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.
This following exchange focuses on Rabbi Visotzky’s new book Aphrodite and the Rabbis: How the Jews Adapted Roman Culture to Create Judaism as We Know It. Part one can be found right here.
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Dear Rabbi Visotzky,
Thank you for your first answer. Your book is indeed convincing in its presentation of many examples of clear influence of Hellenic culture on Judaism.
But the book also shows that the Jews themselves are at times conflicted in the way they acknowledge and accept such influences. They tell one story – of influence – and another story – of ambivalence.
Can you please help us understand why these two conflicting notions exist, and how the Jews have managed this coexistence?
Thank you,
Shmuel
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Dear Shmuel,
This question cuts to the heart of how rabbinic Judaism found its way in the Ancient World – and continues to do so today. For the ancient rabbis, the quintessential symbol of the Roman Empire was the biblical figure of Esau, the brutish twin brother of Jacob/Israel. Esau was the hunter while Jacob stayed at home.
In the rabbinic imagination, Esau was Rome and his character wholly inhabited their image of Roman power. Esau was “The Man,” the oppressor, the colonial authority that exercised imperial hegemony. Rome had, after all, twice brutally put down Jewish rebellions in the Land of Israel and had burnt the Second Temple to the ground. It was easy for the zealots who rebelled to characterize Rome as the embodiment of all bad things — the original Evil Empire.
But it must be emphasized that in choosing Esau as the symbol of Rome, the rabbis were equally aware the Esau was, in fact, Jacob’s twin brother. Fraternal twins have a bond, even when they engage in sibling rivalries. The rabbis understood how extensively they imbibed Roman culture in their own creation of post-Temple rabbinic religion – what we still celebrate as Judaism.
A story in the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 33b) illustrates the ambivalence that the rabbis felt about Rome:
Rabbi Judah son of Converts said, “How admirable are the deeds of this nation. They have built markets, bridges, and bath-houses.” His colleague Rabbi Yosi was silent; but Rabbi Shimeon ben Yochai retorted, “Anything they have built has been for their own needs. They build markets so their whores have a place to ply their trade. Bath-houses to pamper themselves, and bridges to collect tolls and taxes.”
One rabbi in the Talmudic narrative extols Roman achievements, while another disdains them. The text reflects a division of those in the Jewish community who are at home in the broader culture and can give credit where credit is due – if you will: render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s – versus those who insist that Judaism is unique and forever set apart from the broader culture. Such a divide may be found in the contemporary Jewish world, especially in the United States and Europe, where Jews live as a small minority among a much larger Christian and/or secular culture.
More than 70 years ago, the spiritual leader of the Park Avenue synagogue in New York, Rabbi Milton Steinberg, wrote a novel called As a Driven Leaf. It traced the conflict of Judaism versus Hellenism as a matter of stark choices, not coincidentally reflecting what was the dilemma of his own synagogue community in the aftermath of the Holocaust. They asked themselves: “Am I a Jew first or an American first?”
Today, we here in the U.S. no longer ask that question. We Jews believe that we are America, even as we know that this might be a fragile moment in U.S. and Jewish history. Aphrodite and the Rabbis recounts a similar moment of Jewish development in the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. The book traces the rabbis’ move from indecision about the values of Hellenism to an embrace of Greco-Roman culture the very means of Jewish survival.
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