Coexisting with the Enemy: Jews and Pagans in the Mishnah

Coexisting with the Enemy: Jews and Pagans in the Mishnah

Description

This essay aims to analyse some aspects of the rabbinic outlook in the second century, concerning the norms that govern relationships between Jews and pagans. The Mishnah tractate Avodah Zarah—which is the main source for the following analysis—reflects a reality of two communities, Jewish and pagan, entangled with one another, within the setting of the Hellenistic cities of the land of Israel. The Mishnah's main concern is to create a complex set of norms which will constitute the proper response of Jews towards an environment saturated with pagan worshippers and symbols. The most extreme and telling case of such close proximity between Jews and pagans, which the Mishnah aims to address and regulate, is represented in the Mishnah's ruling concerning a Jewish house which shares a wall with a pagan temple: “If [an Israelite] has a house adjoining an idolatrous shrine and it collapsed, he is forbidden to rebuild it. How should he act? He withdraws a distance of four cubits into his own ground and there builds. [If the wall] belonged both to him and the shrine, it is judged as being half and half . . .” (Avodah Zarah 3.6). The normative question that arises in the Mishnah is: what happens in a case where the wall which is shared by the temple and a neighbouring Jew's house has fallen, and the Jew wants to rebuild the wall? If the Jew re-erects the wall, it will involve not only rebuilding his own house, but also rebuilding a pagan temple. He therefore has to withdraw a distance of four cubits into his own ground. It is hard to imagine a case which would reflect closer contact between a Jew and a pagan temple. Entanglement of radically diverse communities is thus a given fact in the Hellenistic city, and the Mishnah aims to regulate the norms of such a shared social space. I do not aim to reconstruct the historical relations between Jews and pagans in mixed cities as reflected in other documents in the Mishnah. Nor do I intend to analyse the particular historical circumstances that led to the Mishnah's specific rulings. Rather, my aim is internal to the text of the Mishnah, and my question is: what sort of normative outlook guides the rulings of the Mishnah, and what type of interaction is countenanced by the norms of the Mishnah in the shared geographical and sometimes social space of the mixed cities in the land of Israel? This question can be answered independently of the as yet unanswered problem of to what extent those rulings were actually obeyed by the community. My enquiry is thus directed towards the normative conceptions of the dominant and most articulate Jewish elite of the time, and not to the actual behaviour of the Jewish populace. The main concerns of this chapter are how such a coexistence was tolerated and the conceptual framework which allowed sharing even to a limited degree a social space with pagans. In order to examine toleration and its limits in the Mishnaic text, it is important to outline different conceptions of toleration and their relations to the rabbinic world. The following conceptual outline will help us on the one hand to distinguish modern ideas of toleration from ancient ones, and on the other hand to attempt to define which of the conceptual possibilities is open to the rabbis. The first and most radical concept of toleration is based upon relativism concerning truth questions. Since truth is not yet available and thus we do not have any clear way to demarcate truth from falsehood, no one has the legitimate right to force someone out of his or her path. This view is expressed by Mill, who argues that pluralism is the condition of examining and experimenting with different ways of life in order to advance towards the truth which we do not yet have. The only coercive limitation which is permitted is to stop anyone from coercing another into his or her way of life. The relativistic argument has even stronger formulations than Mill's, which deny not only the present access to truth but its future possibility. According to such formulations of the relativistic approach, competing ways of life are incommensurable, hence a future arbitration between them is conceptually impossible. Besides the argument based on incommensurability, the relativistic argument has a postmodernist formulation grounded on Nietzsche's view that the very distinction between true and false is power based and thus another form of enslavement.

Source Publication

Tolerance and Intorlerance in Early Judaism and Christianity

Source Editors/Authors

Graham N. Stanton, Guy G. Stroumsa

Publication Date

1998

Coexisting with the Enemy: Jews and Pagans in the Mishnah

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