Recherche – Detailansicht
Ausgabe: | Oktober/2020 |
Spalte: | 920–922 |
Kategorie: | Judaistik |
Autor/Hrsg.: | Ben-Eliyahu, Eyal |
Titel/Untertitel: | Identity and Territory. Jewish Perceptions of Space in Antiquity. |
Verlag: | Berkeley u. a.: University of California Press 2019. XII, 195 S. m. 5 Abb. u. 6 Ktn. Geb. US$ 95,00. ISBN 978-0-520-29360-1. |
Rezensent: | Catherine Hezser |
This study of the relationship between spatial perception and identity in post-biblical Judaism stands in line with the recent scholarly focus on space and geography in antiquity (cf. Peter Van Nuffelen, ed., Historiography and Space in Late Antiquity, Cambridge: CUP, 2019; Daniela Dueck and Kai Brodersen, eds., Geography in Classical Antiquity, Cambridge: CUP, 2012) and in Jewish culture (Barbara E. Mann, Space and Place in Jewish Studies, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2012; Charlotte E. Fonrobert, »The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies«, AJS Review 33:1, 2009, 155–64). It is the revised and expanded English version of a book published in Hebrew in 2014 (Between Borders: The Boundaries of the Land of Israel etc., Jerusalem: Yad Ben-Zvi). Whereas the earlier Hebrew study (which was not available to this reviewer) claims to closely analyse the literary sources, this English volume is more concep-tual in its approach to the significance of territory in Second Temple and rabbinic sources.
Maurice Halbwachs’s theory of a »collective memory« attached to space is transformed into the notion of »cultural memory« that differs from one (sub-)group to the next and is subject to historical changes and fluctuations. From biblical times onwards, the various religious, political, and socio-economic identities of the respective authors and those they represented determined the ways in which the land of Israel, its borders and locations within were perceived. This approach stands in line with cultural geography’s insight that »society shapes landscape« (6). In addition to changing political rules, »[t]erritory is associated with ethnicity and is dependent on demographics« (7). The perception of space must therefore be examined within the parameters of border definitions, power relationships, and historical changes.
The book’s five chapters deal with specific spatial issues relevant in ancient Jewish history and literature: the focus on Judah/Judaea and/or Israel; the varying notions of the land of Israel’s borders; the notion of the Holy Land and holy places in confrontation with Christianity and its emerging pilgrimage practices of the fourth and fifth centuries C. E. Whereas the book of Chronicles occasio-n-ally uses the term »land of Israel« for the entirety of the southern kingdom of Judah and the northern kingdom of Israel, Ezra and Nehemiah are concerned with the Persian district of Yehud only. Only in the literature of the Second Temple period is the term »Israel« consistently used for the »memory of the biblical Sons of Israel« (21) and the land where they settled. The repeated use of the term »Sons of Israel« for the entire »nation« or ethnic group is sexist and annoying. One wonders why the editors did not spot this transla-tion of the biblical bnei Yisrael and correct it into the gender-inclusive »children of Israel«. B.-E. argues that the shift from »Judah«/ Judaea to »Israel« occurred in the second half of the Hasmonean period and continued throughout rabbinic times. The official Roman name of the province until Hadrian was Judaea. After the Bar Kokhba revolt, perhaps as a punitive measure, the province was renamed »Syria Palaestina«. B.-E. assumes that the rabbinic use of the term »Israel« rather than »Jews« »reflects the complete transformation from a Judean to an Israelite identity« (27) that was probab-ly bolstered by the demographic shift towards the Galilee and the coastal plain in the second and third centuries C. E.
The chapter on the varying notions of the land of Israel’s borders (chapter 2) as well as the chapter on rabbinic perceptions of the land (chapter 4), which deals with some of the same issues, suffer from a lack of any detailed discussions of textual sources. Mere summaries of arguments that are not backed up by literary examinations are presented here. B.-E. states that the biblical tradition already pro-vides »heterogeneous« views of the land’s borders, a phenomenon that continues in Second Temple and rabbinic texts. The ways in which the land of Israel is delimited are based on ideological factors, such as reminiscences of the time of the biblical monarchy and re-sistance to foreign rule, and real demographic and geopolitical changes. Whether Josephus deliberately refrains from defining the borders of »the land of the Jews« in his Jewish War to separate himself from the (other) rebel leaders’ »national consciousness« while specifying the borders of the land of Canaan in his later work Jewish Antiquities due to »shifts in his identity« and greater »identifica-tion with the Jewish people« (53–5) is questionable. He is dealing with different entities – biblical Canaan and contemporary Roman Judaea – after all.
In his chapter on the »Land of the Sages« B.-E. talks about rab-binic literature as if it were a homogeneous whole. References to Usha in the Babylonian Talmud are taken literally as historical evidence of rabbinic settlement in this location. While acknowledging that rabbinic geographical demarcations primarily served ritual halakhic purposes and/or were based on biblical texts and exegesis, he believes that changes in Jewish demographics also played a role. Rabbinic texts are considered to reflect shifts on the ground, such as the move from Judaea to the Galilee and Golan Heights after the two revolts and Diocletian’s administrative reforms that led to the inclusion of the southern areas into (Syria-)Palestine. The essen-tialist notion of the »impurity of the land of the gentiles« (98) has recently been challenged by Mira Balberg in a book ( Purity, Body, and Self in Early Rabbinic Literature, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014) B.-E. does not mention. According to Balberg, impurity should be seen as a subjective category that rabbis applied to themselves and other Jews but not to non-Jews, who remained outside of the rabbinic halakhic system. While rabbis could contract impurity abroad, »gentile« land as such was not considered impure; otherwise rabbis would not have been able to travel and move about, not even in their own neighbourhoods and cities that had mixed populations in late antiquity.
Similarly problematic are B.-E.’s contradictory statements about rabbis’ perception of the holiness of the land. Already at the be-ginning he refers to »their Holy Land« (15). In connection with Mishnah Kelim 1:6–9 he notes that for rabbis the land of Israel was »holier than all the [other] lands« (116). The perceived holiness of the land and Jerusalem was linked to the (Holy of Holies in the) Temple, however, and rabbis were aware of its absence after the Temple’s destruction in 70 C. E. Therefore the statement, »the only places the rabbis considered holy were the Temple, Jerusalem, and the unit of the land of Israel as a whole« (ibid.) is wrong if understood in relation to rabbis’ own post-Temple times. Unlike the author of 2 Maccabees, who talks about Jerusalem as the »Holy City« and the land of Israel as the »Holy Land« (1:7), rabbis did not con-sider the Roman-occupied province of (Syria-)Palestine inherently holy and also refrained from using this terminology for the rab-binically defined land of Israel, to prevent idolatry and to dis-tinguish themselves from Christians who, from the time of Constantine onwards, flocked to »holy places« within their spiritual entity of a »Holy Land«. B.-E. is right, however, in juxtaposing the Christian spiritual entity with the very real land rabbis lived in and were familiar with: »The popularity of the concept of the ›Holy Land‹ demonstrates the diminished status of physical territory« (75) in Philo’s and Paul’s writings already. In later times, the Madaba map and Eusebius’s Onomasticon are concerned with specific points (»holy« sites) in space, whereas the Rehov inscription applies rabbinic agricultural rules to the region of the Bet Shean valley. In the latter, the boundaries of the land of Israel are defined in terms of agricultural law, not in terms of the land’s inherent sanctity.
The volume addresses important issues that should interest scholars and students of rabbinic literature, ancient history, and early Christianity. Hopefully, it will spur further discussions and closer analyses of the relevant sources in the future.