Rabbi Burton Visotzky serves as Appleman Professor of Midrash and Interreligious Studies at The Jewish Theological Seminary, where he joined the faculty upon his ordination in 1977. Rabbi Visotzky is the Louis Stein Director of the Finkelstein Institute for Religious and Social Studies of JTS, charged with programs on public policy. He also serves as director of the Milstein Center for Interreligious Dialogue of JTS. Rabbi Visotzky holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Harvard University, and JTS. He has been visiting faculty at Oxford, Cambridge, and Princeton universities, and at the Russian State University of the Humanities in Moscow. With Bill Moyers, Rabbi Visotzky developed 10 hours of television for PBS. Their collaboration, Genesis: A Living Conversation, premiered in 1996. He also consulted with Jeffrey Katzenberg and DreamWorks for the company's 1998 film, Prince of Egypt. Rabbi Visotzky's articles and reviews are published in America, Europe, and Israel. He is the author of 10 books and more than 100 articles and reviews.
The following exchange will focus on Rabbi Visotzky’s new book Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It.
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Dear Rabbi Visotzky,
Your book explores the Roman influences that have shaped Judaism as we know it. My first introductory question: how surprised do you expect your readers to be by the examples of influences you explore in your book – and do you think some readers could reject the idea that Judaism owes a lot to Hellenism? (and please, provide an example or two as you answer this question).
Yours,
Shmuel.
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Dear Shmuel,
I wrote Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It precisely because what has been known for 70 years among academic scholars is generally surprising to the Jewish public. Folks initially think that Rome was our implacable enemy and that’s the whole story. But as I wrote in the book, the Jews of the Land of Israel lived in the geographic center of the Greek and then the Roman empires for centuries. One of the main languages in the Land of Israel was Greek, including the majority of synagogue and burial inscriptions there. This is all the more true for Jews who lived elsewhere in the Roman Empire or what we call the Diaspora (a Greek word, by the way).
Major Jewish institutions like the synagogue and our courts, the Sanhedrin, have Greek names. In a famous passage in the Talmud (Hagiga 14b) the great founder of rabbinic Judaism, Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai refers to Mt. Sinai itself as a Roman banquet chamber (triclinium). The Passover Seder is structured like a Greco-Roman symposium banquet – including hors d’oeuvres called by their Greek name: karpos (yep, it’s Greek). At the symposium they ate an appetizer made of nuts, fruit and wine, drank multiple cups of wine, dipped vegetables into briny sauce, asked questions about the food and quoted sacred literature in response – with the Greeks and Romans quoting Homer, not Moses. The symposium banquet ended in debauchery with so-called “flute girls” coming out to practice their wiles and vaudeville comedians telling dirty jokes. The rabbis, eager to distinguish the Seder from the symposium, warn us that after the paschal meal we should not go off to the comedians – in Greek: api komias. This gave us the afikomen at the end of the meal, through some creative mistranslation on the part of the non-Greek speaking Babylonian rabbis.
I want to offer another example of just how much Greek influence there was among the rabbis by quoting from a fifth-century Midrash that refers to a verse of Jeremiah (31:20), HaBen Yakir Li Ephraim, “Truly Ephraim is a dear son to me.” This Scripture is from the prophetic portion read in synagogues world-wide on the second day of Rosh HaShannah. But the rabbis of old were, in fact, stymied by the invocation of Ephraim in the verse. Did God, speaking through Jeremiah, refer to Ephraim who was the son of Jacob? Did this perhaps mean the tribe that Ephraim spawned? Maybe it was a metonymy for the exiled Northern Kingdom, the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel? Still other rabbis understood that Ephraim should be read as an honorific title.
In fact, in Leviticus Rabbah 2: 3, one Rabbi explains the word to mean: Palatiani. His colleague says: Eugenestatos. If this seems Greek to you, it should! The palatiani had palatial lives – they were courtiers. Our rabbi employs Greek to convey his precise meaning. Not to be outdone, his colleague uses Greek as well. The term Ephraim means the best (which is the Greek –statos ending), the well-born (Greek: eugenos, like eugenics). Ephraim means nobility!
Jews in fifth century Israel entered the New Year singing in Hebrew, but thinking in Greek. In my new book Aphrodite and the Rabbis, readers will learn how much Roman culture and Greco-Roman languages penetrated Jewish practice. That’s why the book is sub-titled: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It.
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