When in Rome

Following the catastrophic defeat of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, the Jewish people were no longer a military threat to the Roman Empire. The legions had won. The Temple was destroyed, Jerusalem lay in ruins, and a new Roman city called Aelia Capitolina was built over its foundations. Judea was now Palaestina. For a defeated people ruled by the most powerful empire in the world, the options seemed limited.  

They found another way. “After the Bar Kokhba Revolt the Jews stopped trying to rebel against the empire,” says Dr. David Sabato, a lecturer in rabbinic literature and Bible at Herzog College and a research fellow on the Romana Project at the Hebrew University. “The relationship changed. From the mid-second century on, the Jews were no longer military rivals. Now there was a more cultural, philosophical, and moral clash.”

Sabato’s lecture series at Beit Avi Chai explores this encounter through Bereshit Rabbah, a III-IV-century midrash on the Book of Genesis from the Land of Israel. The course examines how the rabbis absorbed, deflected, appropriated, and even subverted the dominant culture of imperial Rome, and how that encounter shaped the Jewish tradition in ways that are still felt today.

Genesis as a weapon

The choice of Bereshit Rabbah is deliberate. “This is the first aggadic midrash that we know,” Sabato explains. “It’s the earliest and richest that we have.” But there is another reason for its relevance to the Jewish-Roman encounter. The Book of Genesis deals with universal themes that were also the domain of Roman philosophy and political thought. The rabbis were not writing in a vacuum. They were also responding to an empire that claimed authority over all of creation, using Genesis as the raw material to fight back.

Crucial to this material is the story of Jacob and Esau. Esau was also known as “Edom” (‘The Red One’), which for the rabbis was a coded reference to Rome. The ongoing conflict between the brothers was read not just as an ancient family drama but also a living metaphor for the struggle between Israel and its imperial oppressor. Bereshit Rabbah returns repeatedly to this theme. “From the rabbinic perspective,” Sabato notes, “it’s not only an ancient story but a story about the struggle between two nations.” The Midrash uses the twin relationship between Jacob and Esau to describe the complex relationship between Israel and Rome, which share many unique similarities, such as a developed legal culture, but are also opposites of each other.

Separation of powers

Sabato’s course puts these midrashic texts in direct dialogue with classical Roman sources: Cicero on justice and governance, Seneca on moral philosophy, Tacitus on imperial power, Virgil on the eternity of Rome. Reading these two traditions side by side reveals that the rabbis were not simply reacting to Rome but engaging with it – sometimes mocking it, sometimes internalizing its values, and sometimes with chutzpah daring to embody those values better than the Romans themselves.

Sabato returns to this last, surprising theme repeatedly. One of the most striking examples he offers involves the confrontation between Abraham and God over the fate of Sodom. In the biblical text, Abraham accuses God of injustice: will the judge of all the earth not do justice? When the rabbis interpret this in Bereshit Rabbah, they give it a distinctly Roman political inflection.

“Rabbi Yehuda ben Simon says: When you created your world, you gave it to two men to rule it – Romus and Romulus, the mythological founders of Rome. You did that because you knew that one would balance the other. But you are the only God, so you have nobody to balance you.” The midrash shifts gears from outcome to procedure. Abraham’s challenge is no longer simply about the fate of Sodom, but about judicial standards and the principle that no single authority should act as sole judge, even God. This, in Sabato’s reading, is a clear appropriation of the Roman concept of separation of powers, of the institutional checks that the Senate was supposed to provide against the arbitrary will of the emperor. The political balance in this midrash probably refers to the two consuls. The common myth tells of the murder of Remus by Romulus, while here a different version has been preserved about the cooperation between them that served as a model for the relations between the consuls.

On one level, the rabbis are using Roman political theory to make a theological point about the nature of divine justice. On another, they are turning that same theory against Rome itself. By invoking Romulus and Remus in a text about God’s need for counsel, they are subtly criticizing an empire in which, by the III century, the Senate had become a rubber stamp and the emperor exercised essentially unchecked power.

“The rabbis are saying: We are better Romans than you are,” Sabato explains. Another midrash about King David makes this point even more explicitly. In it, David is depicted dressed like a Roman emperor. When the general Joab seeks permission to wage war against the Moabites, the midrash describes David setting aside his imperial cloak, going before the Sanhedrin, and donning his tallit. “I came here only to ask and get your permission; I can’t act without it,” he says. According to this reading the Sanhedrin is the ideal Roman Senate: a properly functioning deliberative body that constrains executive power rather than just affirming it.

This is not mere polemic. “It’s adopting, internalizing, but also criticizing Roman ideas,” Sabato says. “The battlefield isn’t with a sword and shield but it’s interpretative and midrashic.” According to his reading, Jewish culture becomes a form of intellectual and moral resistance to the occupying empire that claims to uphold the empire’s own highest values more faithfully than the empire itself. In short, a counterculture.

When the rabbis were more Romans than the Romans

The question of how conscious the rabbis were of this process of cultural absorption is one that Sabato also addresses. In contemporary Talmudic scholarship, there has been increased interest in identifying direct connections between Roman and legal and administrative concepts and rabbinic law, and specific Roman terms and institutional, literary and legal structures have been identified in Jewish legal texts. This includes the European Research Council-funded Romana project led by Prof. Maren Niehoff, of which Dr. Sabato is a part, which studies the ways in which the Roman Empire influenced Jews, pagans, and Christians in a multidisciplinary manner.

The situation is somewhat different, Sabato notes, when it comes to Bereshit Rabbah, which is a work of narrative and homiletical interpretation (aggadah) rather than law. Here the influences are more difficult to trace to specific textual sources. Sabato doesn’t think that the rabbis read Seneca’s individual writings. “But they knew his popular notions,” he concludes. The rabbis encountered Roman scholars in Caesarea and other centers of learning; there are recorded debates in the literature, although some challenge their historicity.

“In Israel, Western culture is in the air,” Sabato says, drawing the analogy to the present. “You can’t escape those cultural influences. But like the fish in the aquarium, we’re not always aware of it. This is very similar to Roman culture during the rabbis’ time, which was extremely influential for hundreds of years.”

What makes the rabbinic response so interesting, in Sabato’s view, is that they didn’t just absorb it passively. “They didn’t accept it as is – they changed it, they took the format and adopted it into their own culture, values, texts. They internalized those ideas but at the same time they flipped them and fought them and sometimes mocked them.” The rabbis were not simply Romans who happened to keep Shabbat. They were thinkers who deeply engaged with the dominant civilization of their time and transformed it on their own terms.

The larger issue of minority cultural survival is one that Sabato thinks about often. The question of how a minority culture maintains its distinctiveness and integrity while living inside a dominant culture, without either withdrawing into a ghetto or dissolving into assimilation, is always relevant. It is, he suggests, one of the key challenges of Jewish history.

Sabato’s new book, “Yavneh and Its Sages: A Journey into the Origins of Tannaitic Halacha,” deals with the rabbinic academy at Yavneh, established in the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction, where the foundations of post-biblical Judaism were laid. “My main goal,” he says, “is to uncover these encounter points and to find out in which ways they interpret or mock them. The most interesting thing to do is to identify and analyze these unexpected connections.”

For more, see Dr. David Sabato’s online series at BAC, “Between Jews and Romans in Midrash Bereshit Rabbah” (in Hebrew).

Main Photo: The Roman Forum, Rome, Italy. By Hans E C Johansson\ Wikipedia