-5). Ben Sira was himself one of them. Another of them,
who lived more or less at the same time about 200 B.C., indicated their central position in society:
"Let your house be a house of meeting for the sages, sit at their feet as their pupils and drink in their
words with thirst" (Abot 1, 4). Mystical journeys to [5] Heaven, miracles and prophecies were not
impossible for them. Some had secret doctrines for their pupils. They lived in a society where magic
was rampant. One would like to know more about this aspect of their activities, and also whether
one is justified in sensing that there was more of it in Babylonia after A.D. 200 than in Palestine in
previous centuries.
The following story is famous but bears repetition. Two rabbis of the early fourth century feasted
together at Purim. They got drunk, Rabbah rose and cut R. Zera's throat. The next day Rabbah
prayed and resurrected R. Zera. The following year he asked R. Zera: "Will your honour come and
feast with me?". R. Zera answered: "A miracle does not always happen" (<B>23. Meg. 7 b; J.
Neusner, There we sat down, 1972iv, 84). In Palestine the rabbinic rain-makers were perhaps fewer,
the situation less humorous. Honi 'the circle-maker', a learned and celebrated rain-maker of the first
century B.C. (M. Ta'anit 3, 8), was stoned to death when he refused to curse one of the factions in
conflict and prayed: "Master of the Universe, these men are thy people" (Jos. Ant. Jud. 14, 24). In
any case, just as they avoided becoming mandarins, so the rabbis as a class avoided becoming
medicine men. Their concern was rather with holiness. They were not ascetic, but greatly aware of
sin and perdition. They cared about ritual purity and respected Temple and priesthood. When the
Temple was destroyed they made what to us may appear a pathetic effort to preserve and develop
Temple regulations with a view to its restoration. For all practical purposes they took the place of
the priests as the highest religious authorities and took it upon themselves to decide in controversies
about sacred law. They turned themselves into judges in private litigation between Jews. They were
brutally sincere about their superiority over the individual priests. They came to conceive of
themselves as depositories of the Oral Law which integrated the Written Law of the Pentateuch.
They understood oral Law as law given together with the written Law to Moses on Mount Sinai, but
transmitted from generation to generation until it reached the Sages themselves. This is the doctrine
[6] of Oral Law that made it increasingly difficult for Sadducees to join the Sages, as the Sadducees
treated additions to the Mosaic law as post-Mosaic and collected them in a written Book of
Ordinances which became a bone of contention between Sadducees and Sages (Megillat Ta’anit 4,
1, and its commentary). Yet it was a basic principle of the Sages not to set themselves apart from
the nationv. How they organized themselves and managed to live before the first century B.C. is
unknown.
The relation, if any, between the Sages and the so-called confraternities of Pharisees is equally
obscure: indeed the very nature of the Pharisaic confraternities (haburoth), which (as already
hinted) seem to have been modeled on Greek eranoi (friendly societies) for communal meals and
funerals, is far from being clear.
In the late first century B.C. Hillel and Shammai organized their “houses” on the lines of Greek
philosophic schools. Like Greek philosophic schools they sought and obtained influence and
clienteles. Some public remuneration is documented. Inherited wealth helped, but some Sages, as I
saidvi, were proletarians who supported themselves by work. Direct payment by adult students to
teachers does not seem to have been usual or respectable; but there were good people who
maintained both a Sage and his pupils, though the story of Gen. R. 72, 5 on Zebulun the trader and
Isachar the scholar is not to be taken literally. There was formal ordination of rabbis by imposition
of hands. At first the teacher ordained his best pupils; but when Rabbi Akiba died, another rabbi
ordained his pupils. The earliest evidence about ordination is analogical: it is in the Acts of the
Apostlesvii. The main material for our picture naturally comes from Palestine and Babylonia, where
22
23
P-o 32, 23, 37: the Sages; P-o 77: them.
B[abylonian Talmud] <-> P-o 32, 37: C.
314
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
the most prestigious rabbinic academies had their residences, but rabbis existed elsewhere. About
A.D. 95-96 a delegation of scholars from Palestine found in Rome a religious leader, Theudas
(Thaddeus), whom they considered not very learned, but respected as a man. They are said to have
sent him a message: “If you were not Theudas we would excommunicate you” (B. Pesahim 53 b;
[7] Midr. Tehillim 28). Later in the second century A.D. an academy led by a Palestinian rabbi of
repute, Mattia ben Cheresh (B. Sanh. 32 b), existed in Rome.24
[7a]25 Thanks to the exemplary work by Harold Cherniss on the Early Academy (Berkeley
1945)viii and John Patrick Lynch on Aristotle’s School (Berkeley 1972)ix and to other research, we
are now in a better position to compare the rabbinic schools with the Greek institutions of higher
learning than we could have done forty years ago. The illusion that Greek philosophic schools were
universities in the modern sense has disappeared; what remains is the image of private institutions,
the continuity of which was essentially founded on the appointment of a successor either by the
incumbent head of the school or (perhaps less frequently) by the surviving teachers of the school.
Some estate was tied to the school, but how the estate was transmitted through generations is not
always clear: in some cases it is certain that the head of the school directly inherited it from his
predecessor (which was easy if he had been designated by his predecessor). Public places (such as
the Academy, the Lycaeum and the Stoa Poikile in Athens) were used by the schools together with,
or in substitution of, private buildings. Each school was associated with some religious symbols and
had communal meals: in the case of the Epicureans there was even some worship of the founder
Epicurus. But there is no evidence that the school as such was a religious association or thiasos. The
only learned institution which had real religious status was the Museum of Alexandria which was in
the charge of a priest appointed by the king (Strabo, 17, 794 c), but we are not entitled to
extrapolate from this case: the Museum of Alexandria was chiefly a library, and libraries often were
religious institutions in the Near East. Either fees (e.g. Diog. Laert. 4, 12) or gifts (Plato, Ep. 13) or
both helped the school, but teachers contributed from their wealth, if any. The schools lasted for
centuries, but while there is evidence that Stoics and Epicureans continued to flourish in the first
and second centuries A.D., the continuity of the Academy and of the Peripatos, that is, of the
Platonic [8] and of the Aristotelian schools, seems to have been interrupted for a couple of centuries
(cf. Seneca, Nat. Quaest. 7, 32, 2, Diog. Laert. 10, 9; Acta Apost. 17). Nor is it certain that the
establishment of four endowed chairs of philosophy in Athens for the four main philosophic
doctrines by Marcus Aurelius (Philostr., Vit. Sophist. 2, 2, p. 566x; cf. Dio Cass. 72, 31, 3) means
that all schools went back to full activity. The neo-Platonics who felt persecuted by Justinian and
left Athens in 532 A.D. (Agathias II, 30) were probably the continuators of a fifth-century revival
rather than the direct heirs of Plato. On the other hand it is clear that the teaching of the doctrines of
the main philosophic sects existed outside Athens; there were Platonists in Syria, Aristotelians in
Alexandria, Stoics at Rhodes, Epicureans at Naples in various times and circumstances. Mobility of
schools was as characteristic among Greeks as among Jews.
There are indeed so many obvious similarities and differences between Jewish rabbis and Greek
philosophers that it would be a waste of time to dwell on each of them. But it is perhaps where the
similarity is greatest that the difference become more conspicuous. Both Jewish rabbis and Greek
philosophers had political ambitions. Greek philosophers tries several times to run individual cities
or to act as advisers to sovereigns. They occasionally succeeded for a longer or shorter period. Plato
in Sicily and the Pythagoreans in Southern Italy are the most obvious examples; it is not by chance
that in both places the Greeks were a colonial minority. But unlike the Jewish rabbis the Greek
philosophers never succeeded in establishing themselves permanently as the leaders of their nation
and in impressing their own thought on the social organization of the Greeks at large. It is arguable
that the Jewish rabbis would not have succeeded but for the destruction of the Temple. Some real
political life was left to the Greeks by the Romans, whereas after A.D. 70 none was left to the Jews
24
P-o 32: existed in Rome. Interl.ms[AMM] con segr: Insertion. Insert here handwritten pp.7a and 8.
P-o 32: cc. 7a-8 mss.[Mom] = P-o 12, 22bis-ter; tsf7a: p. 22, second lecture, now third lecture: put this, 22bis-22ter
between first and second paragraph "Existed in Rome. There was indeed", ms[Mom].
25
315
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
qua Jews. Whatever the explanation, the difference remains. The Greek philosophic schools were
fundamentally isolated institutions in the middle [9] of Greek society and transmitted themselves to
posterity as systems of thought. The rabbinic schools shaped the conduct of the surrounding society
and transmitted themselves to posterity both as a way of thinking and as a way of ordinary life for a
nation – which means that their sphere of action extended to the whole of the Jewish communities.26
There were indeed customary ties between diaspora and Palestine, such as the pilgrimages to
Jerusalem and the annual contribution to the Temple which were collected among the diaspora
Jews. Philo mentions the dispatch of first fruits and tithes from Alexandria (Leg. F. 78; Spec. Leg. I
153-5; cf. Joseph. Ant. Jud. 14, 9, 21). But the basic connection was the organization of the Jewish
communities. Notwithstanding the variety of states and political regimes in which the Jews lived
there remained enough uniformity in Jewish institutions to ensure conformity of thought and
similarity of achievements. The synagogue became the centre of communal life everywhere outside
Jerusalem, even in Judaea. The leaders of the synagogue were recognized as communal leaders. The
Greek, the Parthian and the Roman authorities accepted, either officially by charter or unofficially
by custom, the existence of some measure of Jewish self-government. It was taken for granted that
controversies between Jews would be settled according to Jewish law either by local courts or by
local arbitrators. In difficult cases the local Jewish administrators would turn for advice either to
better provided communities or to rabbis of recognized authority. The Talmud recalls the advice
asked by the Alexandrian Jews of Joshua ben Chaninah, a Palestinian teacher of the second century
A.D. (Nidd. 69 b). Philo himself wrote extensively on legal problems arising from Mosaic texts. In
the last century Heinrich Graetz thought that Philo might reflect in his De specialibus legibus the
regulations of the dissident temple of Onias in Egypt (Gesch. der Juden, ed. 1905, II, 29 ff.xi). More
recently E. R. Goodenough tried to prove that Philo, who was after all a communal leader of
Alexandrian Jewry, wrote to guide the local courts of his native cityxii. There is no evidence [10] for
either theory. Philo may well have done nothing more than expound Mosaic Law to the best of his
own reflections. What remains important is that Philo could not avoid interpreting Jewish Law.
Whether he did so to offer a Jewish counterpart to Plato’s law or an Alexandrian counterpart to the
contemporary rabbinic legal exegesis (Halacha) of Jerusalem or Babylonia does not alter the basic
fact that any serious involvement in Jewish religion implied involvement in details of Jewish Law.
Philo warned his fellow allegorists that allegorical interpretation of the Law was not to be construed
as an excuse for not observing it (Migr. Abrah. 88).
The rebels of the Qumran were of the same opinion. They fought against the priests of
Jerusalem, but they stuck to Jewish Law more or less in the form which was current in their time.
This was recognized by the great Louis Ginzberg when the only document of their sect was still the
so-called Zadokite text found in the repository of the synagogue of Old Cairo at the end of the last
century (Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte, 1922xiii). The documents found in the caves near the Wadi
Qumran in the neighbourhood of the Dead Sea since 1947 have confirmed this attitude of the
sectarian followers of the Teacher of Righteousness. One of the great merits of the admirable
Qumran Studies by Chaim Rabinxiv is to have emphasised the legalism of the sectarians, though it
would be difficult to follow Rabin in his inference that the sectarians were Pharisees in retreat.
The Hellenistic age of Judaism has often been defined as the age of variety. The interpretation
goes back to Flavius Josephus who tried to present to a pagan audience the Jewish sects of
Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Variety has indeed to be emphasised. But before we emphasise
it, let us be clear that what is remarkable is the relative uniformity of Jewish life. The spreading of
the Jews along the Mediterranean coasts and in the Middle East had been due to the most diverse
circumstances, from military settlement to deportation, from trade to slavery. What kept all [11]
these people together was a common law which basically resulted from the rabbinic interpretation
of Mosaic Law. If Homer, the Delphic Oracle, the Olympic games and the philosophers kept the
26
P-o 32: [Continue with § beginning "There were indeed..." on p. 7], mgsnmsr[AMM].
316
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
Greeks together, Moses, the Jerusalem Temple, the Synagogue and the rabbis kept the Jews
together.
III
As for the variety of Jewish sects and practices in the Hellenistic age, I shall only indicate one
point of view: the extraordinary restraint and brevity of our sources about conflicts and
disagreements within Judaism. Flavius Josephus is our only systematic informant about the three
sects of Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and he is very brief. On John the Baptist and Jesus he is
even more laconic; and there are later interpolations in his text. Philo has nothing about Sadducees
and Pharisees, but much about Essenes and a great deal about the Therapeutae of Egypt on whom
he is our only source. Essenes and Therapeutae were for Philo the representatives of two different
religious attitudes, one ascetic, the other contemplative. He may have invented the Therapeutae in
order to describe his ideal of monastic contemplation. More probably the Therapeutae were a shortlived community inspired by Philo or by somebody like Philo. After all, according to the Karaite alqirqisani, in the tenth century the sect of the Magharians used a work by the “Alexandrian” who
must be Philo (N. Golb, JAOS, 80, 1960, 348xv).
The Qumran community seems to have remained unknown to all the ancient sources. It is now
fashionable to treat the Qumran brethren as Essenes, because Pliny the Elder placed the Essenes
near the Dead Sea, were the residence of the new sect was found (N.H. 5, 15, 73). But neither Philo
nor Josephus connect the Essenes with the Teacher of Righteousness who looms large in the
Qumran texts. Nowhere is it said that the Essenes lived – as the Qumran brethren undoubtedly lived
– in the expectation of an imminent Messianic age. Prudent scholars must therefore conclude that
the identification of Essenes and Qumran is far from proved. The silence of ancient sources about
Qumran remains striking. [12]
Even more striking is the reticence of rabbinic sources about the Pharisees. If many modern
scholars are convinced that the Pharisees by their insistence on Oral Law created rabbinic – that is,
Talmudic – Judaism, the rabbis who put together what makes up the Talmud are not conscious of
this filiation, and mix praise and blame in the rare cases in which they mention the Pharisees. The
Mishnah attributes to Rabbi Joshua of the first century A.D. the following saying: "A foolish Saint
(hasid), a cunning wicked man, a woman who is a Pharisee and the self-inflicted wounds of those
who are Pharisees, these wear out the world" (Sotah 3, 4). Pharisaic men and women are here
treated as severely as in the contemporary Gospels by a rabbi who is supposed to have been one of
them. I have no solution for what somebody called the Pharisaic riddle.
I do not know of any certain reference either to Jesus or to Christianity in rabbinic texts of the
period when Christianity could still be treated as a deviant form of Judaism. The Mishnah, which
was put together about A.D. 200, is silent about Jesus. Its only likely allusion to Christianity – the
prophecy that the kingdom (of Rome) will fall to heretics (leminuth) in the treatise Sotah 9, 15 –
must be an interpolation later than the conversion of Constantine (J. S. Lauterbach, Rabbinic
Essays, 553). Later Talmudic references, even if authentically going back to rabbis of the first
century, are less relevant to us, inserted as they are in a situation in which Christianity had ceased to
be an internal Jewish problem. Even so, the allusions are remarkably few.
Before Christianity the Samaritans had been the greatest scandal within Judaism. They
considered themselves Jews, they were Jews. They had a text of the Pentateuch which was
essentially identical with that preserved in Jerusalem. Jews and Samaritans had parted company in
circumstances which nobody in Antiquity knew exactly and nobody in modern times has been able
to clarify convincingly. The account of Josephusxvi [13] combined events of the time of Nehemiah
in the fifth century B.C. with events under Sanballath whom we know from recently discovered
texts to have governed in Samaria in the fourth century B.C. “The foolish nation that dwelleth in
Shechem”, as Ecclesiasticus called the Samaritans (1, 25), is treated with altogether remarkable
317
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
restraint in rabbinic texts. The brief Talmudic treatise Kuthim, of uncertain date but with old
material, concludes with the words: “The Samaritans in some of their ways resemble the Gentiles
and in some resemble Israel, but in the majority they resemble Israel”.
As a whole the evidence about Jewish sects in Jewish texts – either Hebrew or Aramaic or
Greek – carries with it an unmistakable indication. The more dangerous and radical the differences
were, the less likely our authorities are to speak about them. The Essenes who were the least
dangerous are the most spoken about. Qumran recusants and Christians are not mentioned or
mentioned sparingly. The Sadducees, who as conservative defenders of the primacy of the Temple
cult and of the literal application of the Mosaic law lost to the Pharisees, play a minimum role in the
tradition. Even the Pharisees, who with their doctrines on the Oral Law, the immortality of the Soul
and the subordinate importance of the Temple sacrifice had a special right to attention, are relatively
seldom allowed to appear and are treated with detachment. Not even Josephus, a declared Pharisee,
identifies himself with them. The most defiant profession of Pharisaism comes from St. Paulxvii .
This attitude can be observed in other respects of Jewish life and may help us to understand the
Jewish-Hellenistic attitude toward recent history. Even in the Hellenistic age the Temple of
Jerusalem had not been alone in receiving the sacrificial worship of the Jews, as required by a
doctrine which had become official in the late seventh century B.C. In the second century B.C. a
dissident priestly group migrated from Jerusalem to Egypt [14] and there founded a temple which
required daily sacrifices like the Temple of Jerusalem. Memories of an older Jewish temple in
Egypt during the Persian period helped to create an establishment which received some support
from the Ptolemies and played a part in their dynastic conflicts. At the gates of Judaea in Ammanitis
the powerful family of the Tobiads kept going another temple of their own, while preserving
religious prestige and financial influence in Jerusalem. The Jewish tradition, as far as I know,
forgot about the temple of the Tobiads, the main evidence for which is archaeological; and speaks
very little – and never bitterly – about the Egyptian temple.
Even more curious is the attitude to individuals suspected or convicted of heresy. Heresy
(minuth) is a concept which must have been formalized in Judaea in the first century A.D. A prayer
against the minim, heretics, or rather a brief formula of a prayer, was introduced into Jewish liturgy
at the end of the first century A.D. Some practice of ban or excommunication developed with it.
Rabbis who disagreed with majority decisions about ritual law in academies were in danger of
being banned by their fellow-academicians. It is not difficult to visualize the historical situation
which led to this closing of the ranks. The more remarkable is rabbinic mildness and even the
sympathy towards individuals tainted with heresy. Eliezer ben Hyrcanos, the teacher of Rabbi
Akiba, was both accused of heresy – that is, probably of Christian sympathies – before a Roman
tribunal and excommunicated by his fellow-rabbis (J. Neusner, Eliezer ben Hyrcanos, I, 1973, 401
and 423xviii ). He remained in the tradition as one of the most honoured rabbis. Tradition shows him
dying on Sabbath eve surrounded by his pupils, as a Sage should die. Elishah ben Abuyah, the pupil
of Rabbi Akiba and the master of Rabbi Meir, did not get off so easily. He remained in the tradition
as the prototype of the Sage who passed to the other side: he was called Aher, the other. All sorts of
nasty things were reported about him, from violation of the Sabbath to collaboration with the
Romans. [15] This was the time of Hadrian, and ben Abuyah’s master, Akiba, had died a martyr’s
death. Yet Elishah ben Abuyah is not damned. Tradition, paradoxically, is rather in sympathy with
him. It preserves and canonizes some of his aphorisms. It registers the devotion of his pupil Meir
who went on discussing the Torah with him and expressed, after the death without repentance of his
master, the certainty that he had been saved. According to one of the Talmudic legends on the
subject Meir spread his mantle over his master’s grave and reassured his soul: “Rest here in the
night; in the dawn of happiness the God of mercy will deliver thee; if not, I will be thy redeemer”
(B. Hag. 15 a). The daring reference to the words of Boas in the Book of Ruth (3, 13) is explicit in
the text. The figure of Elishah ben Abuyah who tried everything – mystical experience, Greek songs
and low forms of prevarication (Y. Meg. 1, 9; B. Hag. 16 b, etc.) – remained the ambiguous symbol
318
Appendice II
The Rabbis and the Communities (CL 1977 III)
of the attraction of the “other” – the classical world of the Greeks and Romans. He was not denied
the hope of resurrection with the Just.
Playing down differences and keeping endless discussion going between the disagreeing
branches of Judaism was perhaps not less important than the reorganization of communal life in
helping to maintain some sort of unity and consequently surviving against overwhelming odds.
What in about 300 B.C. was still a tribal religion appealing from Jerusalem to Semitic
speakers had become two centuries later a potentially universal religion spreading from Parthia to
Italy and Northern Africa. Greek had become almost as important a language as Hebrew or
Aramaic. The followers of this religion had already faced the Samaritan schism and the attempt by
Antiochus IV to transform the Temple of Jerusalem into an acceptable syncretistic temple. They
were soon to realize that they had won bloody wars against the Greeks only to be conquered by the
Romans. They also had to learn - as the Gauls, the Spaniards, the Britons and the Greeks learnt that rebellions against the Roman government never succeeded, whatever the [16] initial success of
the rebels might be. There could be no illusion of easy confrontation. If the Jews managed among
defeats and humiliations to remain themselves (whereas the Celts of Spain, Gaul and Britain and the
Phoenicians of Africa lost their identity for centuries), they did so through the combination of
communal organization and relative internal toleration. Christianity gave back an element of
national pride and linguistic autonomy to Celts, Egyptians, Syrians, Armenians and - in a different
way - to Latinized Africans and even to Greeks. One of the many reasons why the Jews remained
outside Christianity is that they had saved themselves from Romanization much earlier - at what
price, I need not repeat.27
i
Cfr. part. alla c. 13.
Per una nota di aggiornamento sul tema, a distanza di qualche anno, cfr. GL 1982 II (The Jewish Sects), c. 5, dove
Momigliano rinvia alla bibliografia "recent and excellent ... provided in the new revised Schürer, The History of the
Jewish People, Vol. II [...] 1979", e la integra con pubblicazioni successive: RIVKIN 1978 ("mainly on the Pharisees");
NEUSNER 1981; NICKELSBURG 1981; SANDERS 1981 ("which contains much of interest").
iii
RIVKIN 1969-70.
iv
NEUSNER 1972.
v
Una delle "regole di Hillel", cfr. Abot 2, 15.
vi
CL 1977 II (Temple) c. 27. La formulazione "as I said" sembrerebbe tuttavia alludere a una notizia appena
menzionata, piuttosto che espressa in una precedente occasione. Ѐ forse una formulazione residuale della versione
Northcliffe, in cui il rimando era effettivamente presente all’interno della stessa lezione.
vii
Atti 6: 6.
viii
CHERNISS 1945.
ix
LYNCH 1972.
x
Philostratus and Eunapius, The Lives of the Sophists, with an Engl. transl. by W. C. Wright, LondonCambrdige(Mass) 1952.
xi
GRAETZ 1807-1911. Vol. III; t. 2.: Geschichte der Judäer von dem Tode Juda Makkabis bis zum Untergange des
judäischen Staates, 5. verb. und verm. Aufl. bearb. von M. Brann, Leipzig 1905.
xii
Cfr. part. GOODENOUGH 1926; ID. 1929; ID. 1938.
xiii
GINZBERG 1922.
xiv
RABIN 1957.
xv
GOLB 1960.
xvi
In Ant. XI.
xvii
Atti 23: 6.
xviii
NEUSNER 1973B.
ii
27
Seguono i cap. IV-V, su cc.17-24. Per questa sequenza non riprodotta qui, cfr. Appendice III, Attitudes.
319
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and
Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
Sedi e date
NL 1977 III (27 gennaio, cfr. D-a 1)
Documenti
a) NL 1977 III
P-o 19 ms.
P-o 83 top c. di P-o 19.
P-o 1, P-o 167: xerox di P-o 83.
P-o 161 nuova versione ds. basata su P-o 83.
P-o 20, P-o 21 (a): c.c. di P-o 161.
P- o 22, P-o 33 (b), P-o 32 (c): xerox di P-o 21 (a)
b) aggiunte (probl. Per CL 1977 IV)
P-o 21 (b) ms.
P-o 33 (a) xerox di P-o 21 (b).
1. Il testo proposto e i documenti collazionati
La NL 1977 III Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past è il frutto di un intenso lavoro,
terminato a fine novembre 19761 nella consapevolezza di avere "ancora molto da fare sul senso
storico del giudaismo ellenistico"2. La lezione documenta l'iniziale strutturarsi in un'unica sequenza
di due grandi nuclei argomentativi (rispettivamente incentrati sul tema resistenziale e su quello
storiografico) destinati a trovare, nei cicli successivi, articolazioni e collocazioni differenti.
P-o 21, il documento su cui si basa il testo presentato in questa appendice, testimonia anche la
prima rielaborazione subita da Attitudes in vista del ciclo di Chicago, nel quale le 7 carte iniziali
passano alla chiusura della lezione sui Rabbis (per diventare successivamente parte della EL The
Defence, cfr. Appendice II, p. 308 n. 4), mentre le cc. da 8 a 29 diventano, con qualche incremento,
la prima versione della nuova lezione Jews and Gentiles. La ridistribuzione non ha, naturalmente,
carattere definitivo: la versione di Jews and Gentiles proposta a Chicago subirà ulteriori aggiunte e
sottrazioni di materiali (tendenzialmente a favore della nuova lezione The Defence) in occasione del
ciclo Efroymson prima e di quello Grinfield poi3.
P-o 21 si presenta come copia xerox del fascicolo P-o 161 (nuova versione ds. di Attitudes,
frutto di rielaborazione e revisione di un primo testo rappresentato a sua volta dal ms. P-o 19 e dal
ds. che lo riproduce, P-o 83). Un’annotazione ms. di AMM sulla c. 1 prova la natura di reading
copy di P-o 21, mentre è lo stesso Momigliano (ms. ibid.) a identificare il fascicolo come "the more
accurate description of the third lecture". Benché non sia chiaro a quale "third lecture" la
valutazione faccia riferimento (se alla NL III, Attitudes, o alla CL III, Rabbis, posto come
annotazioni sul documento provino il suo riutilizzo come reading copy a Chicago), si ha comunque
la certezza che il testo che offre sia quello sottoposto alla revisione più recente. Resta difficile
decidere se i molti interventi mss. riportati dall’autore, con penne e grafie diverse, risalgano
all'ultima revisione della Northcliffe o alla rielaborazione in vista delle nuove lezioni di Chicago (si
possono attribuire con certezza alla seconda fase solo gli addenda su cc. mss.); è infine possibile
che P-o 21 sia stato effettivamente ripreso in mano (invece forse insieme al testo EL 1978) per
l'ultima versione di Jews and Gentiles (GL 1982), in quanto si conserva nel documento una scheda
bibliografica compilata post 19804.
1
Lettera 30.11.76.
Lettera 23.11.76.
3
Cfr. Introduzione a GL 1982 I, supra, pp. 222-25.
4
F. ms[Mom], in P-o 21: John Collins, Structure and Meaning in the Testament of Job, SBL/ASP-Abstr. Seminars
Papers (1974), I, 35-52; M. Delcor, Le Testament d'Abraham, Leiden Brill 1973; M. De Jonge, The Testament of the XII
2
320
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
La divisione in capitoli, rimasta incoerente dopo i diversi rimaneggiamenti, non è stata corretta
per l’edizione: si restituisce qui la sequenza numerica originaria, affiancata da quella - ricostruita di Jews and Gentiles, a partire dal punto in cui la nuova lezione inizia.
2. Argomento di NL Attitudes (= CL Jews and Gentiles, capp. III ss.)
Il breve capitolo introduttivo (= CL Rabbis I -> EL/GL Defence II-III) ha per temi il
bilinguismo degli uomini di primo millennio – con la patente eccezione dei greci – e la separazione
linguistica che intercorre tra gli Ebrei in età ellenistica, fronteggiata grazie a rinnovate strategie di
comunicazione interna.
L'unità degli Ebrei (= CL Rabbis I-II -> EL/GL Defence IV), al di là delle barriere di lingua, è
mantenuta attraverso un sistema di interpretazioni/traduzioni della Bibba (Targumim, Settanta) e di
compilazione di libri festali. Vale un’osservazione generale: se le forme di bilinguismo ebraico di
età ellenistica non risultano sovrapponibili a quelle degli Ebrei italiani medievali e moderni,
l’attività di mediazione esercitata dal bilinguismo greco/ebraico della Palestina ellenistica ostacola
una netta separazione fra parlanti aramaico/ebraico da un lato, e parlanti solo greco dall'altro.
La tesi (= CL Jews and Gentiles II -> EL/ GL Defence VII) di una grecizzazione pervasiva,
ma non profonda, viene articolata nel cap. III attraverso due esempi: le complesse implicazioni
filosofiche di nomos e dabar in Filone e l’analisi del singolare impasto stilistico e tematico del libro
della Sapienza.
Segue un capitolo incentrato sulle aree di contatto fra Ebrei e Greci (cc. 12-17) che nei cicli
posteriori EL e GL sarà ripartito, in proporzioni disuguali, fra Jews and Gentiles e The Defence.
Confluiscono nella prima lecture (cap. III) le considerazioni relative all’area religiosa e artistica e
all’autoconsapevolezza, identitaria e non cosmopolita, degli Ebrei che scrivono in greco. In The
Defence (cap. V) vengono invece collocati i raffronti fra middot e retorica greca, così come fra
scuole rabbiniche e filosofiche.
Passano in Jews and Gentiles EL/GL (capp. II-III) gli argomenti trattati nel cap. V a
dimostrazione della povertà di comunicazione tra Greci ed Ebrei: la scarsa conoscenza della Bibbia,
da parte pagana, cui risponde l’ignoranza della filosofia greca da parte ebraica; la conseguente
valutazione del pensiero di Filone, i cui nuclei vengono individuati nel tentativo di conciliare
filosofia e rivelazione e nella preferenza accordata alla sapienza e alla mistica.
Il breve capitolo VI (= CL Jews and Gentiles V -> EL/GL Jews and Gentiles III), distaccato
dal precedente con un intervento successivo alla stesura, prende in considerazione i limiti
dell'importanza del proselitismo, non originato dal contatto con la Bibbia quanto piuttosto dall’idea
di divino e dalla ritualità, com l’eccezione dell’unico testo che sembra essere stato scritto per
proseliti, il Testamento di Giobbe.
Considerata unica reale area di comunicazione, la storiografia ebraica – e samaritana – in lingua
greca rientra nel più vasto quadro della produzione ellenistica (= CL Jews and Gentiles VI -> Jews
and Gentiles IV-VII); interpolazioni, ricorso a documenti templari, dibattito sull'antichità sono i
temi affrontati nell’ultimo capitolo. Fra gli autori, vengono ricordati Demetrio, Eupolemo,
Artapano, Cleodemo Malco, e naturalmente Giuseppe e Alessandro Poliistore, che condividono la
destinazione romana della propria opera e la sua preservazione in ambiente cristiano.
3. Le prime strutture espositive del rapporto Ebrei-gentili: alcune riflessioni non recuperate.
Nel passaggio dal ciclo Northcliffe a quello di Chicago si apprezza la nuova autonomia che
caratterizza il tema del rapporto fra Ebrei e gentili, cui sembra far riscontro lo sviluppo successivo
della riflessione sulle Visions of the past nella foma di un rinnovato nucleo di indagine imperniato
sulla questione storiografica. Di un certo rilievo – benché presente solo in questo testo - è anche la
Patriarchs, 1953; Id., Studies in the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, Leiden Brill 1975; J. Becker, Untersuchungen
zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen, Leiden Brill 1970; DeJonge, The Testament etc. in
Aufstieg und Niedergang; Ideal Figures in Ancient Judaism: Profiles and Figures [ma: Paradigms], Scholars Press
1980.
321
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
pagina sul ricorso ai termini nomos e logos in Filone (cap. III): se la riflessione sulle prerogative
linguistiche e stilistiche del libro della Sapienza, affrontata nello stesso capitolo, verrà ripresa in the
Defence, la discussione sulla terminologia filosofica di Filone sarà definitivamente accantonata. È
possibile in tal senso che nel progetto del primo ciclo Filone fosse un personaggio più presente di
quanto non appaia nelle successive rivisitazioni dei testi5. Di rilievo appare anche la presentazione
(forse la più chiara tra quelle formulate da Momigliano) del problema del rapporto
sinagoga/storia/apocalisse, presente in coda al cap. VII con la proposta di un’indagine fondata su
due proposizioni che si escludono a vicenda: 1. “if you start from the synagogue, you will rather
end in apocalypse than in history”; 2. “the synagogue was meant to save the Jews both from
apocalypse and from history”.
Sul piano dell'impostazione generale si osserva la tendenza, nella serie Northcliffe prima e in
quella di Chicago poi, a una considerazione unitaria degli aspetti di civilizzazione del "GrecoRoman world" di cui la stessa denominazione rappresenta una spia; non pare infatti casuale che, nei
cicli più recenti, il nesso "Greco-Roman" veda una frequenza sempre minore e un ricorso selettivo –
piuttosto raro – all’interno di espressioni dalla valenza delimitata (e.g., greco-roman "audience",
"rethoric", "historiography"). L'impressione complessiva di un incremento nella selettività delle
definizioni e di un'evidente istanza di approfondimento e precisazione trova riscontro in un ulteriore
dettaglio terminologico: se a Chicago i "maestri" vengono ancora chiamati “rabbis”, nei cicli
successivi Momigliano recupererà (anche verbatim) brani testuali che ad essi si riferiscono
ricorrendo per i più antichi fra loro alla denominazione di "Sages"6.
5
Cfr. lettera 10.10.76: “Sto cercando adesso di mettere insieme la parte su Filone delle mie Northcliffe Lectures e
leggo in argomento”.
6
Cfr., in proposito, GL 1982 III - Decline, cap. VIII.
322
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past*7
<I>
As I have implied, one of the most important aspects of the Jewish cultural situation was the
linguistic one8. Educated men of the first millennium B.C. were normally bilingual. Bilingualism
had profound roots in Mesopotamia where Sumerian as a literary language accompanied Akkadian
through the ages. The Persian Empire made Aramaic almost compulsory as the language of
administration. Even Egypt was affected by it. The Jews increasingly used Aramaic instead of
Hebrew in ordinary speech. They passed from Hebrew to Aramaic in the same book of the Bible
without giving much attention to the fact. In the Western Mediterranean it was Greek that provided
Carthaginians, Etruscans, Romans and, to a certain extent, Celts with a second language. But the
Greeks themselves were, as we all know, the great exception. They remained almost
uncompromisingly monolingual. Those who had to learn a second language, like Democedes and
Ctesias, both doctors to Persian kings9, concealed the fact. Themistocles, who promised to spend a
year learning Persian, remains so far the only known exception to the great exception. It was as a
consequence of living among Greeks that certain Jews were reduced to monolingualism. If there is a
sign of Philo’s really having absorbed Greek culture, it is that he was stupendously ignorant of
Hebrew. Some kind scholars have tried to help him out of his Greek monolingualism – an
embarrassment to them, but not to him.
The prestige of Hellenism created a new phenomenon: Jews separated from other Jews because
they did not know either Hebrew or Aramaic. Yet these Jews, as we have seen, remained Jews with the same Bible, the same synagogue, the same schools and basically the same customs,
notwithstanding their apparent inability to converse with their Hebrew- or Aramaic-speaking
brethren. We have to explain how the Jews maintained their unity across the linguistic barriers.
What I shall try to show is that in reality there was more communication between Greek-speaking
Jews and Aramaic- or Hebrew-speaking Jews than between Greek-speaking Jews and Greekspeaking Gentiles.
II
10
[2] After11 the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the majority of which are in Hebrew, scholars
are less sure than they used to be that Hebrew had entirely ceased to be a spoken language in
Palestine in the Hellenistic Age. It remains true, however, that Hebrew was no longer the first
language even in Palestine where Aramaic prevailed and Greek was spoken by a considerable
minority. Elsewhere Jews spoke either Greek or Aramaic, and Aramaic was spoken in different
dialects. If unity was to be preserved in Judaism, channels of communication had to be maintained
between people speaking different languages in different countries. The Bible had to be kept at the
centre of Jewish life, even if Jews no longer understood the language in which it had been written.
In Aramaic-speaking congregations the Bible was read in Hebrew and translated extempore into
*
Documento preso come base: P-o 21, fascicolo le cui 7 cc. iniziali confluiranno in CL 1977 III The Rabbis (cfr.
supra, Appendice II), mentre le pp. da 8 a 29 diventeranno, con qualche incremento, la prima versione della nuova
lezione Jews and Gentiles. Degli altri testi presi in considerazione si riportano, in apparato, eventuali lezioni
alternative presenti in P-o 83, manoscritto della prima versione NL 1977 della lecture e del suo ms. di base P-o 19, allo
scopo di evidenziare l’evoluzione del testo a partire dalla sua prima formulazione. Si segnalano all’occorrenza
eventuali discrepanze con P-o 161, fascicolo che testimonia la nuova versione ds. della lecture basata su P-o 83 e di cui
P-o 21 è c.c.
7
P-o 21, tsf: Reading copy, mgdxms[AMM].
8
P-o 21: As I have ... one, interl.ms[Mom].
9
P-o 21: both doctors ... kings, mgsnms[Mom].
10
P-o 21: II, ms[Mom].
11
P-o 21: After <- As I have implied, one of the most important aspects of the Jewish cultural situation was the
linguistic one, del.
323
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
Aramaic. The use of a written Aramaic translation in synagogues was forbidden at least until the
third century A.D. But nothing could prevent private use of Aramaic translations of the Bible. The
discovery of an Aramaic translation of the Book of Job in one of the Qumran caves has proved that
such translations did exists: the Qumran Job text has been dated in the second century B.C. The
discovery incidentally gave new respectability to the Talmudic story that an Aramaic translation (or
Targum) of Job had existed in the time of Rabbah Gamaliel I in the early first century A.D. and had
reappared, after having been withdrawn, in the time of his grandson Gamaliel II (B. Shabb. 115 a;
Tosefta Shabb. 1412 etc.). On the whole recent research on the Aramaic translations of the Bible has
been increasingly inclined to make them more ancient than one used to believe them to be. Scholars
now speak of the Peshitta, the Syriac translation, as being based on a Palestinian Aramaic text not
latter than the first century A.D. The complete text of the Pentateuch [3] Targum identified in the
Neophyti Codex I of the Vatican Library is dated by its discoverer and editor Alejandro Diez
Macho in the second century A.D. Others, such as Rabbi Menachem Kasher, the compiler of Torah
Shelemahi, would go even earlier13. Even if Diez Macho and his followers are proved to have been
too sanguine, this text, which remained unknown until 1956 and began to be published in 1968, can
hardly be later than the fourth century A.D. Though on the present evidence the Greek translation of
the Bible remains older than the earliest Aramaic texts, the gap is narrowing.
As we all know, the whole corpus of the writings which we call the Bible was translated into
Greek from the third to the first century B.C., and the question of what to translate into Greek may
well have contributed to the formation of the canon which on the Hebrew side was closed after the
destruction of the Temple. We are not obliged to believe the Letter of Aristeas and to take the
translation of the Pentateuch as having been ordered by Ptolemy II. The need for a Greek translation
of the Bible was not limited to the diaspora. Fragments of the Bible in Greek have been found
among the Dead Sea Scrolls and among the texts put aside by the followers of Bar Kochba during
the reign of Hadrian. In other words, there were people reading the Bible in Greek even in Palestine.
A Greek translation of the Book of Esther made in Jerusalem seems to have arrived in Egypt about
78 B.C. This at least is the most likely interpretation and date of the mysterious colophon of the
Greek Book of Esther which says: “In the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra,
Dositheus who said he was a priest and a Levite, and Ptolemy his son brought the preceding letter
of Purim which they said was genuine and was translated by Lysimachus the son of Ptolemy one of
the residents in Jerusalem”. The colophon seems to state that the Book of Esther was translated into
Greek in [4] Jerusalem not much before 78 B.C. The translator and the messengers, like many other
Palestinian Jews of their time, had good Greek names which confirm that in Palestine too the social
environment was Greek. It would, however, be rash to conclude that the majority of the biblical
books was translated in Palestine rather than in Egypt. Whatever may be the value of the Letter of
Aristeas as a source for the story that the Five Books of Moses had been translated at the time of
Ptolemy II, the letter represents current opinion in the second century B.C. about the Alexandrian
origin of this text. Philo supports the opinion of an Alexandrian origin by recording that the Jews of
Alexandria celebrated the translation of the Bible into Greek with a yearly festival on the island of
Pharus in which non-Jews participated (Vita Mosis II, 41). However fond of festivals Hellenistic
peoples were, I wonder whether there is a parallel to this holiday in memory of a translation. Philo
leaves us in no doubt about the authority of the Septuagint translation which for him, as for the
majority of the Greek-speaking Jews, replaced the original. In most cases he interprets the Bible
according to the Septuagint. The translation was accepted by the Palestinian rabbis for a long time
(Meg. 1, 8). Only in changed circumstances did they come to consider the Septuagint translation a
national disaster, an event to be compared with the golden calf: even the sun had gone into eclipse
on that day14 (Soferim 1, 8, 7 f.; Meg. Ta'an. 13).
12
13
14
P-o 21: Tosefta Shabb. 14 <-> P-o 83: Tosefta Shabb. 13 (14) ) p. 128 Zuckermandel, ms[Mom].
P-o 21: Others ... earlier, mgsupms[Mom]; P-o 83: Rabbi Menahem Kasher has given its support to much, ms [Mom].
P-o 83: that day - > "since the Torah could not be accurately translated", del.
324
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
It is possible that at least in some synagogues the reading of the original text preceded the reading
of the Septuagint translation. But there is no evidence that the synagogal use of the Greek
translation was subject to the limitations and controls we know for the Aramaic translation. Philo in
any case neither [5]speaks of a synagogal use of the Hebrew Bible nor gives clear signs of ever
having looked at a Hebrew book. If sometimes his interpretation does not exactly correspond to the
text of the Septuagint as we have it, there are other explanations than the influence of the Hebrew
texts. The Septuagint was never a monolith. And even before the Christians appropriated it, there
must have been alternative versions available to Jews.
Both the Aramaic and the Greek translations of the Bible were something more than a simple
means of making the contents of the sacred books available to Jews with little or no Hebrew. They
conveyed an interpretation of the Bible which modernized some religious notions: for instance, it
attenuated some anthropomorphic aspects of God which had become offensive.ii In translating
Genesis 31, 53 which in Hebrew makes a clear distinction between the god of Abraham and the god
of Nahor, that is, it recognizes the existence of different national gods, the Septuagint eliminates the
plurality of gods. The Jews must have had more than an inkling of what in Christian exegesis is the
distinction between simple transference from one language to another (kataballein) and exegetical
process (hermeneuein). Now this too was a potential danger to unity. Different interpretations of the
Bible might easily turn into sectarian interpretations. This consequence was avoided. The different
translations obviously satisfied different needs and different people, but, to the best of my
knowledge, never became a source of lasting religious disagreements betweeen Jews. The Aramaic
translations, being more self-consciously an explanation of the original text than the Greek
translations ever were, could allow themselves greater liberties unconnected with theological
issues15. To mention a famous example, one of the Aramaic translations, the [6] Targum PseudoJonathan, transforms the quarrel between Cain and Abel into a dispute between a Sadducee – Cain
– who does not believe in the importance of good works and in the existence of the world hereafter
and a good Pharisee – Abel – who believes in both. The end remains the old one: Cain kills his
brother (J. Bowker, The Targum and Rabbinic Literature, 1969, 132). But even the Greek text
indulged in some contemporary allusion16. At least in one of its variants the Septuagint turns
Haman, the persecutor of the Jews in the Book of Esther, into a Macedonian. The author of the
variant was thinking of Antiochus IV or, more modestly, of the Greco-Macedonian tax collector.17iii
One must add that care was obviously taken to spread new texts and information about new
festivals. The Book of Daniel which in its present form cannot be earlier, or indeed later, than circa
165 B.C., was already known in Egypt about 150-140 B.C., as the Third Sibylline Book shows.
About 130 B.C. a grandson of Ben Sira translated Ecclesiasticus into Greek: the book included a
personal canon of Hebrew sacred texts which must have attracted the attention of Greek-speaking
Jewish readers. Perhaps a few years later the Jews of Jerusalem sent to Egypt a summary in Greek
of a historical work also in Greek by Jason of Cyrene about the events of the time of Antiochus IV:
this is what we call the Second Book of Maccabees. The dispatch of the book had the purpose of
recommending the participation of the Egyptian Jews in the yearly celebration of the festival
commemorating the purification of the Temple after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes. Those
who fifty years later sent a Greek translation of the Book of Esther from Jerusalem to Egypt had
perhaps the similar aim of commending the festival of Purim to the Egyptian Jews. This is an
15
P-o 21: unconnected ... issues, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: But even ... allusion, interl.ms[Mom].
17
P-o 83: tax collector. -> As I mentioned in my first lecture, pioneer work in comparing the Aramaic translations of
the Bible with the Greek translations was done by Zacharias Frankel 150 years ago in order to discover both common
trends and differential features in the various sectors of Judaism [FRANKEL 1841]. But for a long time there was limited
progress. The newly discovered texts, such as the Neophyti Targum and the Qumran scrolls, have now provided new
problems. As substantial agreement in the interpretation of the Bible was necessary to keep together communities which
were literally speaking different languages, it will be interesting to see what emerges from impending studies. At the
moment we can only assume that this unity was maintained and indicate some of the means by which it was achieved,
del.
16
325
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
interesting possibility. Neither the Book of Esther nor the festival it [7] explained gained easy credit
among Jews. The Book of Esther is, so far, the only biblical book of which no fragments have been
found in the Qumran caves. When Rabbi Meir went to Asia Minor in the early second century A.D.
in order to “intercalate" the year he discovered to his surprise that certain communities had no
Hebrew text of Esther. As he was a professional scribe and knew his Bible by heart he produced a
copy about which no complaint was ever made (Bab. Meg. 18 b; Tos. Meg. II, 5 p. 223
Zuckermandel18; cf. Jer. Meg. 1, 7, 70 d - for another difficulty). Philo does not know - or at least
does not mention - the festival of Purim which is connected with the Book of Esther. But in the
synagogue of Dura of the third century paintings gave pride of place to the story of Mordechai and
Esther. The festival of Purim had by then become acceptable everywhere: a result of the
homogenizing influence exercised by the rabbis.19
These continuous and effective contacts raise the question whether we are ultimately justified in
postulating a radical opposition between Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking Jews. It is easy to
visualise on the one side Aramaic speakers who could go back to Hebrew for further inspiration and
on the other side Greek speakers for whom Hebrew would only be one of the many
incomprehensible languages of the world, but to whom the treasures of Greek culture were wide
open.
As a model to oppose to the situation of the Jews in medieval and modern Europe, this is correct
enough. In later times the Jews living in Christian countries were capable in different degrees of
thinking, writing and speaking concurrently in a Semitic and in an Indo-European language. The
situation in Arabic countries was of course different20. In nineteenth-century Italy there were still
dozens of rabbis - the greatest of whom was of course Samuel Davide Luzzatto - who were at home
both in Hebrew and in Italian. Yet Italian Jews have spoken Latin and its derived dialects for more
than 2,000 years. 21 The social and political presuppositions [8] which explain the SumerianAssyrian bilingualism or the preservation of Hebrew as second and even first literary language
among medieval and modern Indo-European speakers called Jews did not obtain in the Hellenistic
world. But men who knew both Greek and Hebrew existed, perhaps more in Palestine than
elsewhere: the translator of Ecclesiasticus was one of them; the historian Eupolemus of the second
century B.C. was another. It is this situation we must clarify.
[Inizio di CL 1977 IV - Jews and Gentiles]
Before I start my lecture I should like to say that I have heard only yesterday that Professor Henri
Marrou died in Paris about Easter. He was one of the great historians of our time. He remains one of
the most striking examples of how a firm religious belief (he was of course a Catholic) can guide
historical research without deviating or damaging it. He was also an extraordinary man: courageous
and frank in difficult political moments, an authority on troubadours and popular songs, and the
most amusing and loyal of friends.
[1] 22
IV
Jews and Gentiles23
18
P-o 21: 18 b; Tos. Meg. II, 5 p. 223 Zuckermandel, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: a result ... rabbis, interl.ms[Mom].
20
P-o 21: The situation in Arabic countries was of course different, interl.ms[Mom].
21
P-o 21: Yet Italian Jews have spoken Latin and its derived dialects for more than 2,000 years", interl.ms[Mom] <->
Two languages radically different in vocabulary and grammatical structure can co-exist and form one culture - as
Sumerian and Assyrian show; P-o 21: p. 8 to "It is this situation we must clarify" - Here end of lecture, mginfms[Mom].
Il riferimento è alla c. 24 (originariamente 8) di P-o 32 (Rabbis), l'unico documento che corrisponda ai dati
dell'indicazione. Qui e con queste parole termina dunque la CL 1977 Rabbis. La Northcliffe Attitudes proseguiva
invece con la trattazione della Sapienza di Salomone (cc. 8-9) che a Chicago, in Jews and Gentiles, sarà spostata nella
posizione indicata dall'autore su P-o 21 (cfr. nota infra).
22
P-o 21: da qui, cc. msn1-3, fra c. 7 e c. 10. Per le cc. 8-9, sulla Sapienza di Salomone, cfr. nota infra che segnala il
punto di c. 12 dove devono essere inserite.
23
P-o 21: IV - Jews and Gentiles, msb[Mom].
19
326
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
At this stage of my lectures it should have become clear to my listeners why, in my opinion,
the traditional question about what Hellenistic Judaism represented for the origins of Christianity
has to give precedence to the question of how Judaism managed to survive under the impact of
Greco-Roman civilization. Judaism was the only national culture to survive between the Atlantic
Ocean and the river Euphrates. Celts, Phoenicians, Syrians, Aegyptians and other Mediterranean
and Micro-Asiatic nations either lost their culture or had it reduced to a shadow of its former self.
The Jews were the exception to survive with a resilient and even expanding culture, but their
survival is characterized by a complete reconstruction of their religious and social institutions: the
survival and the reconstruction conditioned each other and are both unique in quality. The other
cultures neither reformed their structures nor survived. Of course Zoroastrianism did survive with a
vitality which is comparable with Judaism. But since the middle of the third century B.C.
Zoroastrianism was protected by the excellent archery of the Parthian army. It was outside the reach
of the Hellenistic phalanx and of the Roman legion. If my research is about what, I suppose, would
nowadays be called creative survival, it will no longer appear surprising that Christianity should
emerge out of the only culture which stood up against Greeks and Romans. However much the
Christians came to diverge from the Jews, their success among the nations depended on the
alternative the Jews - and the Jews only -24 had offered to Greco-Roman value, and more explicitly
to the claim by the Romans that they were entitled to be served, paid and worshipped.
There is nothing new in saying that the reconstruction of Judaism in a Hellenistic milieu
expressed itself in the creation of the synagogue, of a complex educational system culminating in
the Rabbinic academies and [2] of a new class of political and intellectual leaders, the Rabbis
themselves. It is less obvious that the world in which Judaism grew up was on the one side the most
unfavourable to the development of any national culture and on the other side the most endowed
with institutions and ideas suitable for a nation prepared to defend itself, as the Jewish nation was.
The survival of Judaism is therefore also an adaptation to the Greco-Roman world. The GrecoRomans both tried to destroy Judaism and gave it the instruments for survival.25
But not all the Jews lived within the Greco-Roman world. The Jews of Mesopotamia were
outside it. And not all the Jews within the Greco-Roman world spoke the same language. Judaism
was in fact divided into three zones: that in which Aramaic dialects were normally spoken, with
some Iranian dialects as auxiliary language; that in which Aramaic prevailed with Greek as the
second language; and that in which Greek prevailed with the Latin as a possible second language.
Where Aramaic prevailed, Hebrew remained alive as a written and perhaps spoken language by the
intellectual élite; but even there the Bible had to be translated into Aramaic in the synagogues to be
understood by the majority. Where Greek prevailed, Hebrew was in danger of dying out, and the
Greek translation of the Bible replaced the original text. As I have indicated in the previous lecture,
translation played a preeminent part in keeping the Jews united around the Bible: I do not know of
any similar phenomenon in Antiquity. With the Bible as unifying element, prayers and - what
mattered most - regulations for daily life remained reasonably uniform. A Jew could recognize his
own fellow Jews from Seleucia in Mesopotamia to Rome, whatever language they happened to
speak. In this vast operation of continuous repair and consolidation the Jews of Palestine were
bound to exercise for centuries the most important role not only owing to the prestige of Jerusalem
but because Palestine was more genuinely bilingual in Greek and Aramaic, and more abundantly
provided with intellectuals in command of Biblical Hebrew, than any other region.
As nothing is simple, there were difficulties for the Palestinian Jews in keeping [3] their Greek in
working order. Greek was after all the language of paganism, of Greek tax collectors and of Roman
governors. The temptation to treat Greek as an enemy language was strong. In emergencies the
rabbis of Palestine prohibited the learning of Greek.
The prohibition is well attested only for the great rebellions of the time of Trajan and Hadrian (in
the relevant text of Mishnah, Sotah 9, 14 the right reading is Quietus, that is the general of Trajan,
24
25
P-o 21: - and the Jews only -, interl.msb[Mom].
P-o 21: The Greco-Romans both tried ... survival, interl.msb[Mom].
327
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
not Titusiv). The prohibition is more vaguely attestedv in relation to the attack by Pompey against
the Temple. What the rabbis meant by this prohibition is difficult to say. Perhaps it was confined to
the teaching of < Greek>26 to children. But the fact that in a letter discovered by Y. Yadin at Nahol
Heifes one of the officers of Bar Kochba in the rebellion against Hadrian should have to apologize
for writing in Greek may well indicate that Greek was altogether discouraged in those years [5] (cf.
B. Lifshitz, Aegyptus 42, 1962, 240vi ; see also Tal. Yer. Shabb. 1, 6) 27vii . In any case, the
prohibition when it came, can hardly have been lasting and effective. About A.D. 100 the Academy
of Gamaliel II had the reputation of bringing together 500 students of the Torah and 500 students of
Greek Wisdom (B. Sotah 49 b). The tradition for various reasons is not to be taken literally, but
under Hadrian many of these pupils were still alive to transmit knowledge of Greek.28
[10] About 200 the Mishnah allowed a certain number of prayers to be said in any language
(Sotah 7, 1) and was altogether sympathetic towards the Greek language. Both the Jerusalem and
the Babylonian Talmud mention a synagogue in Palestinian Caesarea where even the simplest
prayer was recited in Greek. One rabbi was disgusted, but another calmed him down with the
remark that a prayer in Greek is better than no prayer (Jer. Sot. 7, 1; Bab. Ber. 13 a; Bab. Meg. 17
a). Lexicographers tell us that about the great numbers of29 Greek words penetrated into the
language or rather the languages - Hebrew and Aramaic - of the Talmud. Talmudic lexicographers
are not very reliable about their etymologies, their statistics and their inferences - but the Greek
words are there to be seen - more interestingly.30 Recent research is beginning to sense the influence
of Greek on synctactic peculiarities of Mishnaic Hebrew such as the tense system, the function of
prepositions and the absolute nominative. In reading the Mishnah a student coming from the Greek
of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius feels an impalpable similarity: the same sharp, thrusting
dialectics; the same economy of words; and the same lack of well organized argumentation.viii
III <II Jews and Gentiles>
Greek was not only necessary. It was attractive. There was a rabbi who would have liked to
leave it as an ornament to women (T. Jer. Sotah 9, 3). Another, more judiciously, declared Greek
most suitable for songs, Latin for war, Syriac for laments, Hebrew for [11] ordinary speech (Jer.
Meg. 1, 71, b. 53).31
I am not competent to say what difference it made to a Jew to talk in Aramaic instead of Hebrew
- except that he avoided being overheard by the angels, if it is true, as we have it from sound
authority (Johanan ben Nappacha, 3 cent., Bab. Shab. 12 b), that the angels do not understand
Aramaic. But I can guess some of the consequences of talking Greek. Guesses of this kind have
indeed been made before. I shall only give two examples connected with the word Torah, law. The
most common Greek translation of Torah was nomos which immediately presented the choice, if
26
Docc.: Hebrew.
P-o 21: But the fact that in a letter ... 1, 6) <-> At least one of the Bar-Kochba letters of the early second century
clearly indicates that in some circumstances it was easier for a Palestinian to write Greek than Hebrew (B. Lifshitz,
Aegyptus 42, 1962, 240).
28
P-o 21: In emergencies the rabbis ... knowledge of Greek, ms. su c. 3 <-> P-o 83: With Greek it was a different
matter. In emergencies the rabbis of Palestine prohibited the learning of Greek - that is probably the teaching of Greek
to children. The prohibition is well attested for the time of the destruction of the Temple (Sot. 9, 14) and for the [10]
rebellion under Hadrian (Y. Shabb. 1, 6; Sotah 9, 14); it is more vaguely attested in relation to the attack by Pompey
against the Temple. The prohibition, when it came, can hardly ever been effective. About A.D. 100 - that is between the
two best attestated prohibitions - the Academy of Gamaliel II had the reputation of collecting 500 students of the Torah
and 500 students of Greek Wisdom (B. Sotah 49 b). The tradition is unreliable for various reasons, but presupposes the
vitality of Greek as an academic subject in Palestine. Even ritual objects of the Temple were inscribed in Greek, ds. su
cc. 9-10.
29
P-o 21: the great numbers of <-> 2,000, interl.ms[Mom].
30
P-o 21: Talmudic lexicographers ... interestingly, mgsnms[Mom].
31
P-o 21: b. 53). -> At least one of the Bar-Kochba letters of the early II century clearly indicates that in some
circumstances it was easier for a Palestinian to write Greek than Hebrew (B. Lifshitz, Aegyptus 42, 1962, 240), del.
27
328
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
choice it was, of situating the Torah either in the sphere of political law or in the sphere of the
cosmic law. Torah was however basically a form of binding instruction which could be given either
by God directly or by priest or by father and mother. Proverbs 4, 1-2 is now translated in the New
English Bible: "Listen my sons to a father's instruction, consider attentively how to gain
understanding, for it is sound learning I give you; so do not forsake my teaching". What is rendered
by "my teaching" in English is ton emon nomon in Greek and toradi in Hebrew - in one of the
tenderest sentences of the Bible which the Sayings of the Fathers transferred from the earthly to the
heavenly father. In Proverbs 1, 8 the New English Bible has again the same terminology: "Attend
my son to your father's instruction and do not reject the teaching of your mother". The Hebrew for
the "teaching of your mother" is torat imecha. But the Septuagint seems to hesitate to attribute
nomos to a mother and uses thesmous instead. The concept of torah is being split. The [12] chasm
between torah and nomos is even more evident when the notion of oral law is introduced. In
Rabbinic terminology oral Torah, as opposed to the Pentateuch, is Torah she-be'al pe,
approximately the Torah transmitted orally - a Torah, as we know, revealed to Moses, transmitted
orally and equally as valid as the written Torah. For Philo torah she-be'al pe become agraphos
nomos: the translation was of course not his own, he received it. But agraphos nomos automatically
implied notions of Greek philosophy. Before he knew where he was, Philo was turning Yahweh's
second revelation into the law of nature - an ideal pattern and model for Moses' written law. With
Philo one never knows where the influence of a linguistic tradition ends and the attraction of a
specific philosophy begins. Under the influence of the LXX Philo takes logos as the natural
equivalent of Hebrew davar as word of god. His logos is a mediating figure between god and man
or nature. It is never identical with the logos of either Platonists or Stoics. Yet he uses logos about
1300 times, and it would be a brave man who would exclude Platonic or Stoic undertones in all
these 1300 occurrences.32
[8] To confirm this, it is worth taking a closer look at an anonymous writer who seems to have
been bilingual: the author of the Wisdom of Solomon.
His date is not too certain. He is later than Ecclesiastes (Qohelet) and probably earlier than St.
Paul who may or may not have read him. He certainly wrote before the destruction of the Temple.
A date in the first century B.C. seems to be right, though it would be difficult to prove. Jerome
admired him as a notable stylist in the Greek language and did not find anything Hebrew in him:
“Liber qui Sapientia Salomonis inscribitur apud Hebraeos nusquam est, quin et ipse stylus Graecam
eloquentiam redolet”33ix. One does not like to have to disagree with St. Jerome in the matter of
style. But the Hebraisms of the text are evident, and there is “parallelismus membrorum34”, the
mark of Hebrew poetic style. Hebraisms are more profuse in the first five chapters, remain
conspicuous in the next five chapters and only become a secondary phenomenon in the last nine
chapters. It has therefore been suggested that the first five chapters or possibly the first ten chapters
were originally written in Hebrew. A strict proof has never been provided. But a choice presents
itself: either a writer translated into Greek some Hebrew chapters and added a few chapters of his
own or a writer, moving freely from Hebrew to Greek, was capable of stylistic variations in Greek
according to what he had to say. I prefer the second hypothesis. In the first chapters the author
attacked sceptics like the Ecclesiastes and therefore [9] might easily be tempted to use a Hebrew
style to counteract arguments expressed in Hebrew. In the next seven chapter he was concerned
with the good old Hochma (Wisdom) of Proverbs, Job and Ecclesiasticus and therefore still had
scope for abundant Hebraisms, but he was no longer answering specific Hebrew speakers. In the
last chapters he moves to an attack against idolatry – especially Egyptian idolatry; a more sober
Greek style might appear preferable. Whether this analysis is correct or not, it seems to me certain
that we have here an author who is at home both in Hebrew and in Greek. It is consequently
32
33
34
P-o 21: [pp. 8-9 on Wisdom of Solomon], interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: is not to be found in Hebrew: in fact the same style shows [<-> smells of] Greek eloquence, interl.ms[Mom]
P-o 21: membrorum <-> verborum, ms[Mom].
329
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
difficult to say where he found the notion of immortality35, for which his text is the first clear-cut
evidence in Jewish thought. He never explicitly speaks of immortality of the soul, though we may
stretch 3, 5 to mean that "the souls of the just ... have a sure hope of immortality". He is equally
open to more than one interpretation when he states that “God created man for immortality ... it was
the devil’s spirit that brought death into the world” (2, 24).36 The idea certainly circulated among
Essenes and Pharisees: it just happens that our evidence about them is probably later than the Book
of Wisdom. On the other hand our author, who translated Hebrew nephes by psyche, may have got
the notion from Plato. What seems to be original in him is the association of the immortality of the
soul with Wisdom. “Immortality (he says) is in kinship with Wisdom” (8, 17). He finds in divine
retribution after death the answer to the doubts about divine justice expressed by Ecclesiastes. I
should not to be surprised to be told that the author of Wisdom was a Palestinian Jew who discussed
matters with Hillel. I should be more surprised if his text were shown to have been intelligible and,
if intelligible, interesting to a Gentile who had never read Ecclesiastes and did not know Jewish
history.
[12]37
IV <III Jews Gent.>
This brings us to the boundaries of the intellectual and religious relations between Jews and
Gentiles. The areas of contact and friendship existed just as much as the areas of friction and
enmities. If they had not existed, the Jews would not have been able to live as minorities in the
diaspora38. As the latter are better known than the former, let us remember that Jews might pay
homage to foreign gods simply as a matter of courtesy in a decent exchange of signs of respect.
After all there were Gentiles who sent offerings to the Temple of Jerusalem, and the Jews were
naturally proud of this (Joseph. Bell. 2, 412). Since the time of Deutero-Isaiah 56, 7 the sacrifices
[13] of Gentiles had been acceptable; and later rabbinic doctrine allowed pagans to build altars and
to sacrifice to the Jewish God everywhere (Sifra, Lev. 17, 3 II p. 58 ed. Jerusalem 1975). The
second-century B.C. Jewish historian Eupolemus attributed to Solomon the gift of a gold pillar to
Hiram King of Tyre for the local temple of Zeus (<723 F 2b> Jacoby): this must be the pillar
mentioned by Herodotus 2, 44. Solomon was simply imitating in suitable proportions what many
wealthy Jews were in fact doing for the gods of their neighbours in the Hellenistic age. In the
second century B.C. Nicetas son of Jason from Jerusalem gave the city of Iasos in Asia Minor a
hundred drachmae for the local feast of Dionysus (C. I. Jud. 749). There is probably not much more
to the gift of three hundred drachmae sent by the High Priest Jonathan to Tyre for the celebration of
sacrifices to Hercules (II Maccab. 4, 18-20). II Maccabees (4, 18-20) tells the story in a hostile
spirit which indicates that not everybody agreed with Jonathan. In some cases, no doubt, the Jews
tried other gods when the God of the Fathers appeared not to answer. What is perhaps the oldest
Greek inscription by a Jew is the by now famous dedication of the Jewish slave Moschos son of
Moschion who went to the oracle of Amphiaraus in Boeotia to seek advice about regaining his
freedom. About 250 B.C. there must have been very few Jews in Boeotia to warm the heart of the
poor slave. In other cases the identification of the real god to whom the dedication was made was
left open. Some Jewish sailors in Upper Egypt made dedications in a sanctuary to the god Pan when
they had been saved from a shipwreck; they thanked God, and, no doubt, meant Yahveh (A.
Bernard, Le Paneion d’El Kanaïs, 1972x, 34; 42). Apostasy39 does not seem to have been common.
Tradition preserves very few names of apostates: Dositheus at the end of the third century B.C.;
Tiberius Alexander, the nephew of Philo, in the first century A.D.
35
36
37
38
39
P-o 21: immortality -> of the soul, del.
P-o 21: He never explicitly speaks ... (2, 24), mgsn e interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: il testo riprende su c. 12 dopo l'inserzione delle cc. 8-9.
P-o 21: If they had ... diaspora. <-> As the latter are better known than the former, mginfms[Mom].
P-o 21: apostasy -> however, del.
330
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
[14]40 One suspects that far more popular common ground for Jews and Gentiles was magic, from
which at least in imperial times it is difficult to separate astrology. The name of Iao – a variant of
Yahwe – and other Hebrew names are common in amulets. Origen in Contra Celsum 1, 22 claims
that pagans abused the name of the God of Abraham for magic: they could not have done so without
Jewish or later Christian co-operation. Pliny (N.H. 30, 11) and Apuleius (Apol. 90) consider Moses
a magician; Vettius Valens (II, 28, 96 Kroll) attributed astrological books to Abraham. Abraham
was internationally well-known as a master of astrology.
On a higher level there may have been art and poetry in common between Jews and Gentiles. Jews
shared the pleasure of theatre going. We have the greater part of a tragedy by a poet Ezechiel on the
Exodus which is earlier than the first century B:C. Jews and Samaritans wrote poems on their own
history. Twenty-four lines survive of a poem on Jerusalem by a Philo who lived before 70 B.C.: the
whole poem is said to have filled at least 14 books. A Samaritan called Theodotus answered back
with a poem on Schechem of which 47 lines have come down to us. On present evidence the
Samaritan was the better poet. We know from archaeology that many Jews had little objection to
decorating their houses and their synagogues with human figures or even pagan gods. In the Dura
Synagogue King David looks like Orpheus. By chance we know that a famous rhetorician of the
late I century B.C., Caecilius of Calacte, was of Jewish extraction. Many Jews were enslaved, and
slavery was an avenue to intellectual professions in the Greek and Roman world41.
And yet we should not rush to conclusions. It is not unusual for the writing of non-Greeks who
accepted Greek as their literary language to be self-conscious. Meleager the Syrian from Gadara in
Transjordania even suggested that Homer was a Syrian because [15] according to Syrian sacred
rules he did not give fish to eat to his heroes, though the Hellespont is full of fish (Athen. 4, 157 b.).
But the self-consciousness of Meleager is different from that of his Jewish neighbours. He talked of
Gadara as the new Athens in the Syrian land and recalled another citizen of Gadara, the cynic
Menippus. He concluded: “Was I a Syrian? Does it matter? My friend, the world is the fatherland of
the mortals and the same chaos generated all men”. We do not find in any Jewish author of the
Hellenistic period this engaging combination of nationalism and cosmopolitanism. It is perhaps no
accident that no epigram by Jewish poets, as far as I can recollect, found its way into the Greek
Anthology. The men of Jerusalem joked in a friendly way about the men of Athens whom they
considered less clever than themselves: we have a string of such jokes in the most unlikely place,
Midrash Rabbah to Lamentationsxi. But to the best of my knowledge, no Jew ever said that
Jerusalem was the real Athens. Circumstances42 did not even favour that particular situation which
is familiar to us from other periods of Jewish history when Jews wrote their most serious works in
Hebrew and their light literature in whatever language they happened to speak. I do not know in the
Hellenistic period of an Immanuel Romano writing Italian poems indistinguishable from ordinary
fourteenth-century Italian poetryxii or an Eliah Levita, the great pioneer in the study of the Hebrew
text of the Bible, amusing himself and his fellow-Ashkenazis by translating into Yiddish the Italian
poem Buono d’Ancona. The absorption by Jews of important forms of Greek expressions was very
real, but was not meant to facilitate contacts with non Jews or to transmit non Jewish works to
Jews43. It was often meant to reassure the Jews about themselves against the temptations and
objections offered by Greek culture. I should like to emphasize this point especially in relation to
the indisputable use by Jews of Greek methods of reasoning and interpreting.44
Since the second century B.C., Greek allegorical interpretation had been applied to the Bible.
The first Jewish practitioner of allegorical interpretation in the Greek language known to us is
Aristobulus of Panion – an authoritative figure in the Egypt of [16] Ptolemy VI. When allegory
came to Philo it had already a long tradition behind it. The main purpose of allegory was to
40
41
42
43
44
P-o 161: Northcliffe Lecture III continuation, ms - Reading copy, tsf ms[AMM].
P-o 21: in the Greek and Roman world, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: Circumstances <- Historical, del.
P-o 21: or to transmit ... to Jews, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: I should like ... interpreting, interl.ms[Mom].
331
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
reinforce the confidence of the Jews about the validity of their Bible. It provided a new
interpretation of what had become insignificant or objectionable. The purpose of making pagans
interested in Jewish texts is, at least in Philo, much less evident. Rabbinic scholars are now refining
their methods of studying what in the Midrashic interpretation of the Bible may reflect modes of
Greek allegory. They have gone beyond the pioneer essay by Jacob Z. Lauterbach, “The Ancient
Jewish Allegorists in Talmud and Midrash” (J.Q.R., N.S. 1, 1910-11, 291; 503). Whatever the
historical relation between Philonic allegory and the rabbinic form of spiritual interpretation of the
Bible may have been, the purpose was identical - to modernize the message of the Bible for the
Jews themselves.
The new purpose often implied a radical transformation of what had been borrowed from the
Greeks. In the first century B.C. Hillel suddenly introduced seven rules, the so-called middot, for
the interpretation of Scripture in legal terms. The rules had success, and others were added by later
rabbis. It is not difficult for any of us to sense that there is some relation between these rules and
certain categories of Greco-Roman rhetoric. The rule of inference a minori ad maius appears as the
first rule of Hillel as kal va-homer. Yet Saul Lieberman (Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 1950, 4682) and David Daube (“Rabbinic Method of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric”, H.U.C.A. 22,
1949, 239-264), who have tried to derive the rabbinic rules from Greek models, have not quite
succeeded. Personally I doubt whether, even if each is taken individually, these [17] seven rules
have exact parallels in Greco-Latin texts. To the famous rule of the Gezerah Shawah (“equal cut”),
analogy of words in two laws, only vague parallels have so far been adduced. Indeed one may well
ask whether rhetorical rules were ever used by Hellenistic and Roman jurists to interpret the law.
The impression is that Hillel, or somebody else for him, produced something new out of not very
perfect information about Hellenistic hermeneutic. His purpose in any case was obviously not
discussion with Gentiles, but regulation of internal Jewish controversies.
Research on Greek philosophic patterns in Rabbinic texts is now fashionable. The notion of the
chain of transmitters, of diadoche, is unquestionably to be found both in Jewish rabbinic schools
and in Greek philosophic schools. The Sayings of the Fathers provide obvious parallels for
Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers. More specifically Judah Goldin has shown that the
celebrated discussion on the “good way for man” in the Sayings of the Fathers 2, 9 is similar in
form to the summary of Stoic doctrines in Diogenes Laertius 7, 92 (“A Philosophical Session in a
Tannaite Academy”, Traditio 21, 1965, 1-21). In his turn Henry Fischel has to produced some
striking Epicurean parallels to rabbinic texts, though I would not go so far as to believe that the
passage of the Babylonian Talmud about the four sages who entered Paradise (b. Hagigah 14 b) is
based on a misunderstood account of Epicurean experiences by the Four Rabbis.
The result, however, is once again to provide the rabbis with patterns of thought for internal
consumption. Though there are a few exceptions, the rabbis intended to regulate Jewish life, not to
polemize with pagans. The same is basically true for Philo.45 With all these Greek materials the
Jewish authors, whether in Greek or in Hebrew or in Aramaic, were [18] building their own castle;
and the castle was meant to keep Greek idolatry out.46
<V47> <IV Jews Gent.>
One cannot escape the fact that communication between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic
world was poor. This is confirmed by the other fact that a considerable portion of what the Jews
circulated among pagans was fraudulently attributed to pagan authors: most commonly to wellestablished authorities of the old days. The Sibyls were supposed to have produced prophecies in
45
P-o 21: The same ... Philo, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21, 161: own castle; and the castle ... idolatry out; P-o 83: their own castle to defend themselves against the
Greeks <-> their own castle - of which the gate was narrow; P-o 21: idolatry out. -> Personally, I am less convinced that
the famous seven hermeneutic rules attributed to Hillel have clear Greek models, but if they have, the conclusion must
be the same: the models were transformed for internal Jewish consumption, del.
47
IV (per errore).
46
332
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
the Hebrew spirit and with due appreciation of Jewish achievements. In the extant collection of
Sibylline poems, Books III and V are of Jewish origin. Book III mainly belongs to the second
century B.C., Book V is of early imperial times. Pseudo-Orpheus, pseudo-Phocylides, pseudoSophocles, pseudo-Aratus and even pseudo-Homer and pseudo-Hesiod circulated on Jewish
initiative. They could not speak exactly like Jews. The forgers therefore created an artificial
syncretism.
It seems to me an unnecessary subtlety to doubt that such forgeries were primarily meant for
Gentiles. They could be used for the purpose of proselytism or simply to show off: it was nice to
have been remembered by Homer. But one may well wonder whether the pagans were impressed.
Furthermore, there are signs that some Jews were taken in by what other Jews forged. The allegorist
Aristobulus seems to have been one of these credulous Jews. He quoted Pseudo-Homer and PseudoHesiod to prove that the Jewish Sabbath was known to them48. In any case, forgeries have seldom
been an instrument for genuine contacts between different groups: they betray unease, if not
hostility.49
Few pagans seem to have read the Bible for the purpose of finding out what the Jews thought or
believed. Even the philosopher Posidonius, who admired Moses and was interested in the Jewish
past and present, never set eyes on the Bible. Anti-Jewish polemists never purchased a copy of the
Septuagint. I cannot share [19] the opinion that the first century B.C. anti-Jewish polemist50
Apollonius Molon proves direct knowledge of the Septuagint, Genesis 21, 6, by calling Isaac Gelon
("the laugh"51). To write against the Jews Molon must of course have collected some information
somewhere. But if the controversy about the Jews had been based on the Bible, it would have had a
different complexion. From time to time scholars think they have found echoes of some biblical
passages in Hellenistic writers. Such discoveries have been announced for Theocritus, Callimachus
and even Virgil. They have invariably failed to command assent. The first clear quotation of the
Bible in a pagan author is still the quotation of a line of Genesis 1 in the Sublime attributed to
Longinus and now commonly dated in the first century A.D. But Pseudo-Longinus is himself an
enigma. His most obvious literary connection is with the rhetorician Caecilius of Calacte, whom we
know to have been a Jew. Eduard Norden was so struck by the isolation of the author of the Sublime
that he rather irrationally connected him in Philo’s circle in Alexandria. Wilamowitz practically
vetoed the publication of his friend Norden's learned and elaborate phantasy. Norden's paper
appeared in the Memoirs of the Berlin Academy after the last war when he and Wilamowitz had
long been dead. Before the Sublime, a dubious allusion to the account of creation in Genesis may be
found in the treatise on the nature of the world attributed to the Pythagorean Ocellus Lucanus
(second or first century B.C.).
Even if a few more passages were to turn up showing an acquaintance with the Bible, it would
still remain true that no pagan studied Judaism on the basis of authentic texts in order to understand
in what ways Jewish thought differed from Greek thought. There was no theological and
philosophic discussion between Jews and Gentiles on the level of the later discussions between
Christians and Gentiles. It follows that the Jewish interest in Greek philosophy [20] and religion,
such as existed, was unilateral.
No Hellenistic philosopher thought he had to read the Bible before he sat on his chair to instruct his
pupils. The Jews, or certain Jews, took the trouble of seeing where Judaism stood if confronted with
Greek philosophy: more Philo of course, than the Palestinian rabbis52. With a writer like Philo it
difficult to say whether he ever wrote anything exclusively or principally for pagan readers. He may
have done so in some of his treatises which presuppose little or no knowledge of Judaism, such as
Quod omnis probus liber or De Abrahamo. However, he never addresses a pagan audience. He
48
49
50
51
52
P-o 83: known to them. -> After all Jews misled Jews by what we call biblical pseudo-epigrapha, del.
P-o 21: In any case, forgeries ... hostility, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: the first century ... polemist, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: "the laugh" <-> "the man who laughed", ms[Mom].
P-o 21: more Philo ... rabbis, interl.ms[Mom].
333
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
never declares the intention of speaking to non Jews.53 Basically Philo argued to reassure himself
and his fellow-Jews that what they had learned from their Bible was confirmed by Plato or by Zeno
the Stoic. It was again an internal operation to consolidate Judaism.54 Such an enterprise must not
be underrated and, as Harry Wolfson so clearly saw, was fraught with immense consequences for
the future. The issue was the reconciliation of revelation and philosophy, a process which Philo
started and nobody seems to have perfectly concluded. It has also been observed that in the depht of
his heart Philo perhaps preferred Abraham, who saw God, but did not receive the whole of the Law,
to Moses who brought down the complete Torah from Mount Sinai. One of the curious and
unforeseen results of the confrontation of Jewish revelation with Greek philosophy was to
emphasize one aspect of Judaism which the rabbis were bound to underrate: the age of the
Patriarchs when the true God and the true pattern of religious life had been recognized without the
need of a full-dress revelation. Hence the inclination which is characteristic not only of Philo, but of
the Wisdom of Solomon and perhaps also of the Fourth Book of Maccabees, to treat Judaism as a
mistery to which access is granted through Wisdom. The mystic type of language must not lead us
to think that Philo was looking for an Ersatz to the mysteries of Eleusis or of Isis in which [20 bis]55
he was not allowed to take part. Judaism was presented as an initiation to which the ordinary pagan
was not admitted.
As we know, there have been repeated attempts to connect the Essenes with the Pythagoreans.
The most recent is the one to which Isidore Lévy devoted his extraordinary learning and acumenxiii.
Isidore Lévy even believed that the Dead Sea Scrolls confirmed his opinion. It seems to me that the
Dead Sea Scrolls discourage any theory about any connection of any Jewish sect with
Pythagoreanism, because they have revealed the deep Jewish roots of such societies. But if we
concede for a moment that the Essenes were Pythagoreans in disguise, we should have to conclude
that their purpose was to keep the Gentiles out. Even in the account of Josephus, the Essenes appear
as extreme supporters of Levitical purity laws.
[21] The confrontation between Jewish revelation and Greek philosophy reinforced therefore the
tendency, which is conspicuous in the whole of Jewish thought during the Hellenistic age to exclude
gentiles qua gentiles but to welcome proselytes56. Abraham himself, in Philo's picture, had been a
proselyte of a sort, who had abandoned astrology and polytheism for the knowledge of the true God.
According to the Book of Jubilees, a text of the end of the second century B.C., Abraham had even
had to learn Hebrew: he learnt it in the six months of the rainy season (Jub. 1211-14). True enough,
according to the perhaps better informed Antiquitates Biblicae attributed to Philo, but written after
the destruction of the Temple, Abraham had been spared the trouble of learning Hebrew because ha
had refused to take part in the building of the tower of Babel: Hebrew had remained his language.
However, Abraham was for everybody the protoptype of the pagan who had come to recognize the
true God. There were even rabbis who classified Sarah as a daughter of Shem, Hagar as a daughter
of Ham and Keturah as a daughter of Japhet: so all the nations stemmed from Abraham (Yal. Shim.
904). We know that in the second century B.C. the Jews could claim ancestral connections in the
good Hellenistic manner with Sparta and Pergamum through Abraham (II Macc. 12, 20; Jos. Ant.
Jud. 14, 225). Proselytism went together with the emphasis on Abraham.
<VI>57 <V Jews Gent.>
Proselytism was in fact the only specific situation which transformed the intellectual relations
between Jews and Gentiles. Whether the initiative came from Jews or from Gentiles, the issue was
53
P-o 21: He never ... non Jews, interl.ms[Mom].
P-o 21: It was again ... Judaism, interl.ms[Mom].
55
P-o 21: 20 bis, c. interam. ms[Mom]; il testo che contiene si trova già, in prima stesura, ms[Mom] nel mgsn di c. 21,
da dove è stato ricopiato.
56
P-o 83: to exclude gentiles qua gentiles, interl.ms[Mom].
57
V (per errore).
54
334
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
conversion [22] from polytheism to monotheism.58 I wonder whether acquaintance with the Bible
ever attracted pagans to Judaism. We must assume that the Bible – or at least the Books of Moses,
the Psalms and perhaps some prophets – played a part in the instruction of proselytes: the proselyte
depicted by Juvenalxiv knows the book of Moses. But there remains the question of what first
attracted pagans towards Judaism. The little evidence we have seems rather to indicate that pagans
would be struck by the Jewish notion of God, by Jewish religious ceremonies and taboos and
perhaps by Jewish magic rather than by Jewish legal and prophetic books. No specific effort seems
to have been made to write books in order to solve the difficulties of proselytes. Even if we assume
that some books of Philo or the Wisdom of Solomon or IV Maccabees were particularly suitable for
proselytes, there is nothing to show that they were written either to attract or to confort proselytes59.
I can think of only one book which may be considered to aim specifically at the edification of the
proselyte. This is the Testament of Job, a Greek text first published by Angelo Maixv, in which
scholars have vainly tried to find Christian elements. The book stresses the fact that Job was a
pagan who turned to the true God, presents him as an ex-satrap of Egypt under Persian rule (28, 8;
cf. 17, 1), and gives pride of place to his daughters. They receive from him phylactery-like objects
with long cords which change their hearts and make them speak in angelic language. We are
reminded that saintly women play their part in the Jewish-Egyptian society of Therapeutae
described by Philo, but we are even more directly reminded that Judaism attracted pagan women,
including Nero’s Poppaeaxvi .
<VII60> <VI Jews Gent.>
If we discount proselytism, there is only one area in which we must admit some continuous
communication between Jews and pagans: [23] the area of historiography. There are very good
reasons for this. The Jews had their own historical tradition in the Bible, which gave no space worth
mentioning to the Greeks before Alexander and never mentioned the Romans. The Greeks and
Romans had their own historical tradition which virtually ignored the Jews. It was impossible to coexist – or to quarrel – without at least comparing notes on the past. The reasons, however61, are such
as not to modify the essential isolation of the Jews in the pagan world62.
Traditionally in the Hellenistic world each nation was supposed to produce some account of its own
past for circulation in the wide world of Greek speakers. How the custom originated and developed
remains unclear, though we know that it goes back to the fifth century B.C. when Xanthus of Lydia
wrote an account of his own national history in Greek. Manetho, the Egyptian; Berossus, the
Babylonian; and Fabius Pictor, the Roman, are the schoolbook examples of this tendency in the
third century B.C.
The genre was intrinsically ambiguous. It was meant to satisfy the curiosity of the natives as much
as of the foreigners, in so far as both had Greek education and therefore certain interests suggested
by Greek culture. What was intelligible to the native was not necessarily intelligible to the
foreigner, even if both had read their Herodotus or their Timaeus, which as we shall see is not our
case.
58
P-o 83: But here two points must be made which limit the practical consequences of this attitude. First, I am not
aware that [25] Philo - or other writers in Greek such as the authors of the Wisdom of Solomon or of IV Maccabees were particularly inclined to emphasize proselytism or to solve the difficulties of proselytes. Whereas proselytes were a
practical concern for Palestinian rabbis, they seem to be only a theoretical category for the more philosophically minded
writers in Greek. Secondly I wonder [...].
59
P-o 161: No specific effort ... to confort proselytes.; P-o 83: This confirms the intellectual isolation of the Jews even
when they wrote in Greek about their own faith.
60
V (per errore).
61
P-o 21: There are very good reasons for this ... however <-> There are historical reasons for this, but the reasons.
62
P-o 161: If we discount ... pagan world.; P-o 83: I am left with what is considered to be the area of most continuous
communication between Jews and Greeks: the area of historiography.
335
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
The Jews did not fail to contribute to this international literature. As the translation of the
Bible into Greek was not regarded as an equivalent of the national histories produced by Manetho
and Berossus, the Jews had to do something new. Of all these historical books we have only tiny
fragments, except for Flavius Josephus who was one of the very last to write in this tradition.
Under Ptolemy IV Philopator (222-205 B.C.) a Jew called Demetrius presented some Jewish
history according to the methods of Greek chronography. He was basically an expositor of the
Bible. He gave the years from Creation according to the Septuagint text and is therefore our oldest
witness for the existence of the [24] Septuagint translation of Genesis. He divided history into
epochs: from Adam to the deluge; from Abraham’s birth to Jacob’s arrival in Egypt. In this notion
of epochs he anticipated the Book of Daniel which is 40 years later. The notion was pagan – Greek
– but not surprising to Jews, as Genesis knows a pre-deluge age, and Chronicles isolate the seventy
years of desolation as an epoch. Demetrius’ Greek education is probably confirmed by his rhetorical
device of question and answer (aporiai kai lyseis) which, though abundantly used in Midrashic
hermeneutics, seems to be of Greek origin. Flavius Josephus, who can have known this Demetrius
only at second hand, stupidly identified him with the pagan Demetrius of Phalerum who had lived
about a hundred years earlier.
Next comes Eupolemus’ work on “The Kings of Judaea”. Eupolemus is firmly dated by one of
his fragments (fr. 5) in about 158 B.C. and therefore must probably be identified with the
Eupolemus who was an ambassador to Rome on behalf of Judas Maccabaeus in 161. If so, his
father had been involved in diplomatic dealings with Antiochus III. His Greek is sufficiently
affected by Hebrew syntax to make it certain that the author was brought up on Hebrew and
Aramaic. He had much to say about the splendour of Solomon’s Temple and reported letters
exchanged between Solomon and fellow-kings: neither chronology nor common sense was
respected. When he maintained that the prophet Jeremiah saved the ark from Babylonian looters, he
followed a tradition to be found also in the Epistula Jeremiae and in one of the initial letters of II
Maccabees. On the other hand the mention of king Astibares of Media in fr. 4 seems to depend on
Ctesias. The date of composition, 158 B.C., excludes any probability, if not the possibility that
Eupolemus brought his history to Rome when he went as an ambassador there. As we know nothing
about a Philo, author of another [25] book on the Kings of Juda, whom Clemens Alexandrinus puts
together with Demetrius and Eupolemus, the other author to be considered is Artapanus. He is
earlier than circa 70 B.C. because he was read by Alexander Polyhistor. He is famous for making
the Egyptians dependent on Jewish instruction. Abraham introduced the Egyptians to astrology,
Joseph brought agriculture, and Moses, to be identified with Musaeus and to be considered the
teacher of Orpheus, brought in practically everything else from shipbuilding to hieroglyphics and
the cult of animals. No wonder that the Egyptians called him Hermes, that is Thot. Though the book
is quoted as Iudaika, it was perhaps a biography of Moses with some introduction about the
patriarchs. For the moment all I want to say is that Artapanus considered himself a Jew and was
obviously familiar with the Pentateuch.
Samaritans did not write very different history from Jews. Alexander Polyhistor attributed to
Eupolemus a fragment about Abraham which cannot be by him, but obviously comes from a
Samaritan author because it makes Abraham and Melchisedek meet on Mount Garizim, the
Samaritan sanctuary. Since the same Polyhistor quotes another fragment on Abraham as a specialist
in astrology with the remark that it comes from an anonymous author, it is evident that Alexander
Polyhistor attributed the first fragment to Eupolemus only by an oversight. All this was seen by
Jacob Freudenthal long ago. The author quoted the Bible in the Septuagint version. He too made
some attempt to equate Oriental and Greek chronology: he identified the Babylonian Belos with
Kronos. Finally, a mysterious Cleodemus Malchus, whom Josephus calls prophetes (Ant. Jud. 1,
260-1), made Hercules marry a granddaughter of Abraham in Libya. I would consider Cleodemus a
Jew rather than a Samaritan or a pagan.
[26] From one point of view these works certainly contributed to a real debate between Jews and
Gentiles – about the length of their respective histories and therefore about priority in civilization.
336
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
The debate is best documented in Josephus’ Contra Apionem, both a contribution to and a summary
of such a quarrel. By the end of the third century B.C. the peripatetic polymath Hermippus had
already accepted what must have been a Jewish claim that Pythagoras had Jewish masters. The Jews
tended to lengthen their past. If the Hebrew Bible puts 1,948 years between Adam and Abraham,
the Septuagint increased the interval to 3,334 years which is also the figure to be found in
Demetrius. But significantly the Septuagint reduced to 215 years the 430 years in Egypt of Exodus
12, 40. Eupolemus asserted that Moses was the first wise man and imparted the alphabet to the Jews
who passed it on to the Phoenicians, from whom it was received by the Greeks. The Jewish claims
to superior antiquity were certainly noticed and questioned by pagan historians, especially in Egypt.
I shall give only one example, the implications of which do not seem to have been considered. In
the first century A.D. that firm opponent of Jewish claims, Apion of Alexandria, stated that Moses
had lived in the eighteenth year of Bocchoris’ reign, i.e. 753 B.C. This is intriguing; it makes Moses
a contemporary of Romulus, the Exodus contemporary with the foundation of Rome according to
the Varronian date. But Apion is silent about Rome; he presents instead the Exodus as
contemporary with the foundation of Carthage (Jos. Contra Ap. 1, 17 = 616 F 4 Jac.). In other
words Apion accepts Timaeus' synchronization of the foundation of Rome with the foundation of
Carthage, transfers it from 814 B.C. to 753 B.C. and thus succeeds in making the two enemies of
Rome – Carthage and Judaea – coeval and of course far more recent than Egypt [27] Synchronisms
are never insignificant to ancient historians.
The battle of dates was backed by documents. A temple culture is always rich in documents.
Flavius Josephus adapts to his case a commonplace of Hellenistic historians from Eastern countries
when he claims that the Jews, owing to their temple archives, were better documented than the
Greeks about their own past. What Josephus did not know or could not say is that temples are not
only repositories of documents, but also centres of forgeries. Furthermore, many of the documents
circulating in the literature available to him did not even come from temples. They were the product
of the free enterprise of historians. The Greek additions to the Book of Esther include forged
documents, and Eupolemus forged the correspondence of Solomon with his fellow kings. Forgeries
could be interpolated in pagan books of history in order to change their character. Two non-Jewish
writers, Hecataeus of Abdera in the late fourth century and Manetho in the early third century,
received additions. In the case of Hecataeus it seems that the interpolation amounted to one or two
sections on Jews to supplement the not unsympathetic remarks by the author on the Jews. The
manipulation of Manetho is more obscure. Manetho’s history of Egypt reached Josephus in a
version which seems to have been unknown to other ancient readers of Manetho. The explanation
which appeals to me is that the text of Manetho which Josephus read had received both Jewish and
anti-Jewish insertions: the anti-Jewish element prevailed. But the matter is dubious.
Thus there was some debate on historical matters between Jews and Gentiles. The Jews had to
accommodate some Greek history, and the Greek historians had at least to take cognizance of the
existence of a Jewish past. While Castor of Rhodes about 60 B.C. still ignored [28] the Jews, Varro
made one or two entries about them. For Alexander Polyhistor the synchronism of Moses and
Ogygus, the first king of Attica about 1796 B.C., seemed to be an established fact: he wrote before
Apion.
Alexander Polyhistor is the best example of how the Jews managed to force themselves on the
attention of the Gentiles. But how much of this historical work should we know if Alexander
Polyhistor had not gone through it in the second part of the first century B.C.? This Greek freedman
worked hard in the neighbourhood of Rome in the first century B.C. to compile extracts from
historical books about practically all the “barbarian” countries of the known world. He must have
provided the information Roman cultivated people wanted about the foreign countries they had
conquered or considered conquering. Fittingly enough, Alexander Polyhistor died with his library
when his house was burnt down. The Jews were only one of his specialities, and there is really no
reason to suspect him as a Jew in disguise. He is quoted as having said that Moses was a woman
(273 F 790), though he would certainly only have transmitted somebody else’s opinion. But
337
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
Alexander Polyhistor already imposes a problem. What is significant is the exceptional character of
his knowledge. And he would not know about his work about the Jews if it had not interested the
Christian Fathers. Even Josephus is only vaguely acquainted with him. The other Jews forgot him.
He saved something of a literature which few pagans had read, and he himself was saved from
oblivion by the Christians.
The fate of Flavius Josephus confirms this situation. He wrote what was perhaps in extension
and depth the greatest work in Greek on Jewish history, his twenty books on Jewish Antiquities. He
wrote them with the model of Dionysios of Halicarnassus before his eyes and with full knowledge
of the methods of Greco-Roman historiography as practised in his century. He wrote mainly for
pagans, though he was certainly trying to satisfy the requirements [29] of Jews with a Greek
education. He wrote during decades when the Jews were not certain of being able to survive. He
was hardly read by the pagans, and he was soon forgotten by the Jews. The Jews who in the Middle
Ages became acquainted with him got to know him from Christian readers, the only ones who had
constantly remained interested in him. The Jewish historiography meant to interest both pagans and
Jews had become interesting to Christians only. Josephus was saved by the Christians as Philo was
saved by the Christians.63
The failure to involve pagans in Jewish history confirms the isolation of Jewish-Greek culture in its
Hellenic context - before the Christians came in.
[30]64 It is furthermore equally evident that there was no effort on the Jewish side to study and
understand Greek history. No Jewish text known to me, including Philo and Flavius Josephus,
betrays any intimate acquaintance with non Jewish history. The Talmudic texts on Greek and
Roman history are notoriously few and inexact, though occasionally very shrewd at defining the
reality of Roman power at large. If the confrontation between Greeks and Jews was superficial at
the level of philosophy or theology, it was even more superficial at the historical level. The mass of
literature involved encourage a different impression65.
What clinches the matter is that the Jews themselves appear to be only very moderately
interested in their own history - at least after the death of Moses. They lose interest in the history of
their kings, never write the history of the Babylonian exile, and are only spasmodically concerned
with their more recent past. That the world of the Synagogue is not a world propped up by history
needs no demonstration: indeed there is little cause for surprise. We must however establish the
precise limits of the interests of the Jews in their own history and correlate them with the function
which whatever history was left had in protecting the unhistorical world of the Torah against the
claims of Greeks and Romans.
To put it in a different way, I suggest for consideration in our final discussion two mutually
exclusive propositions. The first says that if you start from the synagogue you will rather end in
apocalypse than in history; the second says that the synagogue was meant to save the Jew both from
apocalypse and from history. We shall have to decide which of these propositions is correct.66
i
KASHER 1927-1995.
Per una formulazione più articolata sull’ostilità all'antropomorfismo, cfr. GL 1979 I (Defence), c. 12.
iii
Il testo riportato in nota risulta eliminato nella nuova versione della lezione, come testimonia la reading copy, e
mai ripreso alla lettera. Tuttavia, la continuità e anzi la crescita di interesse per le articolazioni interne del giudaismo è
ii
63
P-o 21: Josephus was saved ... Christians, ms. interl. [Mom.].
P-o 21: c. 30 interam. ms. [Mom.].
65
P-o 21: The mass ... impression <->, though the mass of literature involved may give a different impression,
interl.ms[Mom].
66
P-o 21: It is furthermore equally ... is correct. <-> But we have still to explain why the Jews themselves were only
moderately intersted in their own post-Biblical historians. Here we reach the most serious question. I suggest as a
subject for our final discussion the proposition that if you start from the synagogue, you will rather end in apocalypse
than in history.
64
338
Appendice III
Da Attitudes to Foreigners and Visions of the Past (NL 1977 III) a Jews and Gentiles (CL 1977 IV)
evidente nella produzione stessa della nuova GL 1982 II (The Sects); vd. ibid., c. 6, per un aggiornamento bibliografico
di Momigliano sulla questione (SCHÜRER II; RIVKIN 1978; Aspects of Judaism 1981).
iv
Vd. GL 1979 IV (Defence), n. vi. In un primo tempo, come testimonia P-o 83 (“The prohibition is well attested
for the time of the destruction of the Temple”, cfr. supra, n. 28), Momigliano aveva accolto la lezione "Titus". La
ripresa della versione CL 1977 IV in GL 1979 IV (Defence), cap. II, cc. 4-5, presenta rispetto alla NL modifiche
riconducibili ad approfondimenti nell'analisi dei documenti (oltre allo spostamento della proibizione al tempo di
Traiano e non più a quello di Tito si veda anche la rivalutazione della lettera già attribuita a Bar Kochba).
v
B. Sot. 49 b. Cfr. GL 1979 IV (Defence), c. 4, v. 5. L'episodio riportato nella Gemara al noto passo mishnaico
Sot. 9, 14 (B. Sot. 49 b) riporta un episodio di esecrazione dell'insegnamento del greco riferibile al tempo di Pompeo
perché esplicitamente collocato all’epoca del conflitto fra i due figli di Alessandro Ianneo, Aristobulo e Ircano.
vi
LIFSHITZ 1962.
vii
La citazione, che ricorre solo qui a c. 11, del passo della lettera in questione (P. Yad. 52 = SB 9843), mostra la
perplessità di Momigliano circa il testo proposto dall’editore ai rr. 12-13, διὰ τ[ὸ ὁρ]µὰν µὴ εὑρηθ[ῆ]ναι Ἑβραεστι
γ[ρά]ψασθαι (LIFSHITZ 1962), in base alla quale la lettera sarebbe stata scritta in greco perché "on n'a pas eu envie
d'écrire en hébreu" (p. 243). Sull'attribuzione della lettera a Bar Kochba stesso (LIFSHITZ 1962, 243-244, che identifica
nel nome dello scrivente, Soumaios, la versione greca di Shimon), Momigliano cambia invece parere, come evidente
nella modifica del testo riportata in apparato. Resta tuttavia convinto della capacità del suo autore, volendo, di scrivere
in ebraico. Di avviso contrario Yadin, che traduce "as we have no one who knows Hebrew", ed è convinto che l’autore
della lettera, Soumaios, sia un greco (YADIN 1971, 130). Ancora diversa la posizione di Howard e Shelton, che nel 1973
avevano già proposto una integrazione differente dal διὰ τ[ὸ ὁρ]µὰν di Lifschitz e una conseguente nuova
interpretazione del testo, a loro parere scritto in greco (non da Bar Kochba) per irreperibilità dell'unico scriba in grado
di farlo in ebraico: "because [Her]mas could not be found to write in Hebrew" (HOWARD - SHELTON 1973). Momigliano
non parrebbe comunque incline a letture riduttive circa la conoscenza dell'ebraico fra gli uomini di Bar Kochba (per
ulteriori discussioni sulla lettera, cfr. HESZER 2001, part. alle pp. 277 ss.; per una bibliografia essenziale sulle lettere,
vd. LEWIN 2001, 218 n. 16).
viii
La ripresa in GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), cap. II, c. 8 segue una più sintetica considerazione circa l'influenza
linguistica.
ix
Vd. GL 1979 IV (Defence), n. xxix.
x
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. xi.
xi
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. iv.
xii
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. vi.
xiii
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. xxiii.
xiv
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. xxv.
xv
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. xxvi.
xvi
Vd. GL 1982 I (Jews and Gentiles), n. xxvii.
339
Bibliografia
Bibliografia
ABEL, E. 1968 Abel., E.L., The myth of Jewish slavery in Ptolemaic Egypt, in REJ 127 (1968) 253-8
ABEL, F. 1931 Abel, F.-M., [recensione a:] Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione maccabaica, Roma
1930, RB (1931), 116-119
ID. 1946
Abel, F.-M., Hellénisme et orientalisme en Palestine au déclin de la période séleucide, RBi 53 (1946),
385-402
ID. 1949
Abel, F.-M., Les Livres des Maccabées, Paris 1949
ABRAHAMS
1917-1924
Abrahams, I., Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, 2 v., Cambridge 1917-1924
ID. 1926
Hebrew Ethical Wills,selected and edited with an introduction by I. Abrahams, Philadelphia 1926 (2. Ed.
with a new foreword by J. Goldin, Philadelphia 1976)
ABRAMSONAbramson, G.-Parfitt, T. (edd.), Jewish Education and Learning, Chur 1994
PARFITT 1994
ACHTEMEIER
2003
Achtemeier, P. J. (ed.), Il dizionario della Bibbia, ed. it. a c. di P. Capelli, Bologna 2003
ACKROYD
1953
ID.1968
Ackroyd, P. R., Criteria for the Maccabean Dating of O. T. Literature, VT 3 (1953), 113-132
ID. 1970
Ackroyd, P. R., Israel under Babylon and Persia, Oxford 1970
ADAMS 2003
Adams, J. N.-Janse, M.-Swain, S. (ed.), Bilingualism in Ancient Society, Oxford 2002
AFRICA 1961
Africa, T. W., Aristonicus, Blossius, and the City of the Sun, IRSH 6 (1961), 110-124
ALEXANDER,
P. J. 1967
Alexander, P. J., Oracle of Baalbek: The Tiburtine Sibyl in Greek Dress, Washington 1967
ALEXANDER,
P.S. 1990
Alexander, P. S., Quid Athenis et Hierosolymis? Rabbinic Midrash and Hermeneutics in the GrecoRoman World, in A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature, ed. P. R. Davies
and R. T. White, Sheffiel 1990, 101-124
ALLO 1933
Allo, E. B., Saint Jean, l’Apocalypse, texte, trad. et comm., 4. ed., Paris 1933
ALON 19801984
Alon, G., The Jews and Their Land in the Talmudic Age, 2 v., Jerusalem 1980-1984
Ackroyd, P. R., Exile and Restoration, London 1968
ALTHEIM 1956 Altheim, F., Römische Religiongeschichte, 2 v., 2. ed., Berlin 1956
ALTMAN 1963 Altman, A. (ed.), Biblical and Other Studies, Cambridge 1963
ANDERSON–
Anderson, A. J. O.-Dibble, C. (edd.), Florentine Codex: History of the Things of New Spain, transl. and.
DIBBLE 1950- ed., 13 voll., Salt Lake City 1950-1982
82
APPLEBAUM
Applebaum, S., Jews and Greeks in ancient Cyrene, Leiden 1979
1979
ARENHOEVEL
1967
Arenhoevel, D., Die Theokratie nach dem 1. und 2. Makkabäerbuch, Mainz 1967
340
Bibliografia
ARNDTGINGRICH
1957
Arndt, W. F. – Gingrich, F. W. (edd.), A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early
Christian Literature, Chicago 1957
ASSMAN 1998 Assman, J., Moses the Egyptian: the memory of Egypt in western monotheism, Cambridge 1998 (trad. it.
Milano 2000)
ATTRIDGE
1984
Attridge, H. W., Josephus and His Works, in Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, ed. M. E.
Stone, Assen 1984
AUERBACH
1962
Auerbach, E., Der Aufstieg der Priesterschaft zur Macht im alten Israel, VTS 9 (1962), 236-249
AUSCHER 1967 Auscher, D., Les relations entre la Grèce et la Palestine avant la conquête d’Alexandre, VT 17 (1967),
8-30
AVERINCEV
Averincev, S. S., Atene e Gerusalemme. La Grecia come letteratura, il mondo ebraico come tradizione,
1994
trad. it. Roma 1994
AVIGAD 1951
Avigad, N., The Rock-Carved Facades of the Jerusalem Necropolis, IEJ 1 (1950-1951)
ID. 1954
Avigad, N., Early Tombs in the Kidron Valley, Jerusalem 1954 [ebraico]
ID. 1976
Avigad, N., Beth She’arim 3, New Brunswick (NJ) 1976
ID. 1980
Avigad, N., Discovering Jerusalem, Jerusalem 1980
AVI-YONAH
1961
Avi-Yonah, M., Oriental Art in Roman Palestine, Roma 1961
ID. 1975
Avi-Yonah, M., Une école de mosaïque à Gaza au VIe siècle, in Colloque international pour l’étude de
la mosaïque classique, 2 : La mosaïque romaine, Paris 1975
ID. 1976
Avi-Yonah, M., The Jews of Palestine: A Political History from the Bar Kokhba War to the Arab
Conquest, New York 1976
BAER 1968
Baer, Y., The Persecution of Monotheistic Religion by Antiochus Epiphanes, Zion 33 (1968), 101-124
(ebraico)
BAGNALL
– Bagnall, R.S., – Derow, P., Greek Historical Documents: the Hellenistic Period, Chico (Cal.) 1981
DEROW 1981
BALL 1913
Ball, C.J., Epistle of Jeremy, in The Apocrypha and Pseudoepigrapha of the Old Testament, ed. R.H.
Charles, II voll., Oxford 1913
BAMMEL 1953 Bammel, Zum jüdischen Märtyrerkult, ThLZ 78 (1953), 119-126
BARAG 1987
Barag, D., A Silver Coin of Yohanan the High Priest and the Coinage in Judea in the Fourth Century
B.C., INJ 9 (1986-1987), 4-21
ID.1992
Barag, D., A Coin of Bagoas with a Representation of God on a Winged-Wheel, Qadmoniot 25 (1992),
97-99 [ebraico]
BARCLAY 1988 Barclay, J. M. G., Obeying the Truth: a study of Paul’s ethics in Galatians, Edinburgh 1988
ID. 1992
Barclay, J. M. G., Thessalonica and Corinth: social contrasts in Pauline Christianity, JSNT 47 (1992),
49-72
ID. 1996
Barclay, J. M. G., Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: from Alexander to Trajan (323 BCE-117 CE),
Edinburgh 1996 (trad. it.: Diaspora. I giudei nella diaspora mediterranea da Alessandro a Traiano,
Brescia 2004)
ID. 1998
Barclay, J. M. G., Paul and Philo on circumcision, NTS 44 (1998), 536-556
ID. 2002
Barclay, J., Apologetics in the Jewish Diaspora, in Bartlett 2002, 129-148
341
Bibliografia
ID. 2002
Barclay, J. M. G., Flavio Giuseppe e i conflitti culturali nell’antichità, Quaderni del Dip. di Filologia A.
Rostagni, Torino 2002, 29-45
BARDON 1952- Bardon, H., La littérature latine inconnue, Paris 1952-6
56
BAR-KOCHVA Bar-Kochva, B., Pseudo-Hecataeus “On the Jews”: Legitimizing the Jewish Diaspora, Berkeley 1996
1996
BARN 1956
Barn, J.W., “Egypt and the Greek Romance”, Akten des VII Int. Kongr. für Papyrologie, Mitteilungen
aus der Papyrussamlung der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, 5 (1956), 29-36
BARON 1952- Baron, S. W., A Social and Religious History of the Jews, 18 v., New York 1952-1983
1983
BARON 1964
Baron, S., History and Jewish Historians: Essays and Addresses, Philadelphia 1964, 23-42 [su L.
Finkelstein], 322-343 [su L. Herzfeld]
BARR 1974
Barr, J., ‘Philo of Biblos and his Phoenician History’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library
57, 1974, 17-68
BARTHÉLEMY Barthélemy, D., Redécouverte d’un chaînon manquant de l’histoire de la Septante, RB 60 (1953) 18-29
1953
BARTLETT
2002
Bartlett, J. R. (ed.), Jews in the Hellenistic and Roman Cities, London-New York 2002 (rec.: Robinson
2003)
BARTON 1968 Barton, J., Oracles of God : Perceptions of Ancient Prophecy in Israel after the Exile, London 1968
BASSER 2000
Basser, H. W., Studies in exegesis. Christian critiques of Jewish Law and Rabbinic responses, 70-300
C.E., Leiden 2000
BAUCKHAM
1995
Bauckham, R. (ed.), The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 4: The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian
Setting, Grand Rapids 1995
BAUMSTARK
1927
Baumstark, A., Wege zum Judentum des neutestamentlichen Zeitalters, BZTS 4 (1927), 24-34
ID. 1931
Baumstark, A., Pešīṭtā und palästinische Targum, BZ 19, 1931, 257-70
BECK 2003
Beck, R., Zoroaster, as perceived by the Greeks (2003), Encyclopaedia Iranica
BEER 1916
Beer, G., Die Entstehung des Judentums. Das Frühjudentum (430-200). Das Spätjudentum (200-63). Der
Untergang des jüdischen Gemeinwesens (63 v. bis 135 n. Chr.), capp. 10-13 s.v. Juda und Israel, in RE,
vol. 9.2, Stuttgart 1916, coll. 2428-2458
BELKIN 1940
Belkin, S., Philo and the Oral Law, Cambridge Mass. 1940
BELOCH 1893- Beloch, K.J., Griechische Geschichte, 3 voll., 1893 – 19041; 2. ed. Berlin – Leipzig 1922 – 1927 (rist.
1904
Berlin 1967)
BENGTSON
1988
Bengtson, H., History of Greece: From the Beginning to the Byzantine Era, transl. and updated by E. F.
Bloedow, Ottawa 1988
BENTZEN 1952 Bentzen, A., Daniel, 2. ed., Tübingen 1952
ID. 1970
Bentzen, A., King and Messiah, 2. ed., Oxford 1970 (ed. orig.: Zürich 1948)
BENVENISTE
1932
Benveniste, E., Une apocalypse Pehlevie: le Zamasp – Namak, RHR (106) 1932, 337-80
ID. 1966
Benveniste, E., Relations lexicales entre la Pere et la Grèce ancienne, in La Persia e il mondo grecoromano, Atti del Convegno Acc. dei Lincei, Roma 1966, 479-85
342
Bibliografia
BERCHMAN
2005
Berchman, R.M., Porhypry Against the Christians, Leiden – Boston 2005
BERNARD 1972 Bernard, A., Le Paneion d’El Kanaïs: les inscriptions grecques, Leiden 1972
BERNAYS 1866 Bernays, J., Theophrastos’ Schrift über Frömmigkeit, Berlin 1866
BERTI 1987
Berti, S., Introduzione a A. Momigliano, in Pagine ebraiche, Torino 1987, IX-XXV
ID. 1988A
Berti, S., Autobiografia, storicismo e verità storica in Arnaldo Momigliano, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 297-312
ID. 1988B
Berti, S., Gli insegnamenti di Federico Chabod, Belfagor 43.2 (1988), 423-439
BERTRAM 1935 Bertram, G., Der Hellenismus in der Urheimat des Evangeliums, Archiv fuer Religionswissenschaft 32
(1935), 265-281
ID. 1942
Bertram, G., Josephus und die abendländische Geschichtsidee, in W. Grundmann, Germanentum,
Christentum und Judentum, Leipzig 1942, v. 2, 41-84
BEVAN 1928
Bevan, E., Sibyls and Seers, London 1928
BICHLER 1983 Bichler, R., Hellenismus: Geschichte und Problematik eines Epochenbegriffs, Darmstadt 1983
ID. 1991
Bichler, R., Über die Geschichte des Hellenismus-Begriffs in der Deutschen Historiographie, in Said
1991
BICKERMAN
1927
Bickerman, E. J., Ritualmoral und Eselskult, MGWJ 71 (1927), 171-187 e 255-264
ID. 1928
Bickerman, E. J., Makkabäerbücher, I-III, RE XIV.1 (1928), coll. 779-800
ID. 1930
Bickerman, E. J., Zur Datierung des Pseudo-Aristeas, ZNTW 29 (1930), 280-298
ID. 1933
Bickerman, E. J., Ein jüdischer Festbrief vom Jahre 124 v. Chr., ZNTW 32 (1933), 233-254
ID. 1935A
Bickerman, E. J., Die Makkabäer. Eine Darstellung ihrer Geschichte von den Anfängen bis zum
Untergang des Hasmonäerhauses, Berlin 1935 (trad. ingl.: The Maccabees. An account of their history
from the beginnings to the fall of the house of the Hasmoneans, New York 1947 = Bickerman 1962, 91186)
ID. 1935B
Bickerman, E. J., La Charte Séleucide de Jérusalem, REJ 100 (1935), 4-35
ID. 1937
Bickerman, E. J., Der Gott der Makkabäer, Berlin 1937 (trad. ingl.: The God of the Maccabees, Leiden
1979)
ID. 1937
Bickerman, E. J., Un document relatif à la persécution d’Antiochos IV Epiphane, RHR 115 (1937), 188223
ID. 1939
Bickerman, E. J., Sur une inscription grecque de Sidon, in Mélanges syriens offerts à M. R. Dussaud, I,
Paris 1939, 91-99
ID. 1944A
Bickerman, E. J., Héliodore au Temple de Jérusalem, AIPhO 7 (1939-1944), 5-40
ID.1944B
Bickerman, E. J., The Colophon of the Greek Book of Esther, JBL 63 (1944), 339-362
ID. 1945
Bickerman, E., The date of Fourth Maccabees, in Louis Ginsberg Jubilee Volume, English Section, New
York 1945, 105-122; rist. in Bickerman, E., Studies in Jewish and Christian History, 3 voll., Leiden
1976-1986, vol. 1, 275-281; new ed. in Engl., includ. The God of the Maccabees, intr. by M. Hengel, ed.
by A. Tropper, 2 voll., Leiden 2007
ID. 1948
Bickerman, E. J., Une proclamation séleucide relative au temple de Jérusalem, Syria 25 (1946-1948),
67-85
343
Bibliografia
ID.1949
Bickerman, E. J., The Historical Foundations of Post-Biblical Judaism, Finkelstein Bd. I., 1955 2. ed.,
pp. 70-114 (1. ed.: 1949; 2. ed., =Bickerman 1962, 1-90)
ID. 1950
Bickerman, E. J., The Date of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, JBL 69 (1950), 245-260
ID.1951A
Bickerman, E. J., Notes on the Greek Book of Esther, PAAJR 20 (1951), 101-133
ID. 1951B
Bickerman, E.J., The Maxim of Antigonus of Soko, HTR 1952, 153-165
ID.1952A
Bickerman, E.J., La chaîne de la tradition pharisienne, RB 49 (1952), 44-54
ID. 1952B
Bickerman, E. J., Sur la chronologie de la sixième Guerre de Syrie, CE 27 (1952), 396-403
ID. 1952C
Bickerman, E. J., La chaîne de la tradition pharisienne, RBi 59 (1952), 44-54
ID.1962
A
Bickerman, E. J., From Ezra to the Last of the Maccabees. Foundations of Post-Biblical Judaism, New
York 1962 (riunisce, in trad. ingl., The Historical Foundations of Post-Biblical Judaism, Finkelstein Bd.
I., 1955 2. ed., pp. 70-114 (1. ed.: 1949); Die Makkabäer. Eine Darstellung ihrer Geschichte von den
Anfängen bis zum Untergang des Hasmonäerhauses, Berlin 1935 – 1. trad. ingl.: The Maccabees. An
account of their history from the beginnings to the fall of the house of the Hasmoneans, New York 1947)
ID. 1962B
Bickerman, E. J., The Civic Prayer for Jerusalem, in Harvard Theological Review 55, 1962, 163-85
ID. 1963
Bickerman, E.J., A propos d’un passage de Chares de Mitilène, in La parola del passato 91, 1963, 24355
ID. 1967A
Bickerman, E. J., Four Strange Books of the Bible, New York 1967
ID. 1967B
Bickerman, E., [rec. a] Goodenough, E., Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period, 13 v., New York
1953-1968, Syria 44 (1967), 131-161
ID.1988
Bickerman, E. J., The Jews in the Greek Age, Cambridge 1988
BICKERMANSMITH 1979
Bickerman, E. J.-Smith, M., The Ancient History of Western Civilization, New York 1979
BLACK 1961
Black, M., The Scrolls and Christian origins : studies in the Jewish background of the New Testament,
Chico (Cal.) 1961
ID. 1970
Black, M., Apocalypsis Henochi Graece, Leiden 1970
BLASSDEBRUNNER
1990
Blass, F. – Debrunner, A., Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch, 17. Aufl. bearb. von R.
Rehkopf, Göttingen 1990 (1. ed. 1976)
BLENKINSOPP Blenkinsopp, J., A history of prophecy in Israel : from the settlement in the land to Hellenistic period,
1984
London 1984
BOHAK 2002
Bohak, G., Ethnic Continuity in the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity, in Bartlett 2002, 175-192
BÖHL 1914
Böhl, F. M. T., Die Juden im Urteil der griechischen und römischen Schriftsteller, ThT 48 (1914), 371389 e 473-498
BOKSER 1984
Bokser, B. M., The origins of the Seder : The Passover rite and early rabbinic Judaism, Berkeley 1984
ID. 1984
Bokser, B., The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism, Berkeley 1984
BONGARD
LEVIN,
MARCONE
1995
– “Ora devo cercare di vivere”. Una richiesta di aiuto da Momigliano a Rostovtzeff, a c. di G. BongardLevin e A. Marcone, Athenaeum 83 (1995), 510-512
BOUSSET 1906 Bousset, W., Die Offenbarung Johannis. Kritisch-exegetisches Kommentar, 5. ed., Göttingen 1906
344
Bibliografia
ID. 1926
Bousset, W., Die Religion der Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter, 3. ed. a c. di H. Gressmann,
Tübingen 1926
ID. 1926
Bousset, W., Die Religion des Judentums im späthellenistischen Zeitalter, 3. ed., Tübingen 1926
BOWENLactantius, Divine Institutes, tr. with an introduction and notes by A. Bowen and P. Garnsey, Liverpool
GARNSEY 2003 2003
BOWERSOCK
1990
ID. 1991
Bowersock, G. W., Hellenism in Late Antiquity, Cambridge 1990
Bowersock, G.W., Momigliano’s Quest for the Person, in The Presence of the Historian: Essays in
memory of Arnaldo Momigliano,ed. by M. P. Steinberg, H&Th Beiheft 30, Middletown 1991, 27-36
BOWKER 1973 Bowker, J., Jesus and the Pharisees, Cambridge 1973
BOWMAN 1975 Bowman, J., The Samaritan problem : studies in the relationship of Samaritanism, Judaism, and early
Christianity, Pittsburgh 1975 (ed. orig.: Samaritanische Probleme : Studien zum Verhältnis von
Samaritanertum, Judentum und Urchristentum, 1967)
BOWMAN 1977 Bowman, J. (ed.), Samaritan documents : relating to their history, religion and life, Pittsburgh 1977
BRAUN, M.
1938
Braun, M., History and Romance in Graeco-Oriental Literature, Oxford 1938
BRAUN, R.
1973
Braun, R., Kohelet und frühhellenistische Populärphilosophie, Berlin 1973
BRAVERMAN Braverman, J., Jerome’s Commentary on Daniel, Washington 1978
1978
BRECCIA 1927 Breccia, E., Juifs et Chrétiens de l’ancienne Alexandrie: conférence donnée au siège de l’Organisation
sioniste le 18 avril 1927, Alexandrie 1927
BRIGHT 1959
Bright, J., A History of Israel, Philadelphia 1959
BROCK 1972
Brock, S. P., The Phenomenon of the Septuagint, OTS 17 (1972), 11-36
ID. 1997
Brock, S.P., A Brief Outline of Syriac Literature, Baker Hill, Kottayam 1997
ID. 2006
Brock, S.P., An Iintroduction to Syriac Studies, Piscataway NJ 2006
BROOKE 1985 Brooke, G. J., Exegesis at Qumran : 4Q florilegium in its Jewish context, Sheffield 1985
BROOTEN 1982 Brooten, B. J., Women leaders in the ancient Synagogue : inscriptional evidence and background
iussues, Chico (Cal.) 1982
BROSHI 1974
Broshi, M., The Expansion of Jerusalem in the Reigns of Hezekiah and Manasseh, IEJ 24 (1974), 21-26
ID. 1978
Broshi, M., Estimating the Population of Ancient Jerusalem, BAR 4/2 (1978), 10-15
BROWN 1988
Brown, P., Arnaldo Dante Momigliano, 1908-1987, PBA 74 (1988), 405-42
BRÜHL 1977
Brühl, N., Das apokryphische Susanna-Buch, in Jahrbücher für Jüdische Geschichte und Literatur 3
(1977) 1-69
BRÜNE 1913
Brüne, B., Flavius Josephus un seine Schriften in ihrem Verhältnis zum Judentume, Gütersloh 1913
BUBER 1960
Buber, M., The prophetic faith, New York 1960
ID. 1961
Buber, M., Two types of faith, New York 1961
BUCHANAN
Buchanan, G. W., The consequences of the Covenant, Leiden 1970
345
Bibliografia
1970
BÜCHLER 1922 Büchler, A., Types of Jewish-Palestinian piety from 70 B. C. E. to 70 C. E. : the ancient pious men,
London 1922
ID. 1922-1924 Büchler, A., Ben Sira’s Conception of Sin and Atonement, JQR N.S. 13 (1922-1923), 303-335; 461-502;
14 (1923-1924), 55-83
BUDDE 1905
Budde, K., Die Religion des Volkes Israel bis zur Verbannung, 2. wohlf. Ausg., Giessen 1905
BULL –
Bull., R.J. – Wright, G. E., Newly Discovered Temples on Mt. Gerizim in Jordan, HThR 58 (1965), 234WRIGHT 1965 37
IDD. 1968
Bull., R.J. – Wright, G.E., The Excavation of Tell el Ras on Mt. Gerizim, BA 31 (1968), 58-72.
BUNGE 1971
Bunge, J. G., Untersuchungen zum zweiten Makkabäerbuch, Bonn 1971
BURCHARD
1965
Burchard, C., Untersuchungen zu Joseph und Aseneth, Tübingen 1965
BURESCH 1889 Buresch, K., Klaros. Untersuchungen zum Orakelwesen de späteren Altertum, Leipzig 1889
BURKITT 1914 Burkitt, F. C., Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, London 1914
BURSTEN 1989 Burstein, S.M., Agatharchides of Cnidus, on the Eythraean Sea, London 1989
BYATT 1973
Byatt, A., Josephus and Population Numbers in First Century Palestine, PEQ 105 (1973), 51-60
CADBURY
1955
CAIRD 1966
Cadbury, H. J., The Grandson of Ben Sira, HThR 48 (1955), 219-225
CAMERON
2014
Cameron, Av., Momigliano and Christianity, in WARBURG COLL. 2014, 107-127
Caird, G. B., A Commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, with. transl., London 1966
CANFORA 1967 Canfora, L., Formazione del corpus demostenico e primi inventari, Padova 1967
ID. 1974
Canfora, L., Discorsi e lettere di Demostene, Torino 1974
ID. 1987
Canfora, L., Ellenismo, Roma-Bari 1987
ID. 1989
Canfora, L., L’”Ellenismo” di Momigliano, StudStor 30, 1 (1989), 53-58
CAPELLI 2002 Convegno: Saggezza straniera. Roma e il mondo della Bibbia (Bibbia, Ebrei e Oriente greco-romano dal
I sec. av. e. v. al III sec. e. v.), Verbania Intra, 31 gennaio-3 febbraio 2002, presentato da P. Capelli,
http://www.biblia.org
CARDASCIA
1951
CARDAUNS
1967
Cardascia, G., Les Archives des Murasû, Paris 1951
Cardauns, B., Juden und Spartaner, Hermes 95 (1967), 317-324
CASSUTO 1973 Cassuto, U., Biblical and oriental studies, 2 v., Jerusalem 1973
CAVAGLION
1988
Cavaglion, A., Felice Momigliano (1866-1924). Una biografia, Bologna 1988
CAVALLO 2008 Cavallo, G., La scrittura greca e latina dei papiri, una introduzione, Pisa – Roma 2008
CAVALLO –
MAEHLER
2008
Cavallo, G. – Maehler, H., Hellenistic Bookhands,Berlin – New York 2008
346
Bibliografia
CERVELLI 1989 Cervelli, I., L'ultimo Momigliano: costanti e variabili di una ricerca, StudStor 30, 1 (1989), 59-104
CERBELAUD
2002
Cerbelaud, D., Bulletin d’études juives et judéo-chretiennes: judéo-christianisme antique, dialogue
judéo-chrètien actuel, RSPh 86 (2002), 123-144
CHARLES 1912 Charles, R. H., The Book of Enoch, Oxford 1912
ID. 1920
Charles, R. H., A critical and exegetical commentary on the Revelation of St. John, with introduction,
notes, and indices, also the Greek text and English translation, 2 v., Edinburgh 1920
ID. 1929
Charles, R. H., A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, Oxford 1929
CHARLESWORT Charlesworth , J. H. (ed.), John and Qumran, London 1972
H 1972
ID. 1980
Charlesworth, J. H., The Origins and Subsequent History of the Authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Four
Transitional Phases among the Qumran Essenes, RQ 10 (1980), 213-233
ID. 1983-1985 Charlesworth, J. H. (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. 1: Apocalyptic Literature and
Testaments; 2: Expansions of the “Old Testament” Legend, Wisdom and Philosophical Literature,
Prayers, Psalms and Odes, Fragments of lost Judeo-Hellenistic Works, London 1983-1985
CHERNISS 1945 Cherniss, H., The Riddle of the Early Academy, Berkeley 1945
CHRIST 1988
Christ, K., Arnaldo Momigliano e la storiografia tedesca dell’antichità, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 313-325
CII
Frey, J. B., Corpus Inscriptionum Iudaicarum, Roma 1936-1952
CLEMENTS
1978
Clements, R. E., Prophecy and tradition, Atlanta 1978
CLOCHÉ 1939
Cloché, P., A propos d’un chapitre de Polybe, AC 8 (1939), 361-70.
CODY 1969
Cody, A., A history of Old Testament priesthood, Rome 1969
COGGINS 1975 Coggins, R. J., Samaritan and Jews : the origins of Samaritanism reconsidered, Oxford 1975
COHEN, B.
1966
COHEN, G.
1991
ID. 1994
Cohen, B., Jewish and Roman Law: A Comparative Study, New York 1966
COHEN, H.
1910
Cohen, H., Innere Beziehungen der Kantischen Philosophie zum Judentum, in Bericht der Lehranstalt
für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin 28 (1909), Berlin 1910
COHEN, S.
1981
Cohen, S. J. D., Patriarchs and Scholarchs, PAAJR 48 (1981), 57-85
ID. 1984
Cohen, S. J. D., The Significance of Javneh, HUCA 55 (1984) 27-53
ID. 1985
Cohen, S. J. D., The Origins of the Matrilinear Principle in Rabbinic Law, AJS Review 10 (1985), 19-53
ID. 1987
Cohen, S. J. D., From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Philadelphia 1987
ID. 1999
Cohen, S. J. D., The Temple and the Synagogue, in CHJ III – The Early Roman Period, ed. by W.
Horbury, W.D. Davies, J. Sturdy, Cambridge 1999, 298-325
Cohen, G. D., Studies in the Variety of Rabbinic Cultures, New York 1991
Cohen, G. D., The Blessing of Assimilation, in Great Jewish Speeches throughout History, ed. S.
Forman, North Vale (NJ) 1994, 183-191
COHEN, S.Cohen, S. J. D.-Frerichs, E. S. (edd.), Diasporas in antiquity, Atlanta 1993
FRERICHS 1993
347
Bibliografia
COLLINS 1973 Collins, J. J., The Provenance of the Third Sibylline Oracle, Bulletin of the Institute of Jewish Studies 2
(1974), 1-18
ID. 1974
Collins, J. J., The Sibylline Oracles of Egyptian Judaism, Missoula 1974
ID. 1975A
Collins, J. J., Jewish Apocalyptic against Its Hellenistic Near Eastern Environment, BASOR 220 (1975),
27-36
ID. 1975B
Collins, J. J., The Court Tales in Daniel and the Development of Jewish Apocalyptic, JBL 94 (1975),
218-234
ID. 1977
Collins, J. J., The Apocalyptic Vision of the Book of Daniel, Missoula 1977
ID. 1983
Collins, J. J., Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, New York
19831 (Gran Rapids 19992, ed. accr. di 70 pp.)
ID. 1984
Collins, J. J., The apocalyptic imagination: an introduction to the Jewish matrix of Christianity, New
York 1984
ID. 1987
Collins, J. J., The Development of the Sibyilline Tradition, in ANRW II. Principat, XX, 1, Berlin 1987,
421-459
ID. 1997
Collings, J. J., Seers, Sibyls and Sages in Hellenistic-Roman Judaism, Leiden 1997
COLLINS, A. Y. Collins, A. Y., The Combat Myth in the Book of Revelation, Missoula 1976
1976
ID., A. Y. 2000 Collins, A. Y., Cosmology and eschatology in Jewish and Christian Apocalypticism, Leiden 2000
COLPE 1967
C. Colpe, Jüdisch-hellenistische Literatur, in Der kleine Pauly, vol. 2, Stuttgart 1967, coll. 1507-1512
CORNELL 1988 Cornell, T., Arnaldo Momigliano (1908-1987), RSI 100. 2 (1988), 326-333
COWLEY 1923 Cowley, A. (ed.), Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford 1923
CRACCO
Cracco Ruggini, L., Arnaldo Momigliano: lo storico antico che ha trasformato "le fonti in vita del
RUGGINI 1989A passato", StudStor 30, 1 (1989), 105-127
ID. 1989B
Cracco Ruggini, L. (ed.), Omaggio ad Arnaldo Momigliano. Storia e storiografia nel mondo antico,
Como 1989
CRENSHAW
1971
CROSS 1958
Crenshaw, J. L., Prophetic conflict : its effect upon Israelite religion, Berlin 1971
ID. 1963
Cross, F. M., The Discovery of the Samaria Papyri, BA 26 (1963), 110-121
ID.1966
Cross, F. M., Aspects of Samaritan and Jewish History in Late Persian and Hellenistic Times, HThR 59
(1966), 201-211
ID. 1984
Cross, F.M., Fragments of the Prayer of Nabonidus, IEG 34 (1984) 260-64
Cross, F. M., The Ancient Library of Qumrân, London 1958
CUMONT 1909 Cumont, F., La plus ancienne géographie astrologique, Klio 9 (1909) 265-273
CUMONTBIDEZ 1934
Cumont, F. - Bidez, J., Les Mages Hellénisés : Zoroastre, Ostanès et Histaspe d’après la tradition
grecque, Paris 1937 (3. ed. Paris 2007)
DAICHES 1910 Daiches, S., The Jews in Babylonia in the Time of Ezra and Nehemiah, London 1910
DALBERT 1954 Dalbert, P., Die Theologie der hellenistisch-jüdischen Missionliteratur unter Ausschluss von Philo und
Josephus, Hamburg 1954
348
Bibliografia
DAN 1989
Dan, J., The Ancient Jewish Mysticism, Tel Aviv 1989 [ebraico]
ID. 1995
Dan, J., Jewish Gnosticism, JSQ 2 (1995), 309-328
DANBY 1933
The Mishnah, transl. from the Hebrew, with introd. and brief explanatory notes by H. Danby, Oxford
1933
DANIÉLOU
1958
Daniélou, J., Théologie du judéo-christianisme, Paris 1958 2. ed., a c. di M.-O. Boulnois, J. Paramelle,
M.-J. Rondeau, Tournai-Paris 1991
ID. 1962
Daniélou, J., The Dead Sea Scrolls and primitive Christianity, New York 1962 (ed. orig.: Les manuscrits
de la Mer Morte et les origines du Christianisme, Paris 1957)
DAUBE 1949
Daube, D., Rabbinic Method of Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric, HUCA 22 (1949), 239-46
ID. 1956
Daube, D., The New Testament and rabbinic Judaism, London 1956
DAVIDSON
1924-1933
DAVIES 1974
Davidson, I., Otzar Hashira Vehapiyyut, 4 v., New York 1924-1933
Davies, W. D., The Gospel and the land : early Christianity and Jewish territorial doctrine, Berkeley
1974
DAVIS 1956
Israel: Its Role in Civilization, ed. M. Davis, New York 1956
DEININGER
1971
Deininger, J., Der politische Widerstand gegen Rom in Griechenland, Berling 1971
DEISSMANN
1919
Deissmann, A., Paulus, Tübingen 1910
DE JONGE 1996 De Jonge, H.J., Joseph Scaliger's Historical Criticism of the New Testament, Novum Testamentum 38, 2
(1996), 176-193
DE LACEY
De Lacey, D.R., In Search of a Pharisee, Tyndale Bulletin 43, 2 (1992) 353-72.
1992
DEL MEDICO
1958
DELCOR 1971
Del Medico, H. E., Le mythe des Esséniens : des origines à la fin du Moyen Âge, Paris 1958
ID. 1978
Delcor, M. (ed.), Qumrân : sa piété, sa théologie et son milieu, Louvain- Paris 1978
ID. 1979
Delcor, M., Études bibliques et orientales de religions comparées, Leiden 1979
Delcor, M., Le Livre de Daniel, Paris 1971
DELLING 1969 Delling, G., Bibliographie zur jüdisch-hellenistischen und intertestamentarischen Literatur 1900 -1965,
in Verb. mit G. Zachhuber und H. Berthold, Berlin 1969
ID.1974
Delling, G., Perspektiven der Erforschung des hellenistischen Judentums, HUCA 45 (1974), 133-176
(Abs. in StPh 5 (1978), 124 ss.)
ID. 1975
Delling, G., Bibliographie zur jüdisch-hellenistischen und intertestamentarischen Literatur 1900-1970,
in Verb. mit M. Maser, Berlin 1975
DENIS 1970A
Denis, A.-M., Héraclès et ses cousins de Judée, in Hommages M. Delcourt, Bruxelles 1970, 168-178
ID. 1970B
Denis, A.-M., Fragmenta Pseudepigraphorum quae supersunt graeca, Leiden 1970
DERRON 1986 Derron, P. (ed.), Sentences de Pseudo-Phocylides, Paris 1986
DES PLACES
1973
Des Places, E., Le Dieu Incertain des Juifs, JS 1973, 289-294
DESTRO-PESCE Destro, A.-Pesce, M., Antropologia delle origini cristiane, Bari 1997
349
Bibliografia
1997
DHORME 1937 Dhorme, E., L'évolution religieuse d'Israël. 1: La religion des Hébreux nomades, Bruxelles 1937
DI DONATO
1992
Di Donato, R., Introduzione a Le radici classiche della storiografia moderna, Firenze 1992
ID. 1995
Di Donato, R., Materiali per una biografia intellettuale di Arnaldo Momigliano, I. Pace e libertà nel
mondo antico, in Athenaeum, n.s. 83 (1995) 213-44.
ID. 1996
Di Donato, R., Introduzione. Uno storico, un testo, un contesto, in Momigliano, A., Pace e libertà nel
mondo antico, con un’appendice documentaria e ventuno lettere a Ernesto Codignola, a c. di R. Di
Donato, Firenze 1996.
ID. 1999
Di Donato, R., I Greci selvaggi. Antropologia storica di Ernesto De Martino, Roma 1999
ID. 2004
Di Donato, R., Arnaldo Momigliano dall’antiquaria alla storia della cultura: alcune ragioni per una
ricerca, Eikasmos 15 (2004), 443-461
ID. 2006
Di Donato, R., Gli anni di Londra, in POLVERINI 2006, 125-136
ID. 2010
Di Donato, R., Arnaldo Momigliano. L’ultimo Contributo. Belfagor 386, 2010, 183-200; ed. ingl. The
final Contributo, in WARBURG COLL. 2014, 165-177
DIAZ 1988
Diaz, F., Momigliano e la riflessione sulla storia, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 334-347
DIEZ MACHO
1969 – 1979.
Díez Macho, A., Neophyti I. Targum Palestinense MS de la Bibliotheca Vaticana, I (Génesis) 1968; II
(Éxodo), 1970; III (Levítico), 1971; IV (Números), 1974; V (Deuterónimo), 1978; VI (Apéndices), 1979
DILLON 2002
Dillon, J., The Essenes in Greek Sources: Some Reflections, in Bartlett 2002, 117-128
DIONISOTTI
1988A
ID. 1988B
Dionisotti, C., Commemorazione di Arnaldo Momigliano, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 348-360
ID. 1989
Dionisotti, C., Ricordo di Arnaldo Momigliano, Bologna 1989
ID. 1997
Dionisotti, C., Momigliano e il Contesto, in Belfagor, LII, 6, 30 novembre 1997 (n. 312), 633-48, rist. in
Ricordi della Scuola italiana, Roma 1998, 587-604
Dionisotti, C., Arnaldo Momigliano e Croce, Belfagor 43.2 (1988), 617-642
DIRKSEN 1993 Dirksen, P.B., La Peshitta dell’Antico Testamento, ed. ita. a c. di P.G. Borbone, Brescia 1993
DOMBROWSKI Dombrowski, B., HaYahad in 1QS and To Koinon: An Instance of Early Greek and Jewish Synthesis,
1966
HThR 59 (1966), 293-307
DORNSEIFF
1939
ID. 1959
Dornseiff, F., Echtheitsfragen antik-griechischer Literatur, Berlin 1939
DRERUP 1923
Drerup, E., Demosthenes im Urteile des Altertums: von Theopomp bis Tzetzes. Geschichte, Roman,
Legende, Würzburg 1923
DRIVER 1954
Driver, G.R., Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century B.C., Oxford 1954
DROGE 1996
Droge, A.J., Josephus between Greeks and Barbarians, in Josephus’ Contra Apionem. Studies in
Character & Context, edd. L.H. Feldman & J.R. Levinson, Leiden 1996, 115-142
Dornseiff, F., Kleine Schriften, I: Antike und Alter Orient, 2. ed., Leipzig 1959
DROYSEN 1893 Droysen, J. G., Kleine Schriften, Leipzig 1893
DUBARLE 1966 Dubarle, A. M., Judith: formes et sens des diverses traditions, Rome 1966
DUNN 1999
Dunn, J. D. G., Who did Paul think he was? A study of Jewish-Christian identity, NTS 45 (1999), 174350
Bibliografia
193
DUPONTSOMMERPHILONENKO
1987
DYCK 2002
Dupont-Sommer, A.-Philonenko, M. (ed.), Ecrits intertestamentaires, Paris 1987
Dyck, J., Philo, Alexandria and Empire: the Politics of Allegorical Interpretation, in BARTLETT 2002,
149-174
EISENMAN
1983
Eisenman, R., Maccabees, Zadokites, Christians and Qumran : a new hypothesis of Qumran origins,
Leiden 1983
EISSFELDT
1939
Eissfeldt, O., Ras Shamra und Sanchunjaton, in Beiträge zur Religionsgeschichte des Alterturms, Heft 4
(1939)
ID. 1952A
Eissfeldt, O., Einleitung in das Alte Testament (3. ed., Tübingen 1964)
ID. 1952B
Eissfeldt, O., Sanchunjaton von Berut unf Ilumilku von Ugarit, in Beiträge zur Religionsgeschichte des
Alterturms, Heft 5 (1952)
ID. 1952C
Eissfeldt, O., Taautos und Sanchuniaton, in Sitzungberichte der Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften
zu Berlin (1952), n. 1.
ELBOGEN 1993 Elbogen, E., Jewish Liturgy: a Comprehensive History, Philadelphia 1993
ENSLINZEITLIN 1972
The Book of Judith, Greek text with an Engl. transl., comm. and crit. notes by M. S. Enslin; ed. with a
general intr. and append. by S. Zeitlin, Leiden 1972
FALK 1985
Falk, H., Jesus the Pharisee : a new look at the Jewisness of Jesus, New York 1985
FARMER 1956 Farmer, W., Maccabees, Zealots and Josephus, New York 1956
FEARGHAIL
Ó Fearghail, F., The Jews in the Hellenistic Cities of Acts, in Bartlett 2002, 39-54
2002
FELDMAN 1960 Feldman, L. H., The Orthodoxy of the Jews in Hellenistic Egypt, “Jewish Social Studies” 22 (1960), 215237
FELDMAN 1963 Feldman, L. H., Scholarship on Philo and Josephus (1937-1962), New York s. d. [1963], 1-26
ID. 1977
Feldman, L., Hengel’s “Judaism and Hellenism” in Retrospect, JBL 96 (1977), 371-382
ID. 1987
Feldman, L., How Much Hellenism in Jewish Palestine?, HUCA 57 (1987), 83-111
ID. 1989
Feldman, L. , A Selective Critical Bibliography of Josephus, in Josephus, the Bible, and History, ed. by
L. H. Feldman and G. Hata, Leiden 1989, 330-448
ID. 1993
Feldman, L., Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to
Justinian, Princeton 1993 (Bibliografia: 594-596)
ID. 2007
Feldman, L., Hellenistic Judaism, s.v. Judaism (2007) in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online :
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9105859
FESTUGIÈRE
1950-1954
Festugière, La révelation d’Hermès Trismegiste, 4 v., Paris 1950-1954
FINKEL 1974
Finkel, A., The Pharisees and the Teacher of Nazareth : a study of their background, their halachic and
midrashic teachings, the similarities and differences, Leiden 1974
FINKELSTEIN
1943
ID. 1949
Finkelstein, L., Pre-Maccabean Documents in the Passover Haggadah, HThR 36 (1943), 1-38
Finkelstein, L. (ed.), The Jews: their history, culture, and religion, New York 19491 (New York 19552)
351
Bibliografia
ID. 1950
Finkelstein, L., Introduction to the treatises Abot and Abot de-Rabbi Nathan [heb.], New York 1950
ID. 1966
Finkelstein, L., The Pharisees : the sociological background of their faith, 3. ed., Philadelphia 1966
FINLEY 1966
Finley, M. I., introd. a: The Jewish War and other Selections, London 1966
FIORENZA
1976
Fiorenza Schüssler, E. (ed.), Aspects of religious propaganda in Judaism and early Christianity, Notre
Dame (Ind.) 1976
FISCHEL 1949 Fischel, H., Rabbinic Methods and Interpretation and Hellenistic Rhetoric , HUCA 22 (1949), 239-264
ID. 1953
Fischel, H., Alexandrian Methods of Interpretation and the Rabbis, in Festschrift Hans Lewald, Basel
1953, 27-44
ID. 1968A
Fischel, H., Story and History: Observations on Greco-Roman Rhetoric and Pharisaism, American
Oriental Society, Middle West Branch, 1969
ID. 1968B
Fischel, H., Studies in Cynicism and the Ancient Near East: The Transformation of a ‘Chria’, in
Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, Leiden 1968,
372-411
ID. 1973
Fischel, H., Rabbinic Literature and Greco-Roman Philosophy, Leiden 1973
FISCHER 1978 Fischer, U., Eschatologie und Jenseitsewartung im hellenistischen Diasporajudentum, Berlin-New York
1978 (Diss. Heidelberg)
ID. 1978
Fischer, U., Eschatologie und Jenseitserwartung im hellenistischen Diaspora-Judentum, Berlin 1978
FITZMYER
Fitzmyer, J., Languages of Palestine in the First Century AD, CBQ 32 (1970), 501-531
1970
FITPATRICK
Fitzpatrick-McKinley, A., Synagogue Communities in the Graeco-Roman Cities, in Bartlett 2002, 55-87
2002
FLUSSER 1972 Flusser, D., The Four Empires in the Fourth Sibyl and in the Book of Daniel, Israel Oriental Studies 2
(1972), 148-175
ID. 1978
Flusser, D., An early Jewish-Christian Document in the Tiburtine Sibyl, in Paganisme, Judaïsme,
Christianisme. Mélanges offerts à Marcel Simon, Paris 1978, 153-183
FOERSTER
1981
Foerster, W., From exile to Christ : a historical introduction to Palestinian Judaism, Philadelphia 1981
(ed. orig.: 3a ed. riv., Hamburg 1959: Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte I : das Judentum Palästinas zur
Zeit Jesu und der Apostel)
FOOT MOORE Foot Moore, G., Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era, 3 v. (1927–30, reprinted 1966–67)
1927-1930
FORKMAN
Forkman, G., The limits of the religious community : expulsion from the religious community within the
1972
Qumran sect, within rabbinic Judaism, and within primitive Christianity, Lund 1972
FORMAN 1994 Great Jewish Speeches throughout History, ed. S. Forman, North Vale (NJ) 1994
FRANKEL 1841 Frankel, Z., Historisch-Kritische Studien zu der Septuaginta Nebst Beiträgen zu den Targumim:
Vorstudien zu der Septuaginta, Leipzig 1841
FRASER 1972
Fraser, P.M., Ptolemaic Alexandria, 3. v., London 1972
FREUDENTHAL Freudenthal, J., Hellenistische Studien, Heft I. Alexander Polyhistor und die von ihm erhaltenen Reste
1874
jüdischer und samaritanischer Geschichtswerke, Breslau 1874
FREYNE 2002
Freyne, S., Introduction: Studying the Jewish Diaspora in Antiquity, in BARTLETT 2002, 1-5
FRIEDLÄNDER Friedländer, M., Patristische und talmudische Studien, Wien 1878
1878
352
Bibliografia
ID. 1898
Friedländer, M., Der vorchristliche jüdische Gnosticismus, Göttingen 1898
ID. 1903
Friedländer, M., Geschichte der jüdischen Apologetik als Vorgeschichte des Christentums, Zürich 1903
ID. 1905
Friedländer, M., Die religiösen Bewegungen innerhalb des Judentums im Zeitalter Jesu, Berlin 1905
ID. 1916
Pirke de Rabbi Eliezer, according to the text of the manuscript belonging to Abraham Epstein of Vienna,
transl. and annotated with introd. and indices by G. Friedlander, London 1916 (New York 19814)
FRIEDMANN
1880
Pesikta Rabbati: Midrash für den Fest Cyclus und die ausgezeichneten Sabbate, krit. bearb., comment.
[...] von M. Friedmann, Wien 1880
FRITZ 1972
Fritz, K. von (ed.), Pseudepigrapha. I, Pseudopythagorica. Lettres de Platon. Littérature
pseudépigraphique juive, huit exposés suivis de discussion par R. Syme, W. Burkert, H. Thesleff, M.
Hengel, Vandoeuvres-Gèneve 1972
FRYE 1972
Frye , R. N., Gestures of Deference to Royalty in Ancient Iran, Iranica Antiqua, 9, 1972, 102-7
FUBINI 1998
Fubini, G., Storicismo, storia della storiografia e ebraismo in Arnaldo Momigliano, in Appartenenza e
differenza: Ebrei d’Italia e letteratura, a c. di J. Hassine, J. Mian Montefiore, S. Debenedetti Stow,
Firenze 1998, 43-65
GABBA 1976
Gabba, E., Sulla valorizzazione politica della leggenda delle origini troiane di Roma fra III e II secolo
a.C., in M. Sordi (ed.), I canali della propaganda nel mondo antico, CISA 4, Milano 1976, 84-101
ID. 1988
Gabba, E., Aspetti della storiografia di Arnaldo Momigliano, RSI 100.2 (1988), 361-380
GAFFIN 1997
Gaffin, I., Land, center and diaspora, Sheffield 1997
GAGER 1969
Gager, J. G., Pseudo-Hecataeus Again, ZNTW 60 (1969), 130-139
ID. 1972
Gager, J. G., Moses in Greco-Roman Paganism, Nashville 1972 (rec.: Stern 1973)
GALLING 1964 Galling, K., Studien zur Geschichte Israels im persischen Zeitalter, Tübingen 1964
GAMNIE 1976
Gamnie, J. G., The Classification, Stages of Growth and Changing Intentions in the Book of Daniel, JBL
95 (1976), 191-204
GARCIA
García Martínez, F., Testi di Qumran, ed. ita a c. di C. Martone, Brescia 20032 (19961)
MARTINEZ
2003
GAUGER 1980 Gauger, J.-D., Phlegon von Tralleis, Mirab. III. Zu einem Dokument geistigen Widerstandes gegen Rom,
Chiron 10 (1980), 225-263
GEFFCKEN
1902
GEIGER 1857
Geffcken, J., Komposition und Entstehungszeit der Oracula Sibyllina, Leipzig 1902
Geiger, A.,Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der innern Entwicklung des
Judenthums, Breslau 1857
GELLER 1978
Geller, M., New Sources for the Origin of the Rabbinic Ketubah, HUCA 49 (1978), 227-245
GERA 1998
Gera, D., Judea and Mediterranean politics, 219 to 161 BCE, London 1998
GERATY 1975 Geraty, L.T., The Khirbet el-Kôm bilingual ostracon, in BASO 220 (1975) 55-66
GIARRIZZO
1988
GIBLET 1963
Giarrizzo, G., Storia sacra, storia profana: la tradizione come unità vissuta, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 381-399
GIBSON 1975
Gibson, J.C.L., Textbook of Syrian Semitic Incriptions, vol. II: Aramaic Inscriptions, Oxford 1975
Giblet, J., Eupolème et l’historiographie du Judaïsme hellénistique, EThL 39 (1963), 539-554
353
Bibliografia
GINSBERG
1948
Ginsberg, H.L., Studies in Daniel, New York 1949
ID. 1949
Ginsberg, H.L., In Re My Studies on Daniel, JBL 68 (1949) 402-7
GINSBURG
1934
Ginsburg, M. S., Sparta und Judaea, CPh 29 (1934), 117-122
GINZBERG
1909
Ginzberg, L., The Legends of the Jews, 7 voll., New York 1909, 3. (shorter version: New York 1971; ed.
it. Le leggende degli Ebrei, trad. it. di E. Loewenthal, Milano 1995-)
ID. 1922
Ginzberg, L., Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte, New York 1922; orig. pubbl. In MGWJ 55 (1911) – 58
(1914); 2. ed., riv. e aggiorn., New York 1976
GIOVANNINI- Giovannini, A. – Müller, H., Die Beziehungen zwischen Rom und den Juden im 2. Jh. v. Chr., MH 28
MÜLLER 1971 (1971), 156-171
GLUSTROM
1973
Glustrom, S., The language of Judaism, New York 1973 (1. ed: 1966)
GOLB 1960
Golb, N., Who were the Magariya, JAOS 80 (1960), 347-359
GOLDIN 1972
Goldin, J., Several Sidelights of a Torah Education, in Ex Orbe Religionum. Studia G. Widengren,
Leiden 1972, v. 1, 176-191
ID. 1988
Goldin, J., Studies in Midrash and Related Literature, Philadelphia 1988, 57-76
GOLDSCHMIDT Goldschmidt, R. P., Jerusalem in First Temple Times, in Levine, L. I. (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathedra 2,
1982
Jerusalem 1982, 328-351
GOLDSTEIN
1975
Goldstein, J., The Tales of the Tobiads, in Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty, ed. J. Neusner, 4 voll.,
Leiden 1975, III, 85-193
ID. 1981
Goldstein, J., Jewish Acceptance and Rejection of Hellenism, in Sanders 1981
GOODBLATT
1975
Goodblatt, D. M., Rabbinic instruction in Sasanian Babylonia, Leiden 1975
GOODENOUGH Goodenough, E.R., Philo and Public Life, JEA 12 (1926), 77-79
1926
ID. 1929
Goodenough, E. R., The Jurisprudence of the Jewish Courts in Egypt: Legal Administration by the Jews
under the Early Roman Empire as described by Flavius Josephus, New Haven 1929
ID. 1938
Goodenough, E.R., The Politics of Philo Judaeus: Practice and Theory, New Haven 1938.
ID. 1953-1968 Goodenough, E.R., Jewish Symbols in the Graeco-Roman Period, 13 v., New York 1953-1968 (rec.:
Bickerman, E., Syria 44 (1967), 131-161)
ID.1962
Goodenough, E. R., An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, 2nd rev. ed. Oxford 1962 (1a ed. Yale Univ.
Press. 1940).
ID.FEST. 1968 Religions in Antiquity: Essays in Memory of Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, ed. J. Neusner, Leiden 1968
ID.1994
Goodman, M., Jewish Attitudes to Greek Culture in the Period of the Second Temple, in G. Abramson-T.
Parfitt (ed.), Jewish Education and Learning, Chur 1994, 167-174
GOODMAN
1998
GOTTWALD
1964
Goodman, M. (ed.), Jews in the Greco-Roman period, Sheffield 1998
Gottwald, N. K., All the Kingdoms of the Earth. Israelite Prophecy and International Relations in the
Ancient Near East, New York 1964
354
Bibliografia
GOUDRIAN
Goudrian, K., Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt, Amsterdam 1988
1988
GRABBE 1995 Grabbe, L. L., Hellenistic Judaism, in Judaism in Late Antiquity. Part 2: Historical Syntheses, ed. J.
Neusner, Leiden 1995, 53-83
GRABBE 2002 Grabbe, L. L., The Hellenistic City of Jerusalem, in Bartlett 2002, 6-21
GRAF 1866
Graf, K.H., Die Geschichtlichen Bücher des Alten Testaments, Leipzig 1866
GRANATA
1998
Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano. Guida all’Archivio e regesto delle carte, a c. di G. Granata; avvertenza di
R. Di Donato. Preprint, Pisa, 1998
ID. 1999
Granata, G., La resistenza all’ellenizzazione. Il corpus di inediti momiglianei sul giudaismo ellenistico,
(1977-1982), “Studi ellenistici” 12 (1999), 73-92
ID. 2000
Granata, G., Momigliano, Arnaldo Dante (1908-1987), in Guida agli archivi delle personalità della
cultura in Toscana tra ‘800 e ‘900. L’area pisana, a c. di E. Capannelli e E. Insabato, coord. R. P.
Coppini, Firenze 2000, 207-214
ID. 2006
Granata, G., Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano. Inventario analitico, Roma 2006
GRANT 1959
Grant, F. C., Ancient Judaism and the New Testament, New York 1959
GRÄTZ
Grätz, H., Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 11 voll. In 13 tt., Leipzig
1807-1911
ID. 1846
Grätz, H., Gnosticismus und Judenthum, Krotoschin 1846
GREEN 1978
Green, W. S., Approaches to ancient Judaism : Theory and Practice, Missoula 1978
ID. 1985
Green, W. S., Approaches to ancient Judaism : studies in Judaism and its Greco-Roman context, Atlanta
1985
GRELOT 1972
Grelot, P., Documents araméens d’Egypte, Paris 1972
GRIMAL 1968
Grimal, P., et al., Hellenism and the Rise of Rome, London 1968
GRÖZINGER
1981
Grözinger, K. E. (ed.), Qumran, hrsg. von K. E. Grözinger, N. Ilg, H. Lichtenberger, G.-W. Nebe, H.
Pabst, Darmstadt 1981
GRUEN 2002
Gruen, E. D., Diaspora : Jews amidst Greeks and Romans, Cambridge-London 2002
ID. 1998
Gruen, E. D., Heritage and Hellenism: the reinvention of Jewish tradition, Berkeley 1998
GRUENWALD
1980
GRUNDMANN
1942
GUIGNEBERT
1935
GUTMAN 19581963
GUTMANN
1974
ID. 1981
Gruenwald, I., Apokalyptic and Merkavah Mysticism, Leiden 1980
GUTSCHMID,
VON, A. 1882
von Gutschmid, A., Trogus und Timagenes, RhM 37, 1882, 548-555 (= Kleine Schriften V, 218-22)
W. Grundmann, Germanentum, Christentum und Judentum, Leipzig 1942
Guignebert, C., Le monde juif vers le temps de Jésus, Paris 1935
Gutman, Y., The Beginnins of Jewish Hellenistic Literature, 2 v., Jerusalem 1958-1963 [ebraico]
Gutmann, J. (ed.), The Synagogue, New York 1974
Gutmann, J. (ed.), Ancient Synagogues : the state of research, Chico (Cal.) 1981
HACHLILI 1988 Hachlili, R., Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Land of Israel, Leiden 1988
HADAS 1959
Hadas, M., Hellenistic Culture: Fusion and Diffusion, New York 1959
355
Bibliografia
ID. 1976
Hadas, M., (ed.) The Third and Fourth books of Maccabees, New York 1976
HALPERIN
Halperin, D., The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel’s Vision, Tübingen 1988
1988
HANSON 1971 Hanson, P. D., Jewish Apocalyptic against its Near East Environment, RB 78 (1971), 31-58
ID. 1973
Hanson, P. D., Zechariah 9 and the Recapitulation of an Ancient Ritual Pattern, JBL 92 (1973), 37-58
HARAN 1978
Haran, M., Temples and temple service in ancient Israel : an inquiry into the character of cult
phenomena and the historical setting of the priestly school, Oxford 1978
HARRISON
1994
Harrison, R., Hellenization in Syria-Palestine: The Case of Judea in the Third Century BCE, BA 57
(1994), 98-108
HAUSER –
Hauser, A. J. –Watson, D.F. (eds.), A History of Biblical Interpretation. Vol. I: The Ancient Period,
WATSON 2003 Grand Rapids (Mich.)-Cambridge 2003
HEICHELCHEIM Heichelcheim, F. M., Ezra’s Palestine and Periclean Athens, ZRGG 3 (1951), 251-253
1951
HEILMAN 1973 Heilman, S. C., Synagogue Life, Chicago 1973
HEINEMANN
1919
ID. 1931
Heinemann, I., Poseidonios über die Entwicklung der jüdischen Religion, MGWJ 63 (1919), 113-121
ID. 1932
Heinemann, I., Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung, Breslau 1932
ID.1938
Heinemann, I., Wer veranlasste den Glaubenszwang der Makkabäerzeit?, MGWJ 82 (1938), 145-172
ID. 1940
Heinemann, I., The Attitude of the Ancient World towards Judaism, RR 4 (1940), 385-400
ID.1962
Heinemann, I., Philons griechische und jüdische Bildung. Kulturvergleichende Untersuchungen zu
Philons Darstellung der jüdischen Gesetze, Hildesheim 1962
HEINRICHS
1972
Henrichs, A., Die Phoinikika des Lollianus. Fragmente eines neuen griechischen Romans, Bonn 1972
HENGEL 1971
Hengel, M. Proseuche und Synagogue, in Tradition und Glaube. Festschrift K. G. Kuhn, Gottingen 1971,
157-184 (rist. in Judaica et Hellenistica: Kleine Schriften I, Tubingen 1996, 171-195)
ID.1969
Hengel, M., Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter besonderer Berücksichtigung
Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr., “Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament“
10, Tübingen 1969, (2. ed. ampl. Tübingen 1973; tr. ingl.: Judaism and Hellenism: Studies in Their
Encounter in Palestine during the Early Hellenistic Period, 2 v., Philadelphia 1974; trad. it. a c. di S.
Monaco: Giudaismo ed ellenismo. Studi sul loro incontro con particolare riguardo per la Palestina fino
alla metà del II secolo a.C., Brescia 2001)
ID.1972
Hengel in Fritz, K. von (ed.), Pseudepigrapha. I, Pseudopythagorica. Lettres de Platon. Littérature
pseudépigraphique juive, huit exposés suivis de discussion par R. Syme, W. Burkert, H. Thesleff, M.
Hengel, Vandoeuvres-Gèneve 1972
ID. 1976A
Hengel, M., Die Zeloten : Untersuchungen zur jüdischen Freiheitsbewegung in der Zeit von Herodes I.
bis 70 n. Chr., 2. ed., Leiden 1976; trad. it. a c. di G. Firpo: Brescia 1996
ID.1976B
Hengel, M., The Son of God: The Origin of Christology and the History of Jewish-Hellenistic Religion,
Philadelphia 1976
ID. 1976C
Hengel, M., Juden, Griechen und Barbaren. Aspekte der Hellenisierung des Judentums in vorchristlicher
Zeit, Stuttgart 1976 (trad. ingl.: Jews, Greeks and Barbarians, Philadelphia 1980; trad. it.: Giudei, Greci
e Barbari. Aspetti dell’ellenizzazione del giudaismo in epoca precristiana, Brescia 1981)
Heinemann, I., Antisemitismus, in RE Suppl. 5, 1931, 3-43
356
Bibliografia
ID.1989A
Hengel, M., The “Hellenization”of Judaea in the First Century after Christ, London-Philadelphia 1989
(trad. it.: L’ “ellenizzazione” della Giudea nel I sec. d.C., Brescia 1993)
ID. 1989B
Hengel, M., The Johannine Question, London 1989
ID. 1989C
Hengel, M., The Interpretation of Judaism and Hellenism in the Pre-Maccabean Period, in CHJ, vol. 2,
ed. W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein, Cambridge 1989, 167-228
ID. 1991
Hengel, M., The Pre-Christian Paul, London 1991
HENRY 1969
Henry, M.-L., Prophet und tradition : Versuch einer Problemstellung, Berlin 1969
HENTEN-HOST Henten, J. W. van-Host, P. W. van der (edd.), Studies in early Jewish epigraphy, Leiden 1994
1994
HERFORD 1962 Herford, R. T., The Pharisees, Boston 1962
HERR 1978
Herr, M. D., Hellenism and Judaism in Eretz Israel, Eshkoloth NS. 2-3 (1977-1978) [ebraico]
HESCHEL 1969 Heschel, A. J., The Prophets, 2 v., New York 1969
ID. 1992
Heschel, S., Abraham Geiger on the origins of christianity: the political strategies of Wissenschaft des
Judentums in an era of acculturation, in Jewish Assimilation,Acculturation and Accommodation: Past
Traditions, Current Issues and Future Prospects, ed. M. Mor, Lanham (Nebr.) 1992, 110-126
HESZER 2001
Heszer, C., Jewish Literacy in Roman Palestine: Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism, Tübingen 2001
HEURGON
1959
Heurgon, J., The Date of Vegoia’s Prophecy, JRS 49 (1959), 41-45
HILGENFELD
1868
Hilgenfeld, A., Die Psalmen Salomo’s und die Himmelfahrt des Moses, griechisch hergestellt und
erklärt, ZWT 11, 1868, 273–309
HILL 1914
Hill, G. F., A Catalogue of the Greek Coins of Palestine, London 1914
HILL, C. 1992
Hill, C. C., Hellenists and Hebrews: Reappraising Division within the Earliest Church, Minneapolis
1992
HOHEISEL
1978
Hoheisel, K., Das antike Judentum in christlicher Sicht : ein Beitrag zur neueren Forschungsgeschichte,
Wiesbaden 1978
HOLLADAY
1977
Holladay, C. R., Theios aner in Hellenistic Judaism : a critique of the use of this category in New
Testament Christology, Missoula (Mont.) 1977
HÖLSCHER
1914
Hölscher, G., Die Profeten : Untersuchungen zur Religionsgeschichte Israels, Leipzig 1914
ID. 1948
Hölscher, G., Drei Erdkarten. Ein Beitrag zur Erderkenntnis des hebräischen Altertums, Heidelberg
1949
HORST 1978
Horst, W. van der (ed.), The sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, Leiden 1978
ID. 2005
Horst, P. W. van der, Philo’s Flaccus: the first pogrom, intr., transl. and comm., Atlanta 2005 (1. ed.
Leiden 2003)
HOWARD 1971 Howard, G. E., The Letter of Aristeas and Diaspora Judaism, JThSt n.s. 22 (1971), 337-348
HOWARDHoward, J. – Shelton, J.C., The Bar Kokhba Letters and Palestinian Greek, IEG 23 (1973), 101-2.
SHELTON 1973
HRUBY 1971
Hruby, K., Die Stellung der jüdischen Gesetzeslehrer zur werdenden Kirche, Zürich 1971
357
Bibliografia
HUGHES 1988 Hughes, S. H., Arnaldo Momigliano: la storia universale, la civiltà ellenistica, e gli Ebrei, RSI 100
(1988), 414-421
IDEL 1988
Idel, M., Kabbalah: New Perspectives, New Haven 1988
ISAAC 2004
Isaac, B., The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity, Princeton 2004
ISNARDI
PARENTE
1988A
ID.1988B
Isnardi Parente, M., Arnaldo Momigliano, la VII Epistola e l’autobiografia, Belfagor 43.1 (1988), 245254
ID. 1989
Isnardi Parente, M., Momigliano magnetofonico, Belfagor 44 (1989), 342
Isnardi Parente, M., Tradizione orale, Belfagor 43.2 (1988), 711
JACKSON 1981 Jackson, B. S., On the Problem of the Roman Influence on the Halakhah and Normative Self-Definition
in Judaism, in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, 2: Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period,
ed. E. P. Sanders (et al.), Philadelphia 1981, 157-203
JACOBSON
1983
JAEGER 1938
Jacobson, H., The Exagoge of Ezekiel, Cambridge 1983
Jaeger, W., Greeks and Jews, JR 18 (1938), 127-143 (= Scripta Minora, Roma 1960, v. 2, 169-183)
JAUBERT 1963 Jaubert, A., La notion d’alliance dans le Judaïsme aux abords de l’ère chrétienne, Paris 1963
JEREMIAS 1943 Jeremias, J., Die Einwohnerzahl Jerusalems zur Zeit Jesu, ZDPV 66 (1943), 24-31
JOHSON, J.,
1974
Johnson, J.H., The Demotic Chronicle as an Historical Source, Enchoria 4 (1974), 1-17
JOHNSON , S.
1972
Johnson, S. E., Unsolved Questions about Early Christianity in Anatolia, in Studies in New Testament
and Early Christian Literature in Honor of A. P. Wikgren, Leiden 1972, 181-193
JUSTER 1914
Juster, J., Les Juifs dans l’Empire Romain, Paris 1914
KADARI 1963- Kadari, M.-Z., The Aramaic Megillat Antiochus, Annual of Bar-Ilan University, 1 (1963), 81-105 e 2
64
(1964), 178-214
KAHLE 1930
Kahle, P., Masoreten des Westens, BWAT 14, Stuttgart 1930
ID. 1947
Kahle, P., Die Septuaginta. Prinzipielle Erwägungen, in O. Eissfeldt Festschrift, Halle 1947, 161-180
KAHRSTEDT
1926
Kahrstedt, U., Syrische Territorien in hellenistischer Zeit, Berlin 1926
KALMIN 2006
Kalmin, R., Jewish Babylonia between Persia and Roman Palestine: decoding the literary record, New
York-Oxford 2006
KANAEL 1963 Kanael, B., Ancient Jewish Coins and their Historical Importance, Biblical Archaeologist 26 (1963)
ID. 1967
Kanael, B., Altjüdische Münzen, JNG 17 (1967), 159-298
KASHER 1927- Kasher, M.M., Torah Shelemah (The Complete Torah) : a Talmudic-Midrashic Encyclopedia of the
1995
Pentateuch, 44 voll., Yerushalayim 1927-95 (ebre., trad. ingl., abbrev. e parziale: Kasher, M. M.,
Encyclopaedia of Biblical Interpretation: a Millenial Anthology, transl. under editorship of H. Freedman,
9 voll., New York 1953-79)
KASHER 1985
Kasher, A., The Jews in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. The struggle for equal rights, Tübingen 1985
KATZ 1956
Katz, P., The Old Testament Canon in Palestine and Alexandria, ZNTW 47 (1956), 191-217
KATZOFF 1989 Katzoff, R., Sperber’s Dictionary of Greek and Latin Legal Terms in Rabbinic Literature: A Review
Essay, JSJ 20 (1989), 194-206
358
Bibliografia
KAUFMANN
1961
Kaufmann, Y., The religion of Israel : from its beginnings to the Babylonian exile, ed. rid. e trad. ingl. di
M. Greenberg, London 1961(ed. orig. in 8 vol.: Tel Aviv, 1937-1956)
ID. 1977
Kaufmann, Y., History of the religion of Israel : from the Babylonian captivity to the end of prophecy,
New York –Jerusalem-Dallas 1977 (History of the religion of Israel ; 4)
KEIMER 2004
Keymer, T., Sterne and Romantic Autobiography, in Keymer, T.- Mee, J. (edd.), The Cambridge
Companion to English Literature, Cambridge 2004, 1740-1830
KENT 1953
Kent, R.G., Old Persian, New Haven 19532
KERÉNYI 1927 Kerényi, K., Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur in religionsgeschtlicher Beleuchtung: ein
Versuch, Tübingen 1927
ID.1962
Kerényi, K., Die griechisch-orientalische Romanliteratur, 2. ed., Darmstadt 1962
KERESZTES
1973
Keresztes, P., The Jews, the Christians and Emperor Domitian, VChr 27 (1973), 1-28
KILPATRCK
1952-3
Kilpatrick, G. D., Living Issues in Biblical Scholarship: the Last Supper, in Expository Times 64, 195253, 4-8
KIPPENBERG
1971
Kippenberg, H. G., Garizim und Synagoge : traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur
samaritanischen Religion der aramäischen Periode, Berlin-New York 1971
ID. 1978
Kippenberg, H. G., Religion und Klassenbildung im antiken Judäa : eine religionssoziologische Studie
zum Verhältnis von Tradition und gesellschaftlicher Entwicklung, Göttingen 1978
ID. 1982
Kippenberg, H. G., Religion und Klassenbildung im Antiken Judäa, Göttingen 1982
KITTEL 1926
Kittel, G., Die Probleme des palästinischen Spätjudentums und das Urchristentum, Stuttgart 1926
KLAUSNER
1904
Klausner, J., Die messianischen Vorstellungen des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter der Tannaiten, Berlin
1904
KOCSIS 1962
Kocsis, E., Ost-West Gegensatz in den Jüdischen Sibyllen, NT 5 (1962), 105-110
KOENEN 1968 Koenen, L., Die Prophezeiungen des Töpfers, ZPE 2 (1968), 178-209 e 3 (1968), 137-138
ID. 1974
Koenen, L., Bemerkungen zum Text des Töpferorakels und zu dem Akaziensymbol, ZPE 13 (1974), 313319
ID. 1984
Koenen, L., A supplementary note on the date of the Oracle of the Potter, ZPE 54 (1984), 9-13
KOHLER 1893 Kohler, K., Über die Ursprunge und Grundformen der synagogalen Liturgie, MGWJ 37 (1893), 441451, 489-497
KOLBE 1926
Yvotte, J., L’Egypte ancienne et les origines de l’antijudaïsme, RHR 163 (1963), 133-143
KRAFT 1974
Kraft, H., Die Offenbarung des Johannes, Tubingen 1974
KRAFTKraft, R. A. – Nickelsburg, G. W. E. (ed.), Early Judaism and its modern interpreters, Atlanta 1986
NICKELSBURG
1986
KRAUS 1967
Kraus, C., Filone Alessandrino e un’ora tragica della storia ebraica, pref. di A. Ferrabino, Napoli 1967
KRAUSS 1899
Krauss, S., Griechische und Lateinische Lehnwörter im Talmud, Midrash und Targum, 2 v., Berlin 1899
KREISSIG 1962 Kreissig, H., Der Makkabäeraufstand. Zur Frage seiner sozialökonomischen Zusammenhänge und
Wirkungen, StudClas 4 (1962), 143-175
359
Bibliografia
ID. 1978
Kreissig, H., Rom und die Entwicklung der judäischen Kultur, Atti CeRDAC 10 (1978), Milano, 83-97
KRIEGER 1977 Krieger, L., Ranke. The Meaning of History, Chicago-London 1977
KROLL 1926
Kroll, W., Historia Alexandri Magni (Pseudo-Callisthenes), Berlin 1926
ID. 1941
Kroll, W., Phokylides, in RE 20.1 (1941), coll. 503-510
KRÜGER 1906 Krüger, P., Philo und Josephus als Apologeten des Judentums, Leipzig 1906
KUHRTSHERWINWHITE 1987
Kuhrt, A., - Sherwin-White, S. (eds.), Hellenism in the East, London 1987
KURFESS 1951 Kurfess, A.-M., Sibyllinische Weissagungen, Berlin 1951
LACHMANN
1848
Lachmann, K., Gromatici Veteres, Berlin 1848
LA’DA 2002
La’da, C. A., Foreign ethnics in Hellenistic Egypt, (Prosopographia Ptolemaica, 10), Leeuven-Paris,
2002
LAGRANGE
1931
Lagrange, M.J., Le Judaïsme avant Jésus-Christ, Paris 1931
LANDMAN
1979
Landman, L. (ed.), Messianism in the Talmudic era, New York 1979
LANGE 2008
Lange, A., Sages and scribes in the Qumran literature, in Scribes, sages, and seers: the Sage in the
Eastern Mediterranean World, ed.by L. G. Perdue, Göttingen 2008, 271-294
LAPERROUSAZ Laperrousaz, E.-M., Qoumrân : L'établissement essénien des bords de la Mer Morte : histoire et
1976
archéologie du site, Paris 1976
ID.1982 A
Laperrousaz, E.-M., Les Esseniens : Selon leur témoinage direct, Paris 1982
ID. 1982B
Laperrousaz, E.-M., L'attente du Messie en Palestine à la veille et au début de l'ère chrétienne à la
lumière des documents récemment découverts, Paris 1982
LAPIDE 1978
Lapide, P. E., Auferstehung : ein jüdisches Glaubenserlebnis, 2. ed., Stuttgart-München 1978
LARCHER 1969 Larcher, C., Etudes sur le livre de la Sagesse, Paris 1969
LA SOR 1972
La Sor, W. S., The Dead Sea Scrolls and the New Testament, Grand Rapids 1972
LAUTERBACH
1951
LE MOYNE
1972
LEANEY 1958
Lauterbach, J. S., Rabbinic Essays, Cincinnati 1951
Le Moyne, J., Les Sadducéens, Paris 1972
Leaney, A. R. C. (ed.), A guide to the Scrolls : Nottingham studies on the Qumran discoveries, London
1958
LEBRAM 1970 Lebram, J. C. H., Apokalyptik und Hellenismus im Buche Daniel, VT 20 (1970), 503-524
LEIPOLDT 1933 Leipoldt, J., Antisemitismus in der Alten Welt, Leipzig 1933
LEVI DELLA
VIDA 1938
Levi Della Vida, G., Les sémites et leur role dans l'histoire religieuse : Trois leçons au Collège de
France, Paris 1938
LÉONLéon-Portilla, M. (ed.), Vision de los vencidos. Relaciones indigenas de la conquista, introd., selecc. y
PORTILLA 1959 notas. Trad. A. M. Garibay Kintana, México 1959
360
Bibliografia
LEVINE 1982
Levine, L. I. (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathedra 2, Jerusalem 1982
ID. 1999
Levine, L. I., Judaism and Hellenism in antiquity : conflict or confluence?, Peabody (Mass.) 1999
LEVINE, B. A. Levine, B. A., In the presence of Lord : a study of cult and some cultic terms in ancient Israel, Leiden
1974
1974
LEVINE, L. I.
1985
Levine, L. I., Ma'amar ha-hakhamim be-eretz-Israel bi-tequfat ha-Talmud, Jerusalem 1985
ID. 1987
Levine, L. I. (ed.), The Synagogue in Late Antiquity : A Centennial Publication. Conference, Jewish
Theological Seminary of America - Oct. 21-24, 1984, Philadelphia 1987
ID. 2000
Levine, L. I., The ancient Synagogue: the first thousand years, New Haven 2000 (trad. it.: La sinagoga
antica, Brescia 2005)
LÉVY 1927
Lévy, I., La légende de Pythagore de Grèce en Palestine, Paris 1927
ID. 1955
Lévy, I., Les deux Livres des Maccabèes et le Livre Hébraique des Hasmonéens, Sem 5 (1955), 15-36
ID. 1965
Lévy, I., Recherches esséniennes et pythagoriciennes, Genève-Paris 1965
LEWIN 2001
Lewin, A., Gli Ebrei nell’impero romano. Saggi vari, trad. it. a c. di D. Asheri e R. Volponi, Firenze
2001
LEWIS, D. 1957 Lewis, D. M., The First Greek Jew, JSemSt 2 (1957), 264-266
LEWIS, N. 1986 Lewis, N., Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt. Case studies in the social history of the Hellenistic world, Oxford
1986
LEWIS, N. 1989 The Documents from the Bar Kokhba Period in the Cave of Letters. Greek papyri ed. by N. Lewis,
Aramaic and Nabatean signatures and subscriptions ed. by Y. Yadin and J. C. Greenfield, Jerusalem
1989
LEWY 1932
Lewy, H., Hekateios von Abdera περὶ Ἰουδαίων, ZNTW 31 (1932), 117-132
ID. 1937
Lewy, H., Aethioper und Juden in der antiken Literatur, MGWJ 81 (1937), 91-101
LICHTHEIM
1973-80
Lichtheim, M., Ancient Egyptian Literature, Berkeley-Los Angeles-London 1973-80
LIEBERMAN
1942
Lieberman, S., Greek in Jewish Palestine. Studies in the Life and Manners of Jewish Palestine in the IIIV centuries C. E., 2. ed., New York 1942 (2. ed.: 1965) (trad. ebr., con Lieberman 1950: Greek and
Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 2. ed., Jerusalem 1984)
ΙD. 1950
Lieberman, S., Hellenism in Jewish Palestine. Studies in the Literary Transmission, Beliefs and Manners
of Palestine in the I century B. C. E.-IV century C. E., 2. ed., New York 1950 (2. ed.: 1962) (trad. ebr.,
con Lieberman 1942: Greek and Hellenism in Jewish Palestine, 2. ed., Jerusalem 1984)
ID. 1963
Lieberman, S., How Much Greek in Jewish Palestine?, in Biblical and Other Studies, ed. A. Altman,
Cambridge 1963
ID. 1987
Lieberman, S. J., A Mesopotamian Background for the So-called Aggadic “Measures” of Biblical
Hermeneutics, HUCA 58 (1987), 157-225
LIFSHITZ 1962 Lifshitz, B., Papyrus grecs du désert de Juda, Aegyptus 42 (1962), 240-56
ID. 1965
Lifshitz, B., L’hellénisation des Juifs de Palestine, RB 72 (1965), 520-538
ID. 1967A
Lifshitz, B., Greek and Hellenism among the Jews of Eretz Israel, Eshkolot 5 (1967), 20-28 [ebraico]
361
Bibliografia
ID. 1967B
Lifshitz, B., Donateurs et fondateurs dans les synagogues juives, Paris 1967
LIGHTSTONE
1984
Lightstone, J. N., The commerce of the sacred : mediation of the divine among Jews in the GraecoRoman diaspora, Chico (Cal.) 1984
LIMBECK 1971 Limbeck, M., Die Ordnung des Heils : Untersuchungen zum Gesetzeverständnis des Frühjudentums,
Düsseldorf 1971
LINDBLOM
1962
Lindblom, J., Prophecy in ancient Israel, Oxford 1962
LLEWELLYN- Llewellyn-Jones, Ll. – Robson, J., Ctesias’ History of Persia, London – New York 2010
JONES –
ROBSON 2010
LOEWE 1937
Loewe, H. (ed.), Judaism and Christianity. II. The Contact of Pharisaism with Other Cultures, London
1937
LOEWE 1955
Loewe, R., The Earliest Biblical Allusion to Coined Money, PalEQ 87 (1955), 141-150
LOISY 1933
Loisy, A., La religion d'Israel, 3. ed., Paris 1933
LORETZ 1964
Loretz, O., Qohelet und der Alte Orient, Freiburg-Basel-Wien 1964
LÜDERITZ
1994
LUPIERI 1999
Lüderitz, G., What is the Politeuma, in Henten-Host 1994, 183-225
LURIA 1960
Luria, S., Die Belagerung von Jerusalem bei Alkaios, Acta Antiqua 8 (1960), 265-266
LYNCH 1972
Lynch, J.P., Aristotle’s School: A Study of a Greek Educational Institution, Berkeley 1972
MACCOBY
1991
Maccoby, H., Paul and Hellenism, London 1991
MAGEE 1988
Magee, B., Aspects of Wagner, Oxford 1988
MAIER 1982
Maier, J., Jüdische Auseinandersetzung mit dem Christentum in der Antike, Darmstadt 1982
MAIERSCHREINER
1973
Maier, J.-Schreiner, J. (ed.), Literatur und Religion des Frühjudentums : Eine Einführung, Würzburg
1973
MALTE 2000
Malte, J., Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’, Frankfurt 2000
MARCONE
2000
Marcone, A. (a c. di), Momigliano e la riedizione inglese della Social and Economic History of the
Roman Empire di Rostovtzeff, a cura di A. Marcone, Athenaeum 88 (2000), 604-607
L’Apocalisse di Giovanni, a c. di E. Lupieri, Milano 1999
MARCUS 1946 Marcus, R., Antisemitismus in the Hellenistic-Roman World, in Pinson, K. S. (a c. di), Essays on
Antisemitism, 2. ed., New York 1946, 61-78
ID. 1947
Marcus, R., A Selected Bibliography (1920–1945) of the Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman Period,
Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research, 16 (1946–47), 97-181
ID. 1956
Marcus, R., The Hellenistic Age, in Leo W. Schwarz (ed.), Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People,
1956, 93–139
ID. 1960
Marcus, R., Hellenistic Jewish Literature, in Finkelstein, L., (ed.), The Jews: Their History, Culture and
Religion, 3. ed., vol. 2, 1960, 1077–1115
MARGALIOTH Margalioth, M., Sepher Ha-Razim: A Newly Recovered Book of Magic from the Talmudic Period,
1966
Jerusalem 1966 [ebraico]
362
Bibliografia
MARKHØLM
1966
Markhølm, O., Antiochus IV of Syria, Copenaghen 1966
MASSYNGBERD Massyngberde Ford, J., Revelation. A new translation with introduction and commentary, New York
E FORD 1975
1975
MASON 1993
Mason, S., Greco-Roman, Jewish, and Christian Philosophies, in Approaches to Ancient Judaism, new
ser., 4, ed. J. Neusner, Atlanta 1993, 1-28
MASSYNGBERD Massyngberde Ford, J., Revelation, Garden City, NY 1975
E FORD 1976
MATTA 1926
Matta, R., Gli Atti di martiri alessandrini, Didaskaleion 4 (1926), fasc. 1, 69-106; fasc. 2, 49-84
MATTHEWS
1989
Matthews, J., The Roman Empire of Ammianus, Baltimore 1989
MAZAR 1957
Mazar, B., The Tobiads, IEJ 7 (1957), 137-145; 229-238.
ID. 1982
Mazar, B., Jerusalem in Biblical Times, in L. I. Levine (ed.), The Jerusalem Cathedra 2, Jerusalem 1982,
1-24
MCCOWN 1957 McCown, C. C., The Araq el-Emir and the Tobiads, BA 20 (1957), 63-76
MCGING 2002 McGing, B., Population and Proselytism: how many Jews were there in the Ancient World?, in
BARTLETT 2002, 88-106
MEEKS 1983
Meeks, A. W., The first urban Christians. The social world of the Apostle Paul, New Haven 1983
MEIGGS –
LEWIS 1988
Meiggs, R. – Lewis, D., Greek Historical Inscriptions, Oxford 1988
MEINHOLD
1909
Meinhold, H., Sabbat und Sonntag, Leipzig 1909
MENDELS 1979 Mendels, D., Hellenistic Utopia and the Essenes, HThR 72 (1979), 207-222
ID. 1992
Mendels, D., The Rise and Fall of Jewish Nationalism, New York 1992
MENDELSON
1982
Mendelson, A., Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria, Cincinnati 1982
MERKELBACH Merkelbach, R., Roman und Mysterium in der Antike, München 1962
1962
MESHORER
1982
Meshorer, Y., Ancient Jewish Coinage, 2 v., Dix Hills (NY) 1982
MEYER, E.
1910
Meyer, E., Hesiods Erga und das Gedicht von den fünf Menschengeschlechtern (1910) in Kleine
Schriften, II, Halle 1924, 15-66
ID. 1915
Meyer, E., Ägyptische Dokumente aus der Perserzeit, I : eine eschatologische Prophetie über die
Geschichte Ägyptens in persischer und griechischer Zeit, in Sitzungberichte der Preussischen Akademie
der Wissenschaften, 1915, 287-304
ID. 1921-1923 Meyer, E., Ursprung und Anfänge des Christentums, 3 v., Stuttgart 1921-1923
MEYER, M.
1975
Meyer, M., Abrahan Geiger’s Historical Judaism, in New Perspectives on Abrahan Geiger: an HUC-JIR
Symposium, Cincinnati 1975, 3-16
MEYERS 1992 Meyers, E. M., The Challenge of Hellenism for Early Judaism and Christianity, BA 55 (1992), 84-91
363
Bibliografia
ID. 2002
Meyers, E. M., Aspects of Everyday Life in Roman Palestine with Special Reference to Private Domiciles
and Ritual Baths, in BARTLETT 2002, 193-220
MEYERSMeyers, E.-Strange, J., Archaeology, the Rabbis and Early Christianity, Nashville 1981
STRANGE 1981
MIDDENDORP Middendorp, T., Die Stellung Jesu Ben Siras zwischen Judentum und Hellenismus, Leiden 1973
1973
MILIK 1956
Milik, J.T, Prière de Nabonide et autres écrits d’un cycle de Daniel, fragments de Qumrân 4, RB 63,
1956, 407-11
ID. 1966
Milik, T. J., La patrie de Tobie, RB 73, 1966, 522-530
MILLAR 1978
Millar, F., The Background to the Maccabean Revolution: Reflections on Martin Hengel “Judaism and
Hellenism”, JJS 29 (1978), 1-21
ID. 1983
Millar, F., The Phoenician Cities: A Case-Study of Hellenisation, PCPhS 209 (1983), 55-68
ID. 1993
Millar, F., The Roman East, 31 BC-AD337, Cambridge 1993
MILLER 1973
Miller, P. N., The divine warrior in early Israel, Cambridge 1973
MILLER 2007
Miller, P. N., Momigliano, Benjamin, and Antiquarianism after Historicism, in Momigliano and
Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. by P. N. Miller, Toronto 2007, 334378.
MITTEIS –
Mitteis, L.-Wilcken, U., Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, 2 vol. in 4 t., I: Historischer
1
2
WILCKEN 1912 Teil; II: Juristischer Teil, Leipzig-Berlin 1912 (Leipzig 1965 )
MODRZEJEWSK Modrzejewski, J. M., How to be a Greek and yet a Jew in Hellenistic Alexandria, in Cohen, S.-Frerichs
I 1993
1993, 65-92
MOMIGLIANO
1929
Momigliano, A., Il decreto trilingue in onore di Tolomeo Filopatore e la quarta guerra di Celesiria,
Aegyptus 10, n. 2-4 (1929), 180-189 (=Quinto, 579-589)
ID. 1930A
Momigliano, A., Un’ignota irruzione dei Galati in Siria al tempo di Antioco III?, BFC 36, n. 6 (192930), 151-155 (=Quinto, 591-596)
ID. 1930B
Momigliano, A., Errori intorno alle toparchie della Palestina, RFIC 8 (1930), 71-74 (=Nono, 9-11)
ID. 1930C
Momigliano, A., Il profeta Micha e il vaticinio di Elia contro Achab, RR 6 (1930), 298-303 (=Nono, 2327)
ID. 1930D
Momigliano, A., Aspetti dell’antisemitismo alessandrino in due opere di Filone, La Rassegna Mensile di
Israel, S. 2, 5 (1930), 3-14 (=Nono, 33-43)
ID. 1930E
Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione maccabaica, Roma 1930 (2. ed. riv. Torino 1931;
rist. con pref. e bibliografia aggiornata, Amsterdam 1968) [rec.: Pincherle 1931; Abel 1931]
ID. 1931A
Momigliano, A., Un’apologia del Giudaismo: il “Contro Apione” di Flavio Giuseppe, La Rassegna
Mensile di Israel, 2. ser., 5 (1931) fasc. 1-2 (=Terzo, 513-522)
ID. 1931B
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Leon, Harry J., The Jews of Ancient Rome, Philadelphia 1960 [5721], Gnomon
34 (1962), 178-182 (=Terzo, 749-754)
ID. 1931C
Momigliano, A., Eliseo e il re di Siria in II Re VI-VII, SMSR 7 (1931), 223-226 (=Quinto, 751-755)
ID. 1931D
Momigliano, A., Intorno al Contro Apione, RFIC ns 9, fasc. 4 (1931), 485-503 (=Quinto, 765-784)
ID. 1931E
Momigliano, A., Un nuovo frammento dei così detti “Atti dei Martiri Pagani”, Rendic. Pontif. Accad.
Rom. Archeol. 7 (1931), 119-127 (=Quinto, 789-798)
364
Bibliografia
ID. 1931F
Momigliano, A., Un’apologia del Giudaismo: il “Contro Apione” di Flavio Giuseppe, La Rassegna
Mensile di Israel, 2. ser., 5 (1931) fasc. 1-2 (=Terzo, 513-522; =Momigliano 1987e, 63-71)
ID. 1931G
Momigliano, A., I nomi delle prime “Sinagoghe” romane e la condizione giuridica della comunità in
Roma sotto Augusto, La Rassegna Mensile di Israel, 2. ser., 6 (1931) fasc. 7, 283-292 (=Terzo, 523-533)
ID. 1932A
Momigliano, A., L'opera dell'imperatore Claudio, Firenze 1932
ID. 1932B
Momigliano, A., Per la data e la caratteristica della Lettera di Aristea, Aegyptus 12 (1932), 161-172
(=Quarto, 213-223); Appendice: Un documento della spiritualità dei Giudei Leontopolitani, 223-224
ID. 1932C
Momigliano, A., I Tobiadi nella preistoria del moto maccabaico, Atti R. Acc. S. Torino 67(1931-32),
165-200 (=Quinto, 597-628)
ID. 1932D
Momigliano, A., La personalità di Caligola, ASNP S. 2, 1 (1932), 205-228 (=Nono, 191-217)
ID. 1932E
Momigliano, A., Postilla metodologica ad una critica sull’opera di Claudio, La Nuova Italia 3 (1932),
320-321 (=Nono, 219-222)
ID. 1932F
Momigliano, A., I Tobiadi nella preistoria del moto maccabaico, Atti R. Acc. S. Torino 67(1931-32),
165-200 (=Quinto, 597-628)
ID. 1933A
Momigliano, A., Aspetti di Michele Rostovzev, “La Nuova Italia” 4 (1933), 160-164 (=Contributo, 327335)
ID. 1933B
Momigliano, A., Giuramento di Sarapiastai? Contributo alla storia del sincretismo ellenistico, Aegyptus
13, n. 1 (1933), 179-186 (=Quinto, 757-764)
ID. 1933C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Geiger, F., Philon von Alexandria als sozialer Denker, Stuttgart 1932, RFIC 11
(1933), 94-98 (=Sesto, 825-829)
ID. 1933D
Momigliano, A., Per il centenario dell’ “Alessandro Magno” di J. G. Droysen. Un contributo,
“Leonardo” 4 (1933), 510-516 (=Contributo, 263-274)]
ID. 1933E
Momigliano, A., Aspetti di Michele Rostovzev, “La Nuova Italia” 4 (1933), 160-164 (=Contributo, 327335)
ID. 1934A
Momigliano, A., Severo Alessandro Archisynagogus. Una conferma alla Historia Augusta, Athenaeum,
N.S. 12 (1934), 151-153 (=Quarto, 531-533)
ID. 1934B
Momigliano, A., Ricerche sull’organizzazione della Giudea sotto il dominio Romano (63 a.C.-70 d.C.),
ASNP S.2, 3 (1934), 183-221 e 347-396 (=Nono, 227-323)
ID. 1934C
Momigliano, A., Josephus as a Source for the History of Judaea. Note, in CAH, vol. 10, 1934, cap. 11,
pp. 384-387; (=Nono, 348-350)
ID. 1934D
Momigliano, A., Nero. (With a note on the Persecution of the Christians), transl. by M. P. Charlesworth,
in CAH, vol. 10, 1934, chap. XXI, pp. 702-42, 887-8; Bibliography on pp. 978-84
ID. 1934E
Momigliano, A., La ribellione giudaica, trad ingl.di M. P. Charlesworth in CAH, vol. 10, 1934, cap. 25,
pp. 860-865; l’orig. it., conservato ds. presso Dionisotti, fu presentato al concorso per il Premio Cantoni,
Firenze 1932; pubbl. per la prima volta in Nono, 393-408
ID. 1934F
Momigliano, A., Nero, trad ingl.di M. P. Charlesworth in CAH, vol. 10 (1934), 704-742
ID. 1934G
Momigliano, A., Rebellion within the Empire, in CAH, vol. 10, Cambridge 1934
ID. 1935A
Momigliano, A., Genesi storica e funzione attuale del concetto di ellenismo, “Giornale critico della
filosofia italiana”, 16 (1935), 10-37 (=Contributo, 165-193)
ID. 1935B
Momigliano, A., Genesi storica e funzione attuale del concetto di ellenismo, “Giornale critico della
365
Bibliografia
filosofia italiana” 16 (1935), 10-37 (=Contributo, 165-193)
ID. 1937
Momigliano, A., Uno schema etnografico e una presunta legge punica, RSO 16 (1935-37), 228-229
(=Quarto, 515-517)
ID. 1938
Momigliano, A., Una osservazione sulla politica tributaria di Roma in Oriente, in Atti del IV Congresso
Nazionale di Studi Romani, 1938, vol. I, 280-283 (=Quinto, 641-644)
ID. 1940
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Goodenough, E. R., An Introduction to Philo Judaeus, New Haven 1940, JRS
34 (1944), 163-165 (=Quarto, 619-624)
ID. 1943
Momigliano, A., Rostovtzeff's Twofold History of the Hellenistic World, JHS 63 (1943) 116-117
(=Contributo, 335-339)
ID. 1944
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. X: The Augustan Empire, 44 B.C.-A.D.
70, ed. by S.A. Cook, F. E. Adcock, M. P. Charlesworth, Cambridge 1934, JRS, 34 (1944), 109-116
(=Quinto, 986-1002)
ID. 1945
Momigliano, A., La storia antica in Inghilterra, Il Mese 3, n. 18, 1945, 728-733 (=Sesto, 761-768)
ID. 1947
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Wolfson, Harry Austryn, Philo. Foundations of Religious Philosophy in
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Cambridge (Mass.) 1947, Ricerche Religiose 20 (1949), 199-201(=Quarto,
625-627)
ID. 1949A
Momigliano, A., Felice Momigliano, 1866-1924, in Nel 25. anniversario della morte di Felice
Momigliano, Mondovì 1949, 19-21 (=Terzo, 843-849)
ID. 1949B
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] WOLFSON 1947, in RR 20 (1949), 199-201 (=Quarto, 625-627).
ID. 1950A
Momigliano, A., Panegyricus Messallae and “Panegyricus Vespasiani”: Two references to Britain, JRS
40 (1950), 39-42 (=Quarto, 523-529)
ID. 1950B
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Walzer, R., Galen on Jews and Christians, Oxford 1949, RSI 62 (1950), 575577 (=Quarto, 637-640)
ID. 1954
Momigliano, A., M. I. Rostovtzeff, “The Cambridge Journal” 7 (1954), 334-346 (=Contributo, 341-354;
Studies in Historiography, 91-104)
ID. 1955
Momigliano, A., Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Roma 1955
ID. 1956
Momigliano, A., Problemi di metodo nella interpretazione dei simboli giudeo-ellenistici [E. R.
Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, I-IV], Athenaeum, N.S. 34 (1956), 237-248
(=Secondo, 355-364; Pagine ebraiche, 53-62)
ID. 1960A
Momigliano, A., Commemorazione del socio Plinio Fraccaro, RAL . VIII vol. XV fasc. 7-12 (1960),
361-67 (=Terzo, 827-35)
ID. 1960B
Momigliano, A., Secondo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici, Roma 1960
ID. 1961A
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Hadas, Moses, Hellenistic Culture, Fusion and Diffusion, New York-London
1959, RSI 73 (1961), 147-149 (=Terzo, 765-767)
ID. 1961B
Momigliano, A., The Jews of Ancient Rome, The Jewish Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1961, pp. 21 e 38. A review
of H. J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome, Philadelphia 1960 (=Sesto, 579-582)
ID. 1962A
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Boman, Th., Das Hebräische Denken im Vergleich mit dem Griechischen, 3.
ed., Göttingen 1959, RSI 74 (1962), 603-607 (=Terzo, 759-764)
ID. 1962B
Momigliano, A., Discussione con gli storici sovietici. I. Risposta ad un critico russo; II. Fatti e
prospettive, RSI 74 (1962), 139-142, e 75 (1963), 604-607 (=Terzo, 795-802)
366
Bibliografia
ID. 1963A
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Toynbee, Arnold, A Study of History, vol. XII: Reconsiderations, Oxford 1961,
EHR 78 (1963), 275-276 (=Terzo, 793-794)
ID. 1963B
Momigliano, A., The Conlict Between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century, Oxford 1963
ID. 1965A
Momigliano, A., Remarks on Eastern History Writing, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African
Studies, 1965, 447-451 (=Terzo, 229-238)
ID. 1965B
Momigliano, A., Fattori orientali della storiografia ebraica post-esilica e della storiografia greca, RSI
77 (1965), 456-464 (=Terzo, 808-818)
ID. 1966A
Momigliano, A., Time in Ancient Historiography, H&T 6 (1966), 1-23 (=Quarto, 13-41)
ID. 1966B
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Pines, S., The Jewish Christians of the Early Centuries of Christianity
according to a New Source, Jerusalem 1966, RSI 78 (1966), 980-981 (=Sesto, 729-730)
ID. 1966C
Momigliano, A., Studies in Historiography, London 1966
ID. 1966D
Momigliano, A., Terzo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma 1966
ID. 1966E
Momigliano, A., Beloch Karl Julius, DBI, Istituto dell’Enciclopedia italiana, Roma 1966, VIII 32-45 (=
Terzo, 32- 45; trad. ingl. in Momigliano, A., Studies on Modern Scholarship, ed. by G.W. Bowersock
and T.J. Cornell,1994, 97 – 120)
ID. 1966F
Momigliano, A., Michael Rostovzev, Il Sedicesimo 6 (1966), 1-4
ID. 1967
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Will, E., Histoire politique du monde hellénistique, I: De la mort d’Alexandre
aux événements d’Antiochos III et de Philippe V, Nancy 1966, RSI 79 (1967), 512-513 (=Sesto, 691-693)
ID. 1968A
Momigliano, A., Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca, RSI 80 (1968), 5-19 (=Quarto, 43-58)
ID. 1968B
Momigliano, A., The Greater Danger – Science or Biblical Criticism? A discussion of R. H. Popkin
“Scepticism, Theology and the Scientific Revolution in the Seventeenth Century”, in Problems in the
Philosophy of Science, edd. Lakatos-Musgrave, Amsterdam 1968, 33-36; R. H. Popkin, ib., 1-28
(=Quinto, 1020-1022)
ID. 1968C
Momigliano, A., Prospettiva 1967 della storia greca, RSI 80 (1968), 5-19 (=Quarto, 43-58)
ID. 1968D
Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione maccabaica, Amsterdam 1968 (rist. con pref. e
bibliografia aggiornata della 2. ed. riv., Torino 1931)
ID. 1969A
Momigliano, A., Jacob Bernays, MKNAW, Afd. Letterkunde, N. Reeks, 32, n. 5 (1969), 151-178
(=Quinto, 127-158; trad. it. in Pagine Ebraiche, 157-180)
ID. 1969B
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Bravo, B., Philologie, histoire, philosophie de l’histoire. Étude sur J. G.
Droysen, Historien de l’antiquité, Varsovie 1968, RSI 81, fasc. 3 (1969), 679-682 (=Quinto, 898-902)
ID. 1969C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Bravo, B., Philologie, histoire, philosophie de l’histoire. Étude sur J. G.
Droysen, Historien de l’antiquité, Varsovie 1968, RSI 81, fasc. 3 (1969), 679-682 (=Quinto, 898-902)
ID. 1969D
Momigliano, A, Quarto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma 1969
ID. 1970A
Momigliano, A., J. G. Droysen between Greeks and Jews, H&T 9, fasc. 2 (1970), 139-153 (=Quinto,
109-126)
ID. 1970B
Momigliano, A., Introduzione all’ellenismo, RSI 82, n. 4 (1970), 781-799; Lezione tenuta alla Scuola
Normale Superiore di Pisa nel Dicembre 1969 (=Quinto, 267-291)
ID. 1970C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Hengel, M., Judentum und Hellenismus. Studien zu ihrer Begegnung unter
besonderer Berücksichtigung Palästinas bis zur Mitte des 2. Jh.s v. Chr., Tübingen 1969, JThS, NS 21
(1970), 149-153 (=Quinto, 931-936)
367
Bibliografia
ID. 1970D
Momigliano, A., Introduzione all’ellenismo, RSI 82, n. 4 (1970), 781-799; Lezione tenuta alla Scuola
Normale Superiore di Pisa nel Dicembre 1969 (=Quinto, 267-291)
ID. 1970E
Momigliano, A., Hellenismus und Gnosis, Randbemerkungen zu Droysens Geschichte des Hellenismus,
Saeculum 21 (1970), 185-188
ID. 1971A
Momigliano, A., La libertà di parola nel mondo antico, RSI 83, fasc. 3 (1971), 499-524 (=Sesto, 403436)
ID. 1971B
Momigliano, A., Empietà e eresia nel mondo antico, RSI 83, fasc. 4 (1971), 771-791 (=Sesto, 437-458)
ID. 1971C
Momigliano, A., The Development of Greek Biography, Four Lectures, Cambrdige (Mass) 1971
ID. 1974A
Momigliano, A., The Social Structure of the Ancient City, ASNP S. 3, vol. 4, fasc. 2 (1974), 331-349
(=Sesto, 459-476)
ID. 1974B
Momigliano, A., Jews in Classical Scholarship, Encyclopaedia Judaica, Jerusalem, Year Book 1974,
223-225 (=Sesto, 583-587)
ID. 1974C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] MacMullen, R., Roman Social Relations, 50 B.C. to A.D. 284, New Haven
1974, RSI 86 (1974), 405-407 (=Sesto, 697-700)
ID. 1975A
Momigliano, A., La portata storica dei vaticini sul settimo re nel terzo libro degli Oracoli Sibillini, in
Forma Futuri. Studi in onore del Cardinale Michele Pellegrino, Torino 1975, 1079-1084 (=Sesto, 551559)
ID. 1975B
Momigliano, A., The Second Book of Maccabees, CPh 70 (1975), 81-88 (=Sesto, 567-578)
ID. 1975C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Zinberg, I., Italian Jewry in the Renaissance Era. A History of Jewish
Literature, vol. IV, transl. and ed. by B. Martin, Cincinnati-New York 1974, Jewish Journal of Sociology
17 (1975), 235-236 (=Sesto, 730-732)
ID. 1975D
Momigliano, A., The Second Book of Maccabees, CPh 70 (1975), 81-91
ID. 1975E
Momigliano, A., The Fault of the Greeks, Deadalus, Spring 1975, 9-19 (vol. monografico dal tit.:
Wisdom, Revelation and Doubt: Perspectives of the First Millennium B.C.; pubbl. anche come
Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 104, n. 2) (=Sesto, 509-523)
ID. 1975F
Momigliano, A., Alien Wisdom : The Limits of Hellenization, Cambridge 1975; 2. ed 1978
Momigliano, A., Quinto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma 1975
ID. 1975G
ID. 1975H
Momigliano, A., Storiografia greca, RSI 87, 1975, 17-46 (= Sesto, 33-67 e rist. nella raccolta La
storiografia greca, Torino 1982; ed. ted. Griechische Geschichtsschreibung, in Neues Handbuch der
Literaturwissenschaft, Bd. 2, hrsg. von E. Vogt, Wiesbaden 1981, 305-335; ed. ingl. Greek
Historiography, H&T 17, 1978, 1-28; ed. fr. in Problèmes d'historiographie ancienne et moderne, Paris
1983
ID. 1976A
Momigliano, A., Ebrei e Greci, RSI 88 (1976), 425-443 (=Sesto, 527-549)
ID. 1976B
Momigliano, A., The Date of the First Book of Maccabees, in L’Italie préromaine et la Rome
républicaine. Mélanges offerts à Jacques Heurgon, Rome 1976, 657-661 (=Sesto, 561-566)
ID. 1976C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Barnes, T. D., Tertullian: A Historical and Literary Study, Oxford 1971, JRS 66
(1976), 273-276 (=Sesto, 707-713)
ID. 1977A
Momigliano, A., Interpretazioni minime, I-III, Athenaeum NS 55, fasc. 1-2 (1977), 186-190 (=Sesto,
181-186)
ID. 1977B
Momigliano, A., Max Weber and Eduard Meyer: a propos of City and Country in Antiquity, TimesLS, 8
apr. 1977, 435-436 (=Sesto, 285-293)
368
Bibliografia
ID. 1977C
Momigliano, A., After-dinner speech on the occasion of the award of the degree of D.H.L.H.C. at
Brandeis University, 22 May 1977, in Ottavo, 431-432.
ID. 1977D
Momigliano, A., Easter Elements in Post-Exilic Jewish and Greek Historiography, in Momigliano 1977E
ID. 1977E
Momigliano, A., Essays in Ancient and Modern Historiography, Middletown 1977
ID. 1978A
Momigliano, A., Dopo Max Weber?, ASNP S. 3, vol. 8, fasc. 4 (1978), 1315-1332 (=Pref. a:
Humphreys, S.C., Saggi antropologici sulla Grecia antica, Bologna 1979 = Sesto, 295-322)
ID. 1978B
Momigliano, A., The Historians of the Classical World and their Audiences: Some Suggestions, ASNP
S. 3, vol. 8, fasc. 1 (1978), 59-75 (=Sesto, 361-376)
ID. 1978C
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Christianity, Judaism and Other Greco-Roman Cults. Studies for Morton Smith
at Sixty, ed. by J. Neusner, 4 v., Leiden 1975, JThS 29 (1978), 212-217 (=Sesto, 773-778)
ID. 1978D
Momigliano, A., Greek Historiography, H&Th 17, 1 (1978), 1-28.
ID. 1979A
Momigliano, A., Flavius Josephus and Alexander’s Visit to Jerusalem, Athenaeum NS. 57, fasc. 3-4
(1979), 442-448 (=Settimo, 319-329; = Momigliano 1987E, 85-93)
ID. 1979B
Momigliano, A., Two Types of Universal History: The Cases of E. A. Freeman and Max Weber, scritto
per la Festschrift D. M. Pippidi, 1979, pubbl. in Studii Clasice 24 (1986), 7-17 (=Ottavo, 121-134)
ID. 1979C
Momigliano, A., Persian Empire and Greek Freedom, in The Idea of Freedom. Essays in Honour of
Isaiah Berlin, ed. by A. Ryan, Oxford, 1979, 139-151 (= Settimo, 61-75)
ID. 1980A
Momigliano, A., Interpretazioni minime, IV-VII, ASNP S. 3, vol. 10, fasc. 4 (1980), 1221-1231
(=Settimo, 105-114)
ID. 1980B
Momigliano, A., Daniele e la teoria greca della successione degli imperi, RAL S. 8, vol. 35, fasc. 3-4
(1980), 157-162 (=Settimo, 297-304)
ID. 1980C
Momigliano, A., Ciò che Flavio Giuseppe non vide, introd. a Vidal-Naquet, P., Il buon uso del
tradimento (trad. it. di: Flavius Josèphe ou du bon usage de la trahison), Roma 1980; RSI 91, fasc. 4
1979 (1980), 564-574 (=Settimo, 305-317)
ID. 1980D
Momigliano, A., A Note on Max Weber’s Definition of Judaism as a Pariah-Religion, H&T 19 (1980),
313-318 (=Settimo, 341-348)
ID. 1980E
Momigliano, A., Saggezza straniera. l’Ellenismo e le altre culture, Torino 1980 (ed. orig.: Alien
Wisdom. The Limits of Hellenization,Cambridge 1975)
ID. 1980F
Momigliano, A., Sesto contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, 2 v., Roma 1980
ID. 1981A
Momigliano, A., Premesse per una discussione su Eduard Meyer. Introduzione a un seminario su E.
Meyer nella Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 12-13 febbr. 1981, RSI 93, fasc. 2 (1981), 384-398
(=Settimo, 215-231)
ID. 1981B
Momigliano, A., Max Weber di fronte agli storici dell’antichità, Prefazione a Weber, M., Storia
economica e sociale della antichità, Roma 1981, VII-XIII 507 (=Settimo, 245-251)
ID. 1981C
Momigliano, A., Biblical Studies and Classical Studies: Simple Reflections upon Historical Method.
Centennial Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in Dallas, 6 nov. 1980, ASNP S. 3, vol. 11, fasc.
1 (1981), 25-32 (=Settimo, 289-296)
ID. 1981D
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Doran, R., Temple Propaganda: The Purpose and Character of 2 Maccabees,
Washington 1981, CPh 79 (1984), 177-178 (=Ottavo, 387-389)
ID. 1981E
Momigliano, A., Greek Culture and the Jews, in The Legacy of Greece: a New Appraisal, ed. by M.
Finley, Oxford 1981, 325-346 (qui anche History and Biography, 155-184)
369
Bibliografia
ID. 1982A
Momigliano, A., The Origins of Universal History, Creighton Lecture, University of London, 2 Febr.
1981, ASNP, S.3, vol. 12, fasc. 2 (1982), 533-560 (=Settimo, 77-103)
ID. 1982B
Momigliano, A., Considerations on History in an Age of Ideologies. First Georges Lurcy Lecture at the
University of Chicago, 4 May 1982, The American Scholar 51 (1982), 495-507 (=Settimo, 253-269)
ID. 1982C
Momigliano, A., L’assenza del terzo Bickermann, RSI 94 (1982), 527-551 (=Settimo, 371-375)
ID. 1982D
Momigliano, A., Books on the Maccabees. [Rec. a] Gauger, J.-D., Beiträge zur jüdischen Apologetik:
Untersuchungen zur Autentizität von Urkunden bei Flavius Josephus und im I. Makkabäerbuch,
Cologne-Bonn 1977; [Rec. a] Fischer, T., Seleukinden und Makkabäer: Beiträge zur
Seleukidengeschichte und zu den politischen Ereignissen in Judäa während der 1. Hälfte des 2.
Jahrhunderts v. Chr., Bochum 1980, CPh 77 (1982), 258-263 (=Settimo, 481-488)
ID. 1982E
Momigliano, A., [rec. a] Brooten, B. J., Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, Chico 1982, RSI 97
(1985), 325-327 (=Ottavo, 389-392)
ID. 1982F
Momigliano, A., How to Reconcile Greeks and Trojans, MKNAW, n. r., 45, 9 (1982), 231-254 (=
Settimo, 437-462) (trad. it. in Roma arcaica, 325-345)
ID. 1982G
Momigliano, A., Biblical Studies and Classical Studies. Simple Reflections upon Historical Method,
ASNP s. III, vol. XI (1982) 25-32 (=Settimo, 289-96).
ID. 1982H
Momigliano, A., La storiografia greca, Torino 1982
ID. 1984A
Momigliano, A., Religion in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem in the First Century B.C., ASNP S. 3, 14
(1984), 873-892 (=Ottavo, 279-296)
ID. 1984B
Momigliano, A., F. W. Walbank, JRS 74 (1984), n. p. (=Ottavo, 424-426)
ID. 1984C
Momigliano, A., Sui fondamenti della storia antica, Torino 1984
ID. 1984D
Momigliano, A., Settimo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma 1984
ID. 1985A
Momigliano, A., The New Letter by “Anna” to “Seneca” (Ms. 17 Erzbischöfliche Bibliothek in Köln),
Athenaeum 63 (1985), 217-219 (=Ottavo, 329-332)
ID. 1985B
Momigliano, A., Questioni di metodologia della storia delle religioni. [Rec. a] Filoramo, G., Religione e
ragione tra Ottocento e Novecento, Bari 1985; Kitagawa, J. M. (ed.), The History of Religions.
Retrospect and Prospect, New York 1985, RSI 98 (1986), 120-125 (=Ottavo, 402-407)
ID. 1985C
Momigliano, A., Tra storia e storicismo, Pisa 1985
ID. 1986A
Momigliano, A., Profezia e storiografia, in Momigliano 1987e, 109-116
ID. 1986B
Momigliano, A., Ancient Biography and the Study of Religion in the Roman Empire, ASNP S. 3, 16
(1986), 25-44 (=Ottavo, 193-210)
ID. 1986C
Momigliano, A., Indicazioni preliminari su Apocalissi ed Esodo nella tradizione giudaica, RSI 98
(1986), 353-366 (=Ottavo, 211-224)
ID. 1986D
Momigliano, A., How Roman Emperors become Gods, The American Scholar, Spring 1986, 181-193
(=Ottavo, 297-311)
ID. 1986E
Momigliano, A., The Disadvantages of Monotheism for a Universal State, CPh 81 (1986), 285-297
(=Ottavo, 313-328)
ID. 1986F
Momigliano, A., Jewish Evaluations of Latin in the Roman Empire, ASNP S. 3, 16 (1986), fasc. 2
(=Ottavo, 355-358)
ID. 1986G
Momigliano, A., Per la storia delle religioni nell’Italia contemporanea: Antonio Banfi ed Ernesto De
Martino fra persona e Apocalissi, in Annali dell’Istituto Antonio Banfi 1 (1986-1987), 37-61 (=Nono,
370
Bibliografia
701-721)
ID. 1986H
Momigliano, A., Some Preliminary Remarks on the “Religious Opposition” to the Roman Empire, in
Opposition et résistances à l’Empire d’Augut à Trajan – Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique, tome
XXXIII (1986), Vandoeuvres-Genève 197, 103-133 (=Nono, 681-699).
ID. 1986I
Momigliano, A., Two Types of Universal History. The Cases of E.A. Freeman and Max Weber, in The
Journal of Modern History 58.1 (1986), 235-45 (=Ottavo, 121-134).
ID. 1987A
Momigliano, A., Historiography of Religion: The Western Tradition, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, v.
6, New York 1987, 383-390 (=Ottavo, 27-44)
ID. 1987B
Momigliano, A., Roman Religion in the Empire, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, v. 12, New York 1987,
462-471 (=Ottavo, 239-259)
ID. 1987C
Momigliano, A., Sibylline Oracles, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, v. 13, New York 1987, 305-307
(=Ottavo, 349-354)
ID. 1987D
Momigliano, A., Pagine ebraiche, a c. di S. Berti, Milano 1987
ID. 1987E
Momigliano, A., On Pagans, Jews, and Christians, Middletown 1987
ID. 1987F
Momigliano, A., From the Pagan to the Christian Sibyl: Profecy as History of Religion, in The Uses of
Greek and Latin. Historical Essays, ed. by A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton and J. Kraye, London 1988, 3-18
(trad. it. di A. M.: ASNP 17 (1987), 407-428(=Nono, 725-744)
ID. 1987G
Momigliano, A., Ottavo contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, Roma 1987
ID. 1987H
Momigliano, A., Storia e storiografia antica, presentazione di E. Gabba, Bologna 1987
ID. 1988A
Momigliano, A., The Romans and the Maccabees, in Jewish History. Essays in Honour of Chimen
Abramsky, ed. by A. Rapaport-Albert and S. J. Zipperstein, London 1988 (trad. it. di L. Polverini.: RIL
123 (1989), 95-109)(=Nono, 747-761)
ID. 1988B
Momigliano, A., On Hellenistic Judaism [rec. a: Will, E.-Orrieux, C., Ioudaïsmos-hellénismos: essai sur
le Joudaïsme judéen à l’époque hellénistique, Nancy 1986], CPh 83 (1988), 248-251 (=Nono, 763-766)
ID. 1988C
Momigliano, A., From the Pagan to the Christian Sybil: Prophecy as History of Religion, in The Uses of
Greek and Latin. Historical Essays ed. by A. C. Dionisotti, A. Grafton and Jill Kraye, London 1988, 318 (=Nono, 725-44)
ID. 1988D
Momigliano, A., Die Judein in der Alten Welt, mit einer Einführung von K. Christ, Berlin 1988
ID. 1988E
Momigliano, A., Saggi di storia della religione romana (Studi e lezioni 1983-1986), a c. di R. Di Donato,
tr. di M. Tavoni, Brescia 19888
ID. 1989
Momigliano, A., Roma arcaica, Firenze 1989
ID. 1990
Momigliano, A., The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, Berkley-Oxford 1990; ed. it. Le
radici classiche della storiografia moderna. Sather Classical Lectures, a c. di R. Di Donato, Firenze
1992
ID. 1992A
Momigliano, A., Prologue in Germany, in Nono, a c. di R. Di Donato, Roma 1992, 543-562
ID. 1992B
Momigliano, A., Liberty and Peace in the Ancient World, inedito [vd. nota esplicativa], in Nono, 483501
ID. 1992C
Momigliano, A., From Bachofen to Cumont, inedito [vedi nota esplicativa], Nono, 593-607 (trad. it. di
M. Tavoni in Saggi di storia della religione romana. Studi e lezioni 1983-1986) a c. di R. Di Donato,
Brescia 1988
ID. 1992D
Momigliano, A., The Self-Awareness of the Protagonists, in Nono, 609-629
371
Bibliografia
ID. 1992E
Momigliano, A., Storiografia persiana, storiografia greca e storiografia ebraica in Le radici classiche
della storiografia moderna. Sather Classical Lectures, a c. di R. Di Donato, Firenze 1992, 12-34 (ed.
orig.: Persian Historiography, Greek Historiography, and Jewish Historiography, in The Classical
foundations of modern Historiography, with a forew. by R. Di Donato, Berkeley 1990, 5-28)
ID. 1992F
Momigliano, A., Nono contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, ed. a c. di R. Di
Donato, Roma 1992
ID. 2000
A. Momigliano, Ausgewählte Schriften zur Geschichte und Geschichtsschreibung, hrsg. von G. W. Most
unter Mitwirk. von W. Nippel und A. Grafton. Band 3: Die moderne Geschichtsschreibung der Alten
Welt, hrsg. von G. W. Most, Stuttgart-Weimar 2000 (=Ausgewählte Schriften 2000), 369-392
ID. 2012
Momigliano, A., Decimo Contributo alla storia degli studi classici e del mondo antico, ed. a c. di R. Di
Donato, 2 v., Roma 2012
MOMMSEN
1861
Mommsen, T., Mamilius Sura, Aemilius Sura, L. Manlius, RhM 16 (1861) 282-4
MONTEFIORE
1910
Montefiore, C. G., Some elements of the religious teaching of Jesus, according to the Synoptic Gospels,
London 1910 (rist. New York 1973)
MONTGOMERY Montgomery, J. A., The Samaritans, the earliest Jewish sect: their history, theology and literature, 2.
1968
ed., New York 1968 (1. ed.: 1907)
MOORE, C.
1971
Esther, translated with an introduction and notes by C.A. Moore, Garden City 1971
ID. 1977
Moore, C.A., Daniel, Esther and Jeremiah: The Additions, New York 1977
ID. 1985
Moore,C.A. (ed.), Judith, The Anchor Bible, Garden City 1985
MOORE, G.
1958
Moore, G. F., Judaism in the First Centuries of the Christian Era : The Age of the Tannaim, 3 v.,
Cambridge 1958 (1. ed. 1930)
MOR 1992
Jewish assimilation, acculturation and accommodation: past traditions, current issues and future
prospects, ed. M. Mor, Lanham (Nebr.) 1992
MORALDI 1971 Moraldi, L., I Manoscritti di Qumran, Torino 1971
MORESCHINI- Moreschini, C.-Norelli, E., Storia della letteratura cristiana antica greca e latina, Brescia 1995
NORELLI 1995
MORRAPPAPORT
1982
Mohr, M. – Rappaport, U., Bibliography of works on Jewish History in the Hellenistic and Roman
periods, 1976-1980, Jerusalem 1982
MOTZO 1913
Motzo, B. R., Esame storico-critico del III libro dei Maccabei, in Entaphia: in memoria di E, Pozzi,
Torino 1913, 211-251 (rist. come: Motzo, B. R., Ricerche sulla letteratura e la storia giudaicoellenistica, a c. di F. Parente, Roma 1977, 351-416)
MOWINCKEL
1927
ID. 1956
Mowinckel, S., Le décalogue, Paris 1927
MOWRY 1966
Mowry, L., The Dead Sea scrolls and the early church, Notre Dame (Ind.) 1966
MUILENBURG
1960
Muilenburg, J., The Son of Man in Daniel and the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch, JBL 79 (1960), 197209
MURPHY-
Murphy-O’Connor, J., The Essenes and Their History, RB 81 (1974), 215-244
Mowinckel, S., He that cometh, Oxford 1956
372
Bibliografia
O’CONNOR
1974
ID. 1976
Murphy-O’Connor, J., Demetrius I and the Teacher of Righteousness, RB 83 (1976), 400-420
MURRAY 1967 Murray, O., Aristeas and Ptolemaic Kingship, JThSt 18 (1967), 337-371
ID. 1972
Murray, O., Herodotus and Hellenistic Culture, CQ 22 (1972), 200-213
ID. 1977
Murray, O., [rec. a] Momigliano, A., Alien Wisdom, JRS 67 (1977), 177-178
ID. 1988
Murray, O., Momigliano e la cultura inglese, RSI 100. 2 (1988), 422-439
MUSSIES 1971 Mussies, G., The Morphology of Koiné Greek as used in the Apocalypse of St. John, Leiden 1971
MUSTI 1966
Musti, D., Lo Stato dei Seleucidi, SCO 15 (1966), 61-197
MYERS 1974
Myers, J.M. (tr.), II Esdras, Garden City 1974
NAVEH 1962
Naveh, J., The Excavations at Mesad Hashavyahu, IEJ 12 (1962), 89-113
ID. 1973
Naveh, J., Some Semitic Epigraphical Considerations on the Antiquity of the Greek Alphabet, AJA 77
(1973), 1-8
NEESEN 1980
Neesen, L., Untersuchungen zu den direkten Staatsabgaben der römischen Kaiserzeit (27 v. Chr.-284 n.
Chr.), Bonn 1980
NENCI 1998
Nenci, G. (ed.), Erodoto, le Storie, vol. VI: la battaglia di Maratona, Milano 1998
NEUSNER 1965 Neusner, J., History and Torah : essays on Jewish learning, New York 1965
ID. 1971
Neusner, J., The Rabbinic Traditions about the Pharisees before 70, 3 vol., Leiden 1971
ID. 1972
Neusner, J., There we sat down : Talmudic Judaism in the making, Nashville-New York 1972 (rist. con
nuova pref., New York 1978)
ID. 1973A
Neusner, J., The idea of purity in ancient Judaism, Leiden 1973
ID. 1973B
Neusner, J., Eliezer ben Hyrcanos: the Tradition and the Man, Part I: The Tradition; Part II: Analysis of
the Tradition, Leiden 1973
ID. 1975A
Neusner, J., First-century Judaism in crisis : Yohanan ben Zakkai and the Renaissance of Torah,
Nashville-New York 1975 (ed. abbrev. di: A life of Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, ca. 1-80 C. E., Leiden
1962)
ID. 1975B
Neusner, J., Early rabbinic Judaism : historical studies in religion, literature and art, Leiden 1975
ID. 1976
Neusner, J., Talmudic Judaism in Sasanian Babylonia : essays and studies, Leiden 1976
ID. 1981
Neusner, J., Judaism. The Evidence of the Mishnah, Chicago-London 1981
ID. 1984A
Neusner, J., Judaism in the beginning of Christianity, London-Philadelphia 1984
ID. 1984B
Neusner, J., Messiah in context : Israel's history and destiny in formative Judaism, Philadelphia 1984
ID. 1986
Neusner, J., Judaism in the matrix of Christianity, Philadelphia 1986
ID. 1987
Neusner, J. Josephus’ Pharisees: A Complete Repertoire, in Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. by
L. H. Feldman and G. Hata, Leiden 1987, 274-292
ID. 1989
Neusner, J., Foundations of Judaism, Philadelphia 1989; tr. it. di P. Stefani, Firenze 1992
373
Bibliografia
ID. 1995
- 2001
Judaism in Late Antiquity. Part 1: The Literary and Archaeological Sources, ed. by J. Neusner, Leiden
1995. Part 2: Historical Syntheses, ed. J. Neusner, Leiden 1995. Part. 3: Where We stand: issues and
debates in ancient Judaism, ed. by A. J. Avery-Peck, J. Neusner, Leiden 1998. Part 4: Death, life afterdeath, resurrection and the world-to-come in the Judaisms of antiquity, ed. by A. J. Avery-Peck, J.
Neusner, Leiden 2000. Part 5: Judaism of Qumran: a systematic reading of the Dead Sea Scrolls, ed. by
A. J. Avery-Peck, J. Neusner, B. D. Chilton, Leiden 2001
NEUSNERNeusner, J. – Frerichs, E. S. (edd.), "To see ourselves as others see us" : Christians, Jews, "others" in
FRERICHS 1985 late antiquity, Chico (Cal.) 1985
NEUSNERGREENFRERICHS 1987
NICKELSBURG
1972
Neusner, J. – Green, W. S. – Freichs, E. S. (edd.), Judaisms and their Messiah at the turn of the
Christian era, Cambridge 1987
Nickelsburg, G. W. E., Resurrection, immortality, and eternal life in intertestamental Judaism,
Cambridge-London 1972
NICKELSBURG Nickelsburg, G.W.E., Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah, London 1981
1981
NICKELSBURG- Nickelsburg, G. W. E.-Stone, M. E. (ed.), Faith and piety in early Judaism : texts and documents,
STONE 1983
Philadelphia 1983
NIEBUHR
1847-51
Niebuhr, B. G., Vorträge über alte Geschichte, an der Universität zu Bonn gehalten, von B. G. Niebuhr,
hrsg. von M. Niebuhr, 3 Bände, Verlag Reimer, Berlin, I. Band: Der Orient bis zur Schlacht von
Salamis. Griechenland bis auf Perikles, 445 S., 1847; II. Band: Griechenland bis zur Niederlage des
Agis bei Megalopolis. Sicilien's Primordien. Der Orient bis zum Tode Alexander's des Großen. Philipp
und Alexander von Makedonien, 508 S., 1848; III. Band: Die makedonischen Reiche. Hellenisirung des
Orients. Untergang des alten Griechenlands. Die römische Weltherrschaft, 762 S., 1851
NIEHOFF 1998 Niehoff, J., Das Judentum von Alexander d. Gr. bis 800 n. Chr., s.v. Judentum in Der neue Pauly, Bd. 5,
Stuttgart-Weimar 1998, coll. 1194-1200
NIKIPROWETZK Nikiprowetzky, V., Temple et communauté, REJ 126 (1967), 7-25
Y 1967
ID. 1970
Nikiprowetzky, V., La troisième Sibylle, Paris 1970
ID. 1971
Nikiprowetzky, V., Le Nouveau Temple, REJ 130 (1971), 1-30
ID. 1977
Nikiprowetzky, V., Le commentaire de l’Ecriture chez Philon d’Alexandrie, Leiden 1977
NOACK 1971
Noack, B., Spätjudentum und Heilsgeschichte, Stuttgart 1971
NOCK 1933
Nock, A.D., Conversion: the old and the new religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo,
Oxford 1933
ID. 1972
Nock, A. D., Essays on Religion and the Ancient World, Oxford 1972, 2 v., Oxford 1972
NORDEN 1921 Norden, E., Jahve und Moses in hellenistischer Theologie, in Festgabe A. v. Harnack, Tübingen 1921,
292-301 (=Kleine Schriften, Berlin 1966, 276-285)
ID. 1954
Norden, E., Das Genesiszitat in der Schrift vom Erhabenen, AAB 1954, n. 1 (=Kleine Schriften, Berlin
1966, 286-313)
NORTH 2014
North, J. A., Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Thinking of Arnaldo Momigliano, in WARBURG COLL.
2014, 129-145
OGDEN 1961
Ogden, J., A Note on "Autobiography", N&Q 206, 1961, 461-462
OLIVER 1953
Oliver, J.H., The Ruling Power. A Study of the Roman Empire in the Second Century after Christ through
the Roman Oration of Aelius Aristides, TAPhA n.s. 43.4,1953, 871-1003
ID. 1968
374
Bibliografia
Oliver, J.H., The Civilizing Power. A Study of the Panathenaic Discourse of Aelius Aristides against the
Background of Literature and Cultural Conflict, TAPhS 58.1, Philadelphia 1968
OMAGGIO 1989 Omaggio a Momigliano: storia e storiografia sul mondo antico. Cuneo-Caraglio, 22-23 ottobre 1988, a
c. di L. Cracco-Ruggini, Como 1989
OPPENHEIMER Oppenheimer, A., The `am ha-aretz : a study in the social history of the Jewish people in the Hellenistic1977
Romam period, Leiden 1977
ORLINSKY
1944
Orlinsky, H.M., Review of Fritsch, Ch., The Anti-Anthropomorphisms of the Greek Pentateuch, Crozer
Quarterly 2 (1944), 156-160
ID. 1956
Orlinsky, H.M., The Treatment of Anthropomorphisms and Anthropopathisms in the Septuangint of
Isaiah, HUCA 27 (1956), 193-200
ID. 1959-61
Orlinsky, H. M., Studies in the Septuagint of the Book of Job. Chapter III: On the Matter of
Anthropomorphisms, Anthropopathisms, and Euphemisms, HUCA 30 (1959), 153-167 e HUCA 32
(1961), 239-268
OSTENSACKEN 1969
Osten-Sacken, P. von der, Die Apokalyptik in ihrem Verhältnis zu der Prophetie und Weisheit, München
1969
PARENTE
1989A
Parente, F., Ellenismo e giudaismo nell’interpretazione di Arnaldo Momigliano, in Omaggio 1989, 89102
ID. 1989B
Parente, F., Arnaldo Momigliano e il giudaismo. Tra storia e autobiografia, SStor 16 (1989), 65-74
PARKER H.
1978
Parker, H.M., Artaxerxes III Ocus and Psalm 44, JQR 68,3 (1978), 152-68
PARKER R.
1959
Parker, R. A., A Vienna Demotic Papyrus on an Eclipse- and Lunar-Omina, Providence 1959
PASQUALI
1934
Pasquali, G., Storia della tradizione e critica del testo, Firenze 1934
PATLAGEAN
1988
Patlagean, E., Ebraismo e storia degli studi classici secondo Arnaldo Momigliano, RSI 100 (1988), 440446
PAUL 1969
Paul, A., Écrits de Qumran et sectes juives aux premiers siècles de l'Islam : recherches sur l'origine du
Qaraïsme, Paris 1969
PENNA 2001
Penna, R., Vangelo e inculturazione. Studi sul rapporto tra rivelazione e cultura nel Nuovo Testamento,
Cinisello Balsamo 2001
PERETTI 1943
Peretti, A., La Sibilla babilonese nella propaganda ellenistica, Firenze 1943
PERGOLA 1998 Pergola, P., Le catacombe romane, Roma 1998
PERROT 1974
Perrot, J., Une statue de Darius découverte à Suse, CDAFI 4 (1974) 61-72
PERRY 1967
Perry, B. E., The Ancient Romances: a literary-historical account of their origins, Berkeley-Los Angeles
1967
PESANTE 2002 Pesante, M. L., Momigliano, la tradizione e la situazione storica, QS 37, 111 (2002), 747-783
PETERS 1913
Peters, N., Das Buch Jesus Sirach oder Ecclesiasticus, Münster 1913
PFEIFFER 1937 Pfeiffer, R. H., Hebrews and Greeks before Alexander, JBL 56 (1937), 91-101
ID. 1949
Pfeiffer, R. H., History of New Testament Times, New York 1949
375
Bibliografia
PFISTER 1914
Pfister, F., Eine jüdische Gründungsgeschichte Alexandrias, SHAW 11 (1914)
PHILONENKO
1968
Philonenko, M., Joseph et Aséneth. Introd., texte critique, trad. et notes, Leiden 1968
PINCHERLE
1931
Pincherle, A., [recensione a:] Momigliano, A., Prime linee di storia della tradizione maccabaica, Roma
1930, SMSR 7 (1931), 238-247
POLVERINI
2006
Polverini, L. (ed.), Arnaldo Momigliano nella storiografia del Novecento, Roma 2006
PORTEN 1968
Porten, B., Archives from Elephantine, Berkeley 1968
PORTEOUS
1965
Porteous, N. W., Daniel. A Commentary, London 1965
PRÉAUX 1939
Préaux, C., L’Économie royale des Lagides, Bruxelles 1939
PREMERSTEIN Premerstein, A. von, Zu den sogenannten alexandrinischen Märtyrerakten, (Philologus 16, Suppl. Bd. 2),
1923
Leipzig 1923
PREUSS 1971
Preuss, H. D., Verspottung fremder Religionen im Alten Testament, Stuttgart 1971
PRITCHARD
1955-1969
Pritchard, J. B. (ed.), Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 2. ed., Princeton 1955 (Suppl. 1969)
PUCCI BEN
ZEEN 2005
Pucci Ben Zeen, M., Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116/117 CE: Ancient Sources and modern Insights,
Leuven 2005
PUGLIESE
CARRATELLI
1966
Pugliese Carratelli, G., Greek Inscriptions of the Middle East, East and West 16 (1966) 31-6
PURVIS 1981
Purvis, J. D., The Samaritan Problem: a Case Study in Jewish Sectarianism in the Roman Era, in
Traditions in Transformation: Turning Points in Biblical Faith. Festschrift for Frank M. Cross, ed by B.
Halpern and J. Levenson, Winona Lake 1981, 323-350
ID. 1988
Purvis, J. D., Jerusalem the Holy City, Metuchen (NJ) 1988, 93-55
RABIN 1957
Rabin, C., Qumran studies, London 1957 (2. ed.: New York 1975)
RADICE 1983
Radice, R., Filone di Alessandria. Bibliografia generale, 1937-1982, Napoli 1983
RAJAK 1983
Rajak, T., Josephus: The Historian and His Society, Philadelphia 1983
ID. 1990
Rajak, T., The Asmoneans and the Uses of Hellenism, in A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish
and Christian Literature, ed. P. R. Davies and R. T. White, Sheffiel 1990, 261-280
ID. 2001
Rajak, T., The Jewish dialogue with Greece and Rome. Studies in cultural and social interaction, Leiden
2001
ID. 2002
Rajak, T., Synagogue and Community in the Graeco-Roman Diaspora, in BARTLETT 2002, 22-38
ID. 2014
Rajak, T., Momigliano and Judaism, In WARBURG COLL. 2014, 89-106
RANKIN 1936
Rankin, O. S., Israel’s Wisdom Literature, Edinburgh 1936
RAPPAPORT
1992
Rappaport, U., On the Hellenization of the Hasmoneans, in Jewish assimilation, acculturation and
accommodation: past traditions, current issues and future prospects, ed. M. Mor, Lanham (Nebr.) 1992,
1-13
REICKE 1969
Reicke, B., The New Testament Era, London 1969 (2. ed. ingl. di: Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte,
376
Bibliografia
1964)
REIFENBERG Reifenberg, A., Ancient Jewish Coins, 2. ed., Jerusalem 1947
1947
REINACH 1895 Reinach, T., Textes d’auteurs grecs et romains relatifs au Judaïsme, Paris 1895
REINACHBLUM 1930
REINHARDT
1995
Flavius Josèphe, Contre Apion, texte ét. et ann. par Th. Reinach et trad. par L. Blum, Paris 1930
Reinhardt, The Population Size of Jerusalem and the Numerical Growth of the Jerusalem Church, in
Bauckham, R. (ed.), The Book of Acts in Its First Century Setting 4: The Book of Acts in Its Palestinian
Setting, Grand Rapids 1995, 237-265
REITZENSTEIN Reitzenstein, R., Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen. Ihre Grundgedanken und Wirkungen, Leipzig
1910
1910
RICHES 1982
Riches, J., Jesus and the transformation of Judaism, New York 1982
RICHTER 1946 Richter, G., Greeks in Persia, in American Journal of Archaeology 50 (1946), 15-30
RIIS 1970
Riis, P. J., Sukas I. The North-East Sanctuary and the First Settling of Greeks in Syria and Palestine,
Copenaghen 1970
RITTER 1879
Ritter, B., Philo und die Halacha. Eine vergleichende Studie unter steter Berucksichtigung des Josephus,
Leipzig 1879
RIVKIN 196970
Rivkin, E., Defining the Pharisee, HUCA 40-41 (1969-70), 205-49
ID. 1971
The Shaping of Jewish History: a Radical New Interpretation, by Ellis Rivkin, New York 1971. Newly
revised and expanded ed. under the title The Unity Principle: the Shaping of Jewish History, Springfield
N.J. 2003
ID. 1975
Rivkin, E., Ben Sira: the Bridge between the Aaronide and Pharisaic revolutions, Eretz Israel 12 (1975),
95-103
RIVKIN 1978
Rivkin, E., A Hidden Revolution: the Pharisees’ Search for the Kingdom Within, Abingdon 1978
ROBERT 1968
Robert, L., Fouilles d’Aï Khanoum, I, Paris 1973, 107-237 (=CRAI 1968, 416-457)
ID. 1978
Robert, L., Les conquêtes du dynaste lycien Arbinas, Journal des Savants 1978, 3-34
ROBERTSON
SMITH 1882
Robertson Smith, W., The prophets of Israel and their place in history to the close of the eight century B.
C. Eight lectures, Edinburgh 1882
ID. 1894
Robertson Smith, W., The religion of the Semites : the fundamental institutions, 2. ed. 1894 (1 ed. 1889)
ROBINSON
1976
ID. 2003
Robinson, J. A. T., Redating the New Testament, London 1976
ROFÉ 1991
Rofé, A., Jerusalem: The City Chosen by God, in Amit, D.-Gonen, R. (ed.), Jerusalem in the First
Temple Period, Jerusalem 1991, 51-62 [ebraico]
Robinson, T. A., [rec. a] Bartlett 2002, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2003.12.03
ROKEAH 1982 Rokeah, D., Jews, pagans and Christians in conflict, Jerusalem-Leiden 1982
ROOT 1979
Root, M.C., The King and Kingship in Achaemenid Art. Essays in the Creation of an Iconography of
Empire, Acta Iranica 19, Tehran - Liège 1979
ROSE 1992
Rose, P.L., Wagner: Race and Revolution, London 1992
ROST 1976
Rost, L., Judaism outside the Hebrew canon : an introduction to the documents, Nashville 1976 (trad. di:
Einleitung in die alttestamentlichen Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen einschliesslich der grossen
377
Bibliografia
Qumran-Handschriften , Erlangen 1971)
ROSTOVTZEFF Rostovtzeff, M., The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire, 3 voll., Oxford 1926; 2. ed.
1926
revised by P.M. Fraser, Oxford 1957; trad. ita. Storia economica e sociale dell’impero romano,
prefazione di G. De Sanctis, trad. di G. Sanna, Firenze 1976
RUDOLPH 1959 Rudolph, W., Vom Buch Kohelet, Münster 1959
RUSSELL 1964 Russell, D. S., The Method and Message of Jewish Apocalyptic, 200 B.C.-A.D. 200, London 1964
ID. 1986
Russell, D. S., From early Judaism to early church, London 1986
ID. 1999
Russell, D. S., L’apocalittica giudaica (200 a.C.-100 d.C.), ed. it. a c. di P. G. Borbone, Brescia 1999
(ed. orig.: The method and message of Jewish Apocalyptic)
RUTGERS 1995 Rutgers, L. V., The Jews in late ancient Rome, Leiden 1995
RYLE 1892
H. E. Ryle, The canon of the O.T., London 1892
SACCHI 1981
Sacchi, P., a cura di, Apocrifi dell'Antico Testamento, con la collab. di F. Franco, L. Fusella, A.
Loprieno, F. Pennacchietti, L. Rosso Ubigli, UTET 1981 (Classici delle religioni. Sezione seconda
diretta da P. Rossano: La religione ebraica)
SACHSWISEMANN
1954
Sachs, A.J., - Wisemann, D.J., A Babylonian King List of the Hellenistic Period, Iraq 16 (1954), 202-209
SACKUR 1989 Sackur, E., Sibyllinische Texte und Forschungen : Pseudomethodius, Adso und tiburtinische Sibylle,
Halle an der Saale 1898
SAFRAI 1976A
Safrai, S., Religion in Everyday Life, in Safrai, S.-Stern, M. (ed.), The Jewish People in the First
Century, Philadelphia 1976, v. 2, 817-823
ID. 1976B
Safrai, S., The Temple, in Safrai, S. – Stern, M. (ed.), The Jewish People in the First Century,
Philadelphia 1976, v. 2, 898-906
ID. 1987
Safrai, Z., et al., The Literature of the Sages, Fortress Press 1987 (2. ed. Van Gorgum 2006)
SAFRAI-STERN The Jewish People in the First Century: Historical Geography, Political Geography, Political History,
1974-1976
Social Cultural and Religious Life and Institutions, ed. by S. Safrai and M. Stern in co-operation with D.
Flusser and W. C. van Unnik, Philadelphia 1974-76
SAID 1991
Said, S., Hellenismos. Quelques jalons pour l’histoire de l’identité grecque, Leiden 1991
SANDERS 1981 Sanders, E.P. (ed), [et al.], Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period, 1981
SANDERS 1990 Sanders, E.P., Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah. Five Studies, London- Philadelphia 1990
SALMERI 2000 Salmeri, G., Regioni, popoli e lingue epicoriche d’Asia Minore nella Geografia di Strabone, in Biraschi,
A.M. – Salmeri, G. (ed.), Strabone e l’Asia Minore, Napoli 2000
ID. 2006
Salmeri, G., “Alien Wisdom”, in POLVERINI 2006, 149-179
SANDELIN
1991
Sandeli, K.-G., The Danger of Idolatry According to Philo od Alexandria, Temenos 27, 1991, 109-150
SANDERS 1977 Sanders, E. P., Paul and Palestinian Judaism : a comparison of patterns of religion, London 19771 (rist.
1981; trad. it. Brescia 1986)
ID. 1981
Sanders, E. P. (ed., con Baumgarten, A. I. e Mendelson, A.), Jewish and Christian self-definition, vol. 2:
Aspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman period, London 1981
378
Bibliografia
ID. 1990
Sanders, E.P., Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah, Philadelphia 1990
SANDERSAspects of Judaism in the Graeco-Roman Period, edited by E. P. Sanders with A. I. Baumgarten and A.
BAUMGARTEN- Mendelson, (Jewish and Christian Self-Definition: 2), London 1981
MENDELSON
1981
SANDMEL 1962 Sandmel, S., Parallelomania, JBL 81 (1962)
ID. 1969
Sandmel, S., The first Christian century in Judaism and Christianity: certainties and uncertainties, New
York 1969
ID. 1971
Sandmel, S., Philo’s place in Judaism: a study of conceptions of Abraham in Jewish literature, New
York 1971
ID. 1977
Sandmel, S., Hellenism and Judaism, in Great Confrontations in Jewish History, ed. S. M. Wagner and
A. D. Breck, Denver 1977, 21-38
ID. 1978
Sandmel, S., Judaism and Christian beginnings, New York 1978
ID. 1979
Sandmel, S., Philo of Alexandria: an introduction, Oxford 1979
SÄNGER 1980
Sänger, D., Antikes Judentum und die Mysterien : religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu Joseph und
Aseneth, Tübingen 1980
SARFATTI 1977 Sarfatti, G. B., Notes on the Inscriptions on Some Jewish Coins and Seals, JEJ 27, 1977, 204-206
SARNA 1966
Sarna, N., Understanding Genesis, New York 1966
SCARPAT 1967 Scarpat, G., Ancora sull’autore del libro della Sapienza, RBi 2 (1967), 171-189
ID. 1989
Scarpat, G., Libro della Sapienza, 3 voll., Brescia 1989
SCHÄFER 1978 Schäfer, P., Studien zur Geschichte und Theologie des rabbinischen Judentums, Leiden 1978
ID. 1991
Schäfer, P., Der vorrabinische Pharisäismus, in Paulus und das antike Judentum, hrsg. Von M. Hengel
und U. Heckel, Tübingen 1991, 125-172.
ID. 1997
Schaefer, P., Judeophobia: attitudes towards the Jews in the ancient world, Cambridge 1997 (trad. it.
Roma 1999)
ID. 2003
Schäfer, P., The History of the Jews in the Greco-Roman World, rev. and corr. ed., London-New York
2003 (1a ed. ingl. Harwood Academic Publishers 1995; 1a ed., in ted., Stuttgart 1983)
ID. 1969
Schalit, A., König Herodes. Der Mann und sein Werk, Berlin 1969
ID. 1971
Schalit, A., Die Denkschrift der Samaritaner an König Antiochos Epiphanes, ASTI 8 (1970-1971), 131183
SCHALLER
1963
Schaller, B., Hekataios von Abdera über die Juden, ZNW 54 (1963), 15-31
SCHANZ –
Schanz, M. -Hosius, C., Geschichte der römischen Literatur bis zum Geetzgebungswerke des Kaisers
HOSIUS 1914- Justinian, München 1914- 35
35
SCHIFFMAN
2010
Schiffman, L. H., Qumran and Jerusalem: studies in the Dead Sea scrolls and the history of Judaism,
Eeerdmans 2010
SCHELKLE
1990
Schelkle, K. H., Paolo. Vita, lettere, teologia, Brescia 1990
379
Bibliografia
SCHLATTER
1925
SCHNEIDER
1939
Schlatter, A., Geschichte Israels von Alexander d. Gr. bis Hadrian, 3. ed., Stuttgart 1925
Schneider, C., Die griechischen Grundlagen der hellenistischen Religionsgeschichte, ARW 36 (1939),
300-347
SCHOLEM 1957 Scholem, G., Sabbetai Sevi we-ha-tenu'ah ha sabbeta'it bi-yme hayyaw, 2 voll., Tel Aviv 1957 (trad.
ingl.: Sabbatai Sevi: the Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, London 1973; trad. it. a c. di M. Ranchetti,
Torino 2001)
ID. 1960
Scholem, G., Jewish gnosticism, Merkabah mysticism, and Talmudic tradition, New York 1960
SCHORSCH
1975
Schorsch, I., Ideology and History, in Graetz, H., The Structure of Jewish History and Other Essays, ed.
I. Schorsch, New York 1975, 1-62
SCHRECKENBE Schreckenber, H., Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter, Leiden 1972
RG 1972
SCHULTZ 1981 Schultz, J. P., Judaism and the gentile faiths : comparative studies in religion, London -Toronto 1981
SCHUNCK 1959 Schunck, K. D., Drei Seleukiden im Buche Kohelet?, VT 9 (1959), 192-201
SCHÜPPAUS
1977
Schüppaus, J., Die Psalmen Salomos, Leiden 1977
SCHÜRER
Schürer, E., The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C. – A.D. 135), a new
English version rev. and ed. by G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Black, 3 vol. in 4 t., Edinburgh 1973-1987 (Ed.
orig.: Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi, 2. neubearb. Aufl., Leipzig. 1890; 1. ed.
ingl., in 5. vol., transl. by J. Macpherson, S. Taylor and P. Christie, 1880; trad. it. della nuova ed. ingl.
riv. a c. di V. Gatti, Brescia 1985-1998
SCHWARTZ
2000
Schwartz, D. R., How at home were the Jews of the Hellenistic diaspora?, CPh 95 (2000), 349-357
SCHWARZ 1956 Schwarz, L. W., (ed.), Great Ages and Ideas of the Jewish People, New York 1956
SCHWEID 1985 Schweid, E., Judaism and Mysticism According to Gershom Scholem: A Critical Analysis and
Programmatic Discussion, Atlanta 1985
SCROFANI
2005
SEELIGMANN
1948
SEGAL 1963
Scrofani, G., La diaspora secondo J. M. G. Barclay, Kervan 2 (2005), 139-145
ID. 1977
Segal, A. F., Two powers in heaven : early rabbinic reports about Christianity and Gnosticism, Leiden
1977
ID. 1986
Segal, A. F., Rebecca's children : Judaism and Christianity in the Roman world, Cambridge (Mass.)
1986
ID. 2014
Segal, A.F., Conversion to Judaism, in The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, ed. By L.R.
Rambo, Ch.E. Farhadin, Oxford 2014, 578-97
Seeligmann, I. L., The Septuagint Version of Isaiah, Leiden 1948
Segal, A. F., The Hebrew Passover : from the earliest times to A. D. 70, London 1963
SELLERS 1933 Sellers, O., The Citadel of Beth Zur, Philadelphia 1933
SEVENSTER
1968
Sevenster, J., Do You Know Greek? How Much Greek Could the First Jewish Christians Have Known?,
Leiden 1968
SHAKED 1972 Shaked, S., Qumran and Iran, Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), 433-446
SHAKED 1984 Shaked, S., Iranian influences on Judaism: First Century BCE to Second Century CE, in The Cambridge
History of Judaism, ed. W.D. Davies and L. Finkelstein, vol. 1, Cambridge 1984, 308-325
380
Bibliografia
SHERK 1969
Sherk, R.K., Roman Documents from the Greek East, Baltimore 1969
SHESTOV 1968 Shestov, L. I., Athens and Jerusalem, trad. di B. Martin, New York 1968
SIEGERT 2003 Siegert, F., Bibliographie des Josephus-Projekts, in Internationales Josephus-Kolloquium, Dortmund
2002. Arbeiten aus dem Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum, hrsg. von J. U. Kalms, F. Siegert, Münster
2003, 195-201
SIEVERS 2001 Sievers, J., Synopsis of the Greek sources for the Hasmonean period: 1-2 Maccabees and Josephus, War
1 and Antiquities 12-14, Roma 2001
SIGONIO 1583 Caroli Sigonii De republica Hebraeorum libri VII, Coloniae 1583
SIMON 1960
Simon, M., Les sectes juives au temps de Jésus, Paris 1960
SIMON FEST.
1978
Paganisme, judaïsme, christianisme. Influences et affrontements dans le monde antique, Mélanges offert
à Marcel Simon, ed. par A. Benoit, M. Philonenko, C. Vogel, Paris 1978
SIMON-BENOIT Simon, M.-Benoit, A., Le judaïsme et le christianisme antique : d'Antiochus Epiphane à Constantin,
1968
Paris 1968
SISTI 1964
Sisti, A., Riflessi dell’epoca premaccabaica nell’Ecclesiastico, Rbi 12 (1964), 215-256
SMALLWOOD
1976
Smallwood, M., The Jews under Roman Rule from Pompey to Diocletian, Leiden 1976
SMITH, J. 2003 Smith, J.C., in Elia Levita Bachur’s Bovo-Buch: a Translation of the Old Yiddish Edition of 1541,
Fenestra Books 2003
SMITH, M.
1956
Smith, M., Palestinian Judaism in the First Century, in Israel: Its Role in Civilization, ed. M. Davis,
New York 1956, 67-81
ID. 1958
Smith, M., The Image of God. Notes on the Hellenization of Judaism, BJRL 40 (1957-58), 473-512
ID. 1961
Smith, M., The Dead Sea Sect in Relation to Ancient Judaism, NTS 7 (1960-1961), 347-360
ID. 1967
Smith, M., Goodenough’s Jewish Symbols in retrospect, JBL 86 (1967), 53-68
ID. 1971
Smith, M., Palestinian Parties and Politics that Shaped the Old Testament, New York 1971
SMITTEN 1974 Smitten, T. W. Historische Probleme zum Kyrosedikt und zum Jerusalemer Tempelbau von 515, Persica
6 (1974), 167-178
SNELL 1954
Snell, B., Griechische Papyri der Hamburger Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Hamburg 1954
SOLDANI 2009 Soldani, A., Aspetti del giudaismo ellenistico: “1977-1982” nell’Archivio Arnaldo Momigliano,
https://www.academia.edu/9198949/Aspetti_del_giudaismo_ellenistico_19771982_nell_Archivio_Arnaldo_Momigliano
SPEISER 1964
Speiser, E. A., Genesis, New York 1964
SPENSER 1686 Spenser, J., De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus et earum rationibus, 3 v. leg. in 1, Hagae Comitum :
apud Arnoldum Leers, 1686.
SPERBER 1935 Sperber, A., in Peschitta und Onkelos, Jewish Studies in Memory of George A. Kohut, 1874-1933, S.W.
Baron – A. Marx (edd.), New York 1935, 554-564
SPIEGELBERG
1914
Spiegelberg, W., Die sogenannte Demotische Chronik des Pap. 215 des Bibliothèque Nationale zu Paris,
Leipzig 1914
381
Bibliografia
SPIRO 1951
Spiro, A., Samaritans, Tobiads and Judahites in Pseudo-Philo, PAAJR 20 (1951), 279-355
STEGEMANN
1971
STEIN 1954
Stegemann, H., Die Entstehung der Qumrangemeinde, Bonn 1971
ID. 1957
Stein, S., The Liturgy of Hanukkah and the First Two Books of Maccabees, JJS 5 (1954), 100-106 e 148155
Stein, S., The Influence of Symposia Literature in the Literary Form of the Pesah Haggadah, JJS 8
(1957), 13-44
ID. 1973A
Stern, M., [rec. a] Gager 1972, AThR 55 (1973), 94-98
ID. 1973B
Stern., M., Zealots, in EJ Yearbook, Jerusalem 1973, 135-152
ID. 1976
Stern, M., Aspects of Jewish society. The priesthood and other classes, in The Jewish people in the first
century. Historical geography, politica history, social, cultural and religious life, II, ed. by S. Safrai, M.
Stern, in co-operation with D. Flusser and H. C. Van Unnik, Amsterdam-Philadelphia 1976, 565-63
ID. 1974-1984 Stern, M. (ed. and comm.), Greek and Latin authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 v., Jerusalem 1974-1984
STERNStern, M.-Murray, O., Hecataeus of Abdera and Theophrastus on Jews and Egyptians, JEA 59 (1973),
MURRAY 1973 159-168
STERN, S. 2002 Stern, S., Jewish Calendar Reckoning in the Graeco-Roman Cities, in BARTLETT 2002, 107-116
STOLZ 1972
Stolz, F., Jahwes und Israels Kriege : Kriegstheorien und Kriegserfahrungen im Glauben des alten
Israel, Zürich 1972
STONE 1972
The Testament of Abraham: the Greek Recensions, transl.by M. Stone, Missoula 1972
ID. 1980
Stone, M. E., Scriptures, sects and visions : a profile of Judaism from Ezra to the Jewish revolts,
Cleveland 1980
ID. 1984
Stone, M. E. (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, Assen 1984
S TP H –
Hilgert, E., A Bibliography of Philo Studies 1963-1970, StPh 1 (1972), 57-71; Id., A Bibliography of
HILGERT 1972- Philo Studies 1971, with addictions for 1965-1970, StPh 2 (1973), 51-54
1980
STERNBERGER Sternberger, G. Das klassische Judentum: Kultur und Geschichte der rabbinischen Zeit, Muenchen 1979
1979
(trad. it: Il giudaismo classico: cultura e storia del tempo rabbinico, dal 70 al 1040, Roma 1991)
STRASBURGER Strasburger, H., Herodot und das perikleische Athen, in Historia 4, 1955, 1-25
1955
STROUMSA
2003
Stroumsa, G., Alexandria and the Myth of Multiculturalism, in L. Perrone, ed., Origeniana Octava:
Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition / Origene e la tradizione alessandrina, Leuven 2003, vol. I, 23-29
ID. 2007
Stroumsa, G., Arnaldo Momigliano and the History of Religions, in Momigliano and Antiquarianism:
Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences, ed. by P. N. Miller, Toronto 2007, 286-311
SWAIN 1940
Swain, J.W., The Theory of the Four Monarchies: Opposition History under the Roman Empire, CPh 35
(1940), 1-21
TARN 1930
Hellenistic Civilization, London 1930 (3. ed. rev. by G. T. Griffith, London 1952)
ID. 1938
Tarn, W. W., The Greeks in Bactria and India, Cambridge 1938 (2. ed. 1951)
TÄUBLER 1926 Täubler, E., Tyche, Leipzig 1926
ID. 1947
Täubler, E., Jerusalem 201 to 199 B.C.E. On the History of a Messianic Movement, JQR 37 (1946-1947),
1-30; 125-137; 249-263
382
Bibliografia
TCHERIKOVER Tcherikover, V., The Jews in Egypt in the Hellenistic-Roman Age in the Light of the Papyri, Jerusalem
1945
1945
ID. 1958
Tcherikover, V., The Ideology of the Letter of Aristeas, HThR 51 (1958), 59-85
ID. 1961
Tcherikover, V., Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews, engl. ed., Philadelphia 1959 (rev. engl. ed.,
Philadelphia 1961; ed. orig., in ebr., 1931)
ID. 1964
Tcherikover, V., Was Jerusalem a “Polis”?, IEJ 14 (1964), 61-78
TESTUZ 1960
Testuz, M., Les idées religieuses du Livre des Jubilés, Genève 1960
THACKERAY
1923
Thackeray, H. St John, The Septuagint and Jewish Worship, London 1923
ID. 1930
Thackeray, H. St. J., Josephus, vol IV: Jewish Antiquities, books I-IV, Cambridge Mass. 1930
THEISSEN 2004 Theissen, G., La religione dei primi cristiani, Torino 2004
THESLEFF 1965 The Pythagorean Texts of the Hellenistic Period, ed. H. Thesleff, Âbo 1965
THIERING 1981 Thiering, B. E., The Gospels and Qumran : a new hypothesis, Sidney 1981
ID. 1983
Thiering, B. E., The Qumran origins of the Christian Church, Sidney 1983
TIMPE 1974
Timpe, D., Der römische Vertrag mit den Juden von 161 v. Chr., Chiron 4 (1974), 133-152
TORREY 1940
Torrey, C. C., The Letters Prefixed to Second Maccabees, JAOS 60 (1940), 119-150
ID. 1944
Torrey, C. C., The Older Book of Esther, HThR 37 (1944), 1-40
TOWNER 1982 Towner, W. S., Hermeneutical Systems of Hillel and the Tannaim: A Fresh Look, HUCA 53 (1982), 101135
TRAPPER 2003 Trapper, A., Tractate Avot and Early Christian succession lists, in The ways that never parted. Jews and
Christians in late antiquity, ed. by A. H. Backer and A. Y. Reed, Tübingen 2003, 159-188
TREBILCO
1991
Trebilco, P., Jewish communities in Asia Minor, Cambridge 1991
TROIANI 1977 Troiani, L., Commento storico al “Contro Apione” di Giuseppe, Pisa 1977
ID. 1985
Troiani, L., Osservazioni sopra l’opera storiografica di Menandro d’Efeso, EVO 8 (1985), 521-528
ID. 1997
Apocrifi dell’Antico Testamento, sotto la dir. di P. Sacchi. Vol. 5: Letteratura giudaica di lingua greca, a
c. di L. Troiani, Brescia 1997
ID. 1998
Troiani, L., L’identità di Israele in Flavio Giuseppe e nella letteratura giudaico-ellenistica, RSB 1
(1998), 67-69
ID. 2000
Troiani, L., Il giudaismo negli autori greci e latini dei primi secoli d.C., AnnSE 17 (2000), 341-353
ID. 2001
Troiani, L., Greci ed ebrei, ebraismo ed "ellenismo", in Storia Einaudi dei Greci e dei Romani. IX: I
Greci oltre la Grecia. Incontri, confronti, conflitti, a c. di S. Settis, Torino 2001, 203-230
ID. 2006
Troiani, L., Le “Pagine ebraiche”, in Polverini 2006, 139-148
UNNIK 1978
Unnik, W. C. van, Flavius Josephus als historischer Schriftsteller, Heidelberg 1978
URBACH 1959 Urbach, E. E., The Rabbinical Laws of Idolatry in the Second and Third Centuries in the Light of
Archaeological and Historical Facts, IEJ 9 (1959), 149-165, 229-245
383
Bibliografia
ID. 1975
Urbach, E. E., The Sages : their concepts and beliefs, 2. ed., 2 v., Jerusalem 1975 (1. ed.: Jerusalem
1971)
VERMÈS 1968 Vermès, G., The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Harmondsworth 1968
VERMES FEST. A Tribute to Geza Vermes: Essays on Jewish and Christian Literature, ed. P. R. Davies and R. T. White,
1990
Sheffiel 1990
VIDALVidal-Naquet, P., Il buon uso del tradimento, intr. di A. Momigliano (=Momigliano 1980f), Roma 1980
NAQUET 1980 (trad. it. di: Flavius Josèphe ou du bon usage de la trahison, Paris 1976)
VIVIANO 1978 Viviano, B. T., Study as worship : Aboth and the New Testament, Leiden 1978
VOLZ 1934
Volz, P., Die Eschatologie der jüdischen Gemeinde im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, Tübingen 1934
WACHOLDER
1963
Wacholder, B. Z., “Pseudo-Eupolemos”, Two Greek Fragments on the Life of Abraham, HUCA 34
(1963), 83-113
ID. 1968
Wacholder, B.Z., Biblical Chronology in the Hellenistic World, HThR 61, 1968, 451-81
ID. 1978
Wacholder, B. Z., The letter from Judah Maccabee to Aristobulos. Is II Maccabees 1.106-2.18
authentic?, HUCA 49, 1978, 89-133
ID. 1983
Wacholder, B. Z., The dawn of Qumran : the sectarian Torah and the teacher of righteousness,
Cincinnati 1983
WACHSMUTH
1891
Wachsmuth, C., in Timagenes und Trogus, RhM 46, 1891, 465-479
ID. 1895
Wachsmuth, C., Einleitung in das Studium der alten Geschichte, Leipzig 1895
WACHTEL
1971
Wachtel, N., La vision des vaincus: les Indiens de Pérou devant la conquête espagnole, 1530-1570, Paris
1971
WAGNER 1960 Wagner, S., Die Essener in der wissenschaftlichen Diskussion : vom Ausgang des 18. bis zum Beginn des
20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin 1960
WAGNERBRECK 1977
Great Confrontations in Jewish History, ed. S. M. Wagner and A. D. Breck, Denver 1977
WALBANK
1977
Walbank, F. W., Polybius’ last ten books, in Historiographia antiqua. Commentationes Lovanienses in
honorem W. Peremans, Leuven 1977, 139-162
WALTER 1964 Walter, N., Der Thoraausleger Aristobulos, Berlin 1964
ID. 1964
Walter, N., Frühe Begegnungen zwischen jüdischem Glauben und hellenistischer Bildung in
Alexandrien, in E. C. Welskopf (ed.), Neue Beiträge zur Geschichte der Alten Welt, I, Berlin 1964, 367378
ID. 1965
Walter, N., Zu Pseudo-Eupolemos, Klio 43-45 (1965), 282-290
WARBURG
COLL. 2014
The Legacy of Arnaldo Momigliano. Ed. by T. Cornell & O. Murray, London – Turin 2014
WEBER 1920
Weber, M., Die Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen, Teil I: Konfuzianismus und Taoismus, Tübingen
1920 (trad. ingl. The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism, transl. By H. H. Gerth, New York –
London 1968.
ID. 1921
Weber, M., Das Antike Judentum. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie, Bd. 3, Tübingen 1921
(ed. ingl.: Weber 1952)
ID. 1952
Weber, M., Ancient Judaism, transl. and ed. by H. H. Gerth and D. Martindale, New York-London384
Bibliografia
Glencoe 1952 (ed. orig.: Weber 1921)
WEINBERG J.
1978
Weinberg, J., Azariah dei Rossi: towards a reappraisal of the last years of his life, ASNP s. III, 8 (1978),
n. 2, 493-511
ID. 1991
Weinberg, J., Where three civilizations meet, in The presence of the historian: essays in memory of
Arnaldo Momigliano, ed. by M. P. Steinberg, History and Theory. Beiheft 30, Middletown (Ct) 1991,
13-26
ID. 2001
Rossi, A. de’, The light of the eyes, transl. from the Hebr. with an introd. and annotat. by J. Weinberg,
New Haven 2001
WEINBERG S.S. Weinberg, S. S., Post-Exilic Palestine. An Archaeological Report, Proc. Israel Acad. 4 (1969-1970), 781970
97
WEINERT 1977 Weinert, F. D., A Note on 4Q159 and a New Theory of Essene Origins, RQ 9 (1977), 223-230
WEINFELD
1986
Weinfeld, M., The Organizational Pattern and the Penal Code of the Qumran Sect, Friburg 1986
WELLHAUSEN Wellhausen, J., Die Pharisäer und die Sadduzäer. Eine Untersuchung zur inneren jüdischen Geschichte,
1874
Greifswald-Bamberg 1874
ID. 1884
Wellhausen, J., Prolegomena zur Geschichte Israels, Berlin 18832
WERNER 1970 Werner, E., The sacred bridge : liturgical parallels in Synagogue and early Church, New York 1970
WERNER 1992 Werner, J. (ed.), Zum Umgang mit fremden Sprachen in der griechisch-römischen Antike, Stuttgart 1992
WEST, E. 1892 Pahlavi texts: Part IV, transl. by West, E.M, Oxford 1892
WEST, S. 1974 West, S., Joseph and Aseneth, CQ n.s. 24 (1974), 70-81
WEWERS 1975 Wewers, G. A., Geheimnis und Geheimhaltung im rabbinischen Judentum, Berlin 1975
WHITLEY 1969 Whitley, C. F., The genius of ancient Israel : the distinctive nature of the basic concepts of Israel studied
against the cultures of the ancient Near East, Amsterdam 1969
WHITTAKER
1984
Whittaker, M., Jews and Christians: Graeco-Roman views, Cambridge 1984
WIKGREN
FEST. 1972
Studies in New Testament and Early Christian Literature in Honor of A. P. Wikgren, Leiden 1972
WILCKEN
1922-23
Wilcken, U., Urkunden der Ptolomäerzeit, Berlin 1922-23
WILAMOWITZ Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, U. von, Die griechische Literatur des Altertums, in U. v. W.-M., K.
Krumbacher, J. Wachernagel, F. Leo, E. Norden, F. Skutsch, Die Griechische und lateinische Literatur
1905
und Sprache, Die Kultur der Gegenwart : I.8, Berlin-Leipzig 1905
WILKINSON
1974
Wilkinson, J., Ancient Jerusalem: Its Water Supply and Population, PEQ 106 (1974), 33-51
WILLIAMS
1998
Williams, M., The Jews among Greeks and Romans : a diasporan sourcebook, London 1998
WILLRICH
1895
Willrich, H., Juden und Griechen vor der Makkabäischen Erhebung, Göttingen 1895
ID. 1900
Willrich, H., Judaica: Forschungen zur hellenistisch-jüdischen –Geschichte und Literatur, Göttingen
385
Bibliografia
1895
ID. 1924
Willrich, H., Urkundenfälshung in der hellenistisch-jüdischen Literatur, Göttingen 1924
WILSON 1980
Wilson, R. R., Prophecy and society in ancient Israel, Philadelphia 1980
WILSON 1986
Wilson, R., The City in the Old Testament, in P. S. Hawkins (ed.), Civitas: Religious Interpretations of
the City, Atlanta 1986, 9-13
WINSTON 1966 Winston, D., Iranian Components in the Bible, Apocrypha and Qumran, History of Religion 5 (1966)
WOELK 1966
Woelk, D., Aghatarchides von Knidos, über das Rote Meer, Übersetzung und Kommentar, Freiburg 1966
WOLFSON
1947
Wolfson, H. A., Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, 2 voll.,
Cambridge 1947 (rev. ed. 1962)
WRIGHT, G.
1962
Wright, G. E., The Samaritans at Shechem, HThR 55 (1962), 357-366
WRIGHT, W.
1952
Philostratus and Eunapius, The Lives of the Sophists, with an Engl. transl. by W. C. Wright, London –
Cambridge(Mass) 1952
YADIN 1962
Yadin, Y., The Scroll of the War of the Sons of Light against the Sons of Darkness, Oxford 1962
ID. 1967
Yadin, Y., Un nouveau manuscrit de la Mer Morte : "le rouleau du temple", CRAI, nov.-dic. 1967
[pubbl. 1968], 607-619
ID. 1971
Yadin, Y., Bar Kokhba. The Rediscovery of the Legendary Hero of the Second Jewish Revolt Against
Rome, London- New York 1971
ID. 1983
Yadin, Y. (ed.), The Temple Scroll, 3 v., Jerusalem 1983
ID. 1985
Yadin, Y., The Temple Scroll : The Hidden Law of Dead Sea Sect , London 1985
YVOTTE 1963
Kolbe, W., Beiträge zur syr. und jüdischen Geschichte, Stuttgart 1926
ZEITLIN 1962- Zeitlin, S., The Rise and Fall of the Judaean State: A Political, Social and Religious History of the
1967
Second Commonwealth, 2 v., Philadelphia 1962–1967
ZELLER 1880
ID.1903
ZIADÉ 2007
Zeller, E., Der Pseudophilonische Bericht über Theophrast, Hermes 15 (1880), 137-146 = E. Zellers
Kleine Schriften, hrsg. von O. Leuze, I-II, Leipzig 1910, vol. I, 215-225.
Zeller, E., Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Leipzig 1903 (trad. it. a c.
di Mondolfo, R., La filosofia dei greci nel suo sviluppo storico, 10 voll., Firenze 1932 – 1979)
Ziadé, R., Les martyrs Maccabées: de l’histoire juive au culte chrétien. Les homélies de Grégoire de
Nazianze et de Jean Chrysostome, Leiden-Boston 2007
ZUCKERMAND Tosefta, based on the Erfurdt and Vienna codices, with parallels and variants by M. S. Zuckermandel,
EL 1937
Jerusalem 1937
ZUNZ 1837
Zunz, L., Die Namen der Juden. Eine geschichtliche Untersuchung, Leipzig 1837
ID. 1865
Zunz, L., Literaturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie, Berlin 1856
386
Bibliografia
387