Introduction to This Edition

INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION

NATALIE B. DOHRMANN

When encountering a 900-page book titled, less than whimsically, Jewish and Roman Law: A Comparative Study, written over half a century ago and studded on nearly every page with Hebrew, Greek, German, Latin, Aramaic and French, not to mention the chapters beckoningly named things like “Testimonial Compulsion” and “Accep- tilatio in Jewish Law,” one hardly expects to describe the work as delightful. Im- portant perhaps, or magisterial, even dense, obscure, or dated—all adjectives one might more intuitively anticipate. But while these descriptors are all in their turn true, this work manages to be, indeed, delightful. Boaz Cohen, who died in 1968, is a character I’d love to be seated beside at a dinner party. He has read and remem- bered seemingly everything in the Western canon and beyond, has a fresh eye for illuminating connections, possesses wit and deep sentiment, and above all, is curious, generous, and—despite his staggering learning—deeply and essentially modest. His intellectual modesty is not born from piety but from a sense of the transience of scholarship, a keen awareness of the work to be done, and an appreciation for what we can’t and will never know.

BIOGRAPHY: BOAZ COHEN (1899–1968) Boaz Cohen’s career was that of a man not only dedicated to scholarship in a range of disciplines, but one devoted to service, to the Conservative movement, and the Seminary, but also a man committed to kavod and community. Born in Connecticut at the turn of the century, Cohen attended public schools in Bridgeport, and ac- quired his Jewish learning through private tutors.1 He received rabbinical ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1924 and three years later a doctorate from Columbia University (from which he had also received his B.A. in 1921) comparing the Mishnah and Tosefta on the Sabbath.2 Cohen spent his career

1 David Golinkin, “A Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Boaz Cohen,” Jewish Law Annual 13 (2000): 65–66. 2 Published as Mishnah and Tosefta: A Comparative Study, Part I—Shabbat (New York, 1935).

vii viii JEWISH AND ROMAN LAW at JTSA as a librarian and an instructor in Talmud.3 Though he was a scholar’s scholar, Cohen’s interest in Jewish law was not solely antiquarian. He was an active decisor in the Conservative movement, and wrote thousands of decisions. From 1940 to 1948 he chaired the Rabbinical Assembly’s Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the movement’s legal authority.4 A thoughtful and influential halakhist, he published reflections on the work of legal interpretation in Law and Tradition in Judaism (New York, 1959). An American born and raised was relatively rare in early 20th-century Jewish studies in the States. But despite Cohen’s European-style ease with the classical canon, his fluent movement between modern languages, and his expected mastery of the rabbinic tradition, he was resolutely American. His humanism feels unburdened by the apologetic impulse and institutional limitations of his European forebears.

CONTENTS Though subtitled “A Comparative Study,” in the singular, Jewish and Roman Law is a collection of twenty-five essays originally published in a range of venues between 1935 and 1963. All but the last two brief notes in Hebrew (“On the Minor” [1963] and “On Derelictio” [1950]) were written in English. The essays were gathered for the first time into two volumes by the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1966, shortly before Cohen’s death. The opening “general” section lays out the contours of his approach and tack- les big questions of a philosophical and theological nature, among them: ethics; a new derivation of Paul’s dichotomy between letter and spirit from Jewish, Greek, and Roman sources; the meaning of freedom and justice; and the delicate dotted line separating law and morals. The subsequent essays are arranged topically according to the tripartite structure with which Gaius structured his Institutes (p. 1245): laws of persons, things, and actions (a troika, by the way, which met with little favor among the Romans themselves, as Cohen gamely underscores). The two Hebrew pieces come at the end. The section on the laws of persons—essays on the complex and seminal topics of inheritance, marriage, and status—represents an extraordinarily meaty collocation of sources and insights. Its six essays take up the bulk of the work, the next two sec- tions decreasingly so. “Law of Things” in nine studies covers, self-evidently, property law—damages, usage, transfer, and the like. The final section, “Laws of Actions,” includes four chapters, having mostly to do with the courts and procedures for ad- judication. Cohen was apparently the collection’s editor, and he wrote a preface and introduction for the whole. That the collection is more than the sum of its parts is due in

3 Elias J. Bickerman and Edward M. Gershfield, “Boaz Cohen (1899–1968),” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 37 (1969): xxix–xxxi. 4 Ibid., xxxi. 5 All page numbers here in parentheses are to this work. INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION ix part to the paratextual apparatus. There are 46 pages of addenda—a series of expan- sions and updates to scholarship in the footnotes and, more valuably, additional primary exempla from ancient sources. Cohen includes a short list of corrigenda (p. 802) as well as a one-page postscript, on which more below, followed by a set of indices, the first of which is a rather idiosyncratic 25-page subject and name index (pp. 805–30). The list of primary sources in the “Index of Passages” (pp. 831–81) offers a unique view into Cohen’s project. Arranged roughly chronologically by tradition, we see what he is talking about when he says the sources must come first, and are hum- bled by the breadth of materials that he commands. The Bible is heavily represented (only Obadiah and Jonah are absent) in a wide range of versions, languages, and editions (LXX, Aquila, Samaritan, Vulgate, Peshitta, targums, and more) as well as medieval Jewish Bible commentators. Over half the books of the New Testament get mention (Cohen has a deep interest in the Pauline corpus) as do Philo and Jose- phus and a smattering of apocryphal sources. As to be expected, tannaitic materials are central, as are the major codes, supplemented by geonic and post-talmudic responsa, and a few references to medieval Jewish philosophy. Medieval voices are not paralleled on the classical side, but Cohen brings a formidable index of Roman legal materials, most heavily focused on the Digest. Though only a very few Greek liter- ary and legal (including Christian) sources appear, he does not scant significant eastern corpuses from Hammurabi to the Koran. The final 10 pages of the passage index are devoted to non-legal classical literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and history, as well as some Church fathers. The index in itself is a useful survey of the sources, and a rough guide helping direct the scholar from her base corpus to the most probable and useful loci of comparisons from the other culture. However, though 50 dense pages long, the passage index is as instructive in its omissions as in its content. A casual search of the footnotes shows far more exemplars in several categories than what appear in the indices. Most perplexing is the absence of any reference to the Talmud! One might surmise that this lacuna signals his intended audience: traditionally trained Jews. One could assume that the title of each chapter cues the accomplished talmudist as to the relevant primary sources from the Bavli, rendering an index unnecessary.6 Such a surmise helps also explain the index of foreign legal terms in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, and Ancient Near Eastern languages. However, this theory does not account for the omission of the Palestinian amoraic sources: the Yerushalmi and the midrashim, though the talmuds are of course his main primary source. A terrific tool for the classically Jewishly-trained, but for a sojourning classicist for whom this work could and should be a vital resource, the unpointed, untranslat- ed Hebrew is virtually useless. In short, the index—which should welcome Roman- ists—makes itself rather unfriendly.

6 Listen for example to the point of view assumed here (p. 669 “Arbitration,” emphasis mine): “Let us recall the rules in the Talmud with respect to arbitration…” x JEWISH AND ROMAN LAW

Another lacuna is religious law. “The laws of Damages [civil law], the sabbath, and Levitical rules of impurity,” Cohen argues, “are too different in origin, nature, and purpose, to permit analogies to be drawn one from the other” (p. 122). His “juridical approach” thus involves disentangling what he calls “ritual law” from civil law, which is his focus. He acknowledges that this bifurcation is alien to rabbinic thinking and sources—and indeed one must make choices in a project of this scale. What is framed as an analytical decision aimed at finding common vocabularies in fact reiterates Roman divisions especially concerning subordinate populations like the Jews, to whom Rome granted legal autonomy regarding their religious law (religio/superstitio) but not civil and criminal jurisdiction. By omitting ritual law Cohen accepts the playing field as determined by the conqueror (i.e., CTh 2.1.10). It seems to me that given the many instructive and eye-opening parallels between Jewish and Roman sacred and ritual laws, that a comprehensive comparison remains a desideratum, all the more so given how easily classicists ignore Roman religious law, and Jewish studies scholars assume its sui generis distinctiveness.7

METHODOLOGY In more than one place Cohen states plainly that his motive in doing his research is corrective: the study of ancient law, he tells us, follows four standard scientific approaches: dogmatic, historical, philosophic, and comparative. The last of these has, to his mind, been understudied, and without it a full study of any legal system is wanting. He wants to build the field (i.e., p. viii, 123). Comparison, for Cohen, is not evaluative. He is in no hurry to draw conclusions or pass judgments. “In a serious study of law there is neither room for apolo- getics nor boasting of the superiority of one system over another” (p. xiii). Instead his object is: to determine whether there was any mutual indebtedness, and if little or no con- nection between their legal creations is discoverable, then to illuminate the dark corners in sundry branches of the law by opening up new vistas and perspectives afforded by the aggregate of analogies and contrasts. For both Jewish and Roman jurisprudence constitute a part of ancient history. (pp. 13–14, emphasis mine) In short, for Cohen, the work of comparison—essentially a project of translation whose gaps are as instructive as its easy substitutions—has deep value in and of itself in that, he notes in the words of Buckland, “nothing is more helpful to an un- derstanding of a system of law than exposition of it from different points of view” (see p. 129, and n. 22 there). The very act of pouring rabbinic law into Roman ves- sels and vice versa, seeing where it accords and diverges, is a process that must be by nature enlightening, even intoxicating.

7 See Natalie B. Dohrmann, “Sacred Law—Greek, Roman, Jewish,” in The Routledge En- cyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, ed. E. Orlin et al. (London, 2015). INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION xi

In his postscript, Cohen writes: “The historical approach must view all the facts in the picture, the theological, it would seem, is free to select.”8 Where, one wonders, does Cohen place himself? While comparison expands the data available to the historian, Cohen is not one. And while he certainly selects his sources, he is devoid of theological dogma or systematizing impulses. Instead, the methodology of Jewish and Roman Law draws something from both the librarian and the posek. A librarian by temperament as well as occupation, much of Cohen’s scholarship was devoted to what might be characterized as bibliographical studies of vari- ous sorts. In addition to his well-known Kuntres ha-teshuvot (Budapest, 1935), a cata- log of thousands of responsa organized by author and provenance, Cohen compiled bibliographies of a range of influential scholars, among them Alexander Marx (1928; Marx was the Seminary’s chief librarian for 50 years from 1903 to 1953), Louis Ginzberg (1933), and Israel Friedlaender (1936), each not incidentally religious lead- ers and visionaries as well as academics and mentors.9 He is also responsible for the over 600-page index to Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews, an achievement that makes this extraordinary work usable.10 The articles in Jewish and Roman Law are themselves bibliographies in miniature, collating the accumulated reading of a voracious mind. His general resistance to formal legal systems aligns him with Conservative principles of the Seminary as a whole, but it appears conditioned as well by his appreciation of the complexity of data and perspectives that of necessity accompanies the bibliographic project, and a commitment to making the evidence available and accessible to the read- er/student.11 In this wise the topics covered in this collection, even when Cohen’s methodology is out of step with the current state of legal studies, amass sources and perspectives that are themselves invaluable, and gather raw material that will spawn further inquiry. The jurist/decisor shapes his method as well. There is a pragmatic curiosity to Cohen’s comparative work; he approaches each topic like an engineer gathering his tools and taking apart a machine to see how it works. Capacious in learning without a drop of dogma, he walks his way around problems applying a range of methodol- ogies from philology to jurisprudence to history. As a result the text can at times feel

8 Postscript, p. 803, cited from M. E. Andrews, Journal of Biblical Literature 67 (1948): 278. 9 David Golinkin compiled a bibliography of Cohen on the 30th anniversary of his death: “A Bibliography of the Writings of Professor Boaz Cohen,” Jewish Law Annual 13 (2000): 65–85. 10 This makes the spotty state of the index to this work even more perplexing. Rebecca Schorsch, “The Making of a Legend: Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews” (Ph.D. diss.; Uni- versity of Chicago, 2003). 11 Catherine Hezser, introduction to Hezser, ed., Rabbinic Law in Its Roman and Near Eastern Context (Tübingen, 2003), 7. xii JEWISH AND ROMAN LAW disorganized and meandering,12 but in his collocation and deconstruction Cohen is looking to see what pieces the two systems share, what can be attributed to legal thinking in general, and what derives from the unique or contingent elements of each culture/history. Though he refrains from judgment in most of his comparative work, each of his analytical surveys could serve as a legal-conceptual background- cum-prolegomenon to the active application of law. His search for legally relevant material leads him far outside the bounds of the normal and normative halakhic canon. In this he may have been influenced by the innovative, canon-expanding research of his teachers Saul Lieberman and Louis Ginzberg. He has a strong commitment to the pervasive bi-directional explanatory power of law and culture.13 Legal concepts can explain non-legal ideas (see “Law and Spirit”) and vice versa. His style is reminiscent of a snappy, Shakespeare-quoting Supreme Court opinion, reflecting a less specialized and more cosmopolitan age. The essays not only illustrate points with narrative exempla drawn from the Bible and aggadata, but also welcome the bon mots of everyone from Plato to Words- worth, Ovid to Oscar Wilde.14 His own writing at times evinces a winking swagger: “While calculated ambiguity serves a purpose in puns, politics, and poetry, it is a perplexing problem in legal and logical discourse” (p. 42). So Cohen writes in the midst of his chapter “Letter and Spirit in Jewish and Roman Law”—the alliteration a taste of the pleasure Cohen took in his work. Simple comparison is the main aim of the project, and at the end of the day Cohen is admirably conservative in his conclusions. At the opening of his bedrock essay on the law of persons, he brings commonsense methodological guidelines: eschew false friends, demand philological rigor, note the power of historical data to alter how juridical categories should be weighed (pp. 126–27)—all the pitfalls that threaten and tempt the overeager or under-read comparatist. He has no time for siloed exceptionalism but cautions against parallelomania (p. 13). Nevertheless, this may be the work’s Achilles heel, for his primary method is suggestive juxtaposition. Absent proof of influence (“mutual indebtedness” or “direct bilateral borrowing”— of which he finds little and about which, frankly, he seems to care even less), comparison comes to “illuminate dark corners.” At times however, it may obscure, as with his timeline of “curious chronological coincidences” (p. 15) in which he point out that Ezra and the Twelve Tables are roughly contemporaneous, as are the Insti- tutes and the Mishnah, and Justinian and the Talmud. The pairs are left dangling enticingly. But he moves on.

12 Morton Smith, “Reviewed Work: Jewish and Roman Law, a Comparative Study by Boaz Cohen,” Journal of Biblical Literature 86.2 (1967): 238, 240–41. 13 The essays on “Law and Spirit” and “Peculium” are exemplary in this wise. 14 There may be an element of canon building in this method. Ginzberg, to whom Co- hen was both student and assistant, decidedly altered the Jewish canon by weaving the narrative traditions from apocryphal and other non-rabbinic materials into his Legends. See Schorsch, “The Making of a Legend.” INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION xiii

COHEN AND THE STUDY OF THE RABBIS The introduction to the work displays the depth of Cohen’s knowledge and thought as it maps the antecedent scholarship. As he moves from Early Modernity through the era of Wissenschaft des Judentums until the 20th century, he points out the uncharted dark areas in all directions: “…we have no textbook on Jewish law similar to those on Roman law by Buckland…” (ix); “…a scientific étude d’ensemble of Biblical law is a great desideratum…” (xiv); “…an exhaustive comparison on Athenian law and Greek law in general with the Talmud would illuminate…” (xiv); “For the properly equipped scholar this field [Hellenistic legal influences on Talmud] offers rich quar- ry…” (xv); “…Agada will yield rich material for the history of Talmudic law…” (xv). Calls for study in particular areas run steadily throughout—Sasanian law, medieval merchant law, patristic studies, Christian civil law, Bible citation in glossators to the Digest, legal studies since Wissenschaft, John Selden. It is a buyer’s market of dis- sertation topics, monographs, even career paths. The desiderata chart the time that mortality did not afford Cohen, yet they anticipate, or have directly inspired, much of the work done in the half century since he published the collection. Cohen the decisor manifests himself most obviously in the very commitment to the idea of “Jewish Law”—a label that makes sense if you are writing responsa but much less when speaking historically.15 Biblical law? Mishnaic law? Law in Jose- phus? Talmudic law is a rather different animal from biblical or medieval law; Cohen often elides them. And if we are not speaking historically, why delimit “Jewish” by “Roman”? What Cohen most commonly means by Jewish law is clearly rabbinic law. Comparative jurisprudence need not posit historical contact, nor weigh history heavily as a factor, but invoking Roman law as the comparison problematizes the category of “Jewish” law. In other words, while comparative jurisprudence is not a historical endeavor, Cohen’s pairing makes historical context at once unavoidable and inescapably relevant. The work’s methodological in-betweenness leaves it in a sort of limbo. That said, both Rabbis and Romans were great jurists who left extraordinary legal legacies, “admirable casuists…relying on their subtle genius to discover in each case the…elegant solution” (p. 157, citing Declareuil [1922]; see n. 155 there). Com- parative law assumes that ancient (and modern) legal codes have much in common: regardless of historical particularity, they evolve along similar paths (i.e., from self- help to due process), perforce confronting and regulating a similar set of societal challenges—violent crime, theft, inheritance, marriage, property, contract, and status—to name only the most obvious. He is by no means a methodological naif; still, like Urbach in The Sages, published a little over a decade later, Cohen disregards documents as such, and cherry picks his sources, setting 6th-century Babylonian material alongside the Twelve Ta- bles, the Bible seamlessly illuminating the Mishnah. Though he was right to

15 See Roger North (1653–1734), cited on p. ix in Cohen’s original publication (p. xxiii in the present volume). xiv JEWISH AND ROMAN LAW acknowledge that cultural interchange took place between the rabbis and the Roman world, and that that exchange went largely unacknowledged by both, Cohen perhaps too readily accedes that rabbis, like Roman legal elite, were magistrates applying the law, and that they shared “a great deal of intellectual relations” with pagan jurists and philosophers (cf. p. 157). Though he is aware of the problem—“Only after exhaustive monographs on the jurisdiction of the Jewish Greek and Syrian courts in Palestine during the Talmudic period (70–500 C.E.) have appeared can a definitive study of influence be seriously undertaken.” (p. xi)—nonetheless it is in the realm of history that Cohen’s work feels most dated. The dramatic impact, direct and tacit, of post-colonial studies on rabbinics means current studies of rabbis and Rome operate in the field of empire and through the filter of power. Cohen states “for the purposes of this discussion, law will be taken in the narrow sense, namely, the aggregate of rules of and principles of conduct which the governing power… recognizes as those which it will enforce or sanction” (p. 123). Even if rabbinic laws in their particulars are not by-products of Roman influence, rabbis themselves certainly were. They were Roman in several senses, they were subordinate to Roman power and were products of a Roman world. This reality should not be ignored, especially, and perhaps most centrally, as the rabbis are authors of a discourse that takes power as its primary idiom.16 Rab- binic law is itself a Roman discourse, and at the same time, by Cohen’s own definition, rabbinic law is not law at all. Is the pragmatic cultural role of jurists in these two cultures then irrelevant? For historians of law as of religion, comparative studies have fallen out of favor, tainted by an awareness of the imperialism of Enlightenment framing. But the jurist is a comparatist by nature, and counter- or casually historical. I want to pause on this tension in this moment, for it presents a decided problem for the modern rabbinicist, and at the same time provokes some reflection on the state of the field. The object of historical study is the specific and embedded text, object, or actor, defined by its position in time and space and power. Comparison is a deeply humanist endeavor—it takes after all as its unit of inquiry the human, that which is constant across time and space. When we qualify assertions by constant reference to the political and contingent, we gain much, but lose as well. “Cohen was attempting nothing less than to rescue the ideal of ethical humanism from the ever-advancing reach of historicism that sought to consume it.”17 So writes David N. Myers about another Cohen, Hermann, and it strikes me as apt for our own Cohen. Boaz Co- hen’s comparative method has at its heart a useful check on the overweening historicism that marks much cutting-edge rabbinics scholarship. His ahistoricism is not the parochialism of traditional insular talmudics, but is decidedly humanist. How do

16 See Dohrmann and Annette Yoshiko Reed, “Introduction: Rethinking Romanness, Pro- vincializing Christendom,” in Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire: The Poetics of Power in Late An- tiquity, eds. Dohrmann and Reed (Philadelphia, 2013), 1–21 and bibliography, 345–78. 17 David N. Myers, Resisting History (Princeton, N.J., 2003), 67. INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION xv great cultures, he asks, articulate the human? How do they insist on justice? Solve disputes? How do they confront the inevitable gaps that appear between law and what is fair? These are questions about truth in action. Cohen’s insistence on asking these big questions has the potential to make historical inquiry that much more nu- anced and precise. Ironically, then, historical studies of the rabbinic (legal) corpus render Cohen’s work freshly important. Despite a tendency in traditional rabbinics to remain within the world of the Talmud, historians of classical Judaism increasingly understand their work as a form of Roman history (a direction that has its Anglophone roots in Momigliano, Lieberman, and Daube, and that finds its contemporary practitioners in Hayes, Fonrobert, Schwartz, Safrai, Hezser, Boyarin, Yuval, Lapin, Rosen-Zvi, Jackson, Berkowitz, and many more). Peripheral cultures must, after all, pay mind to the dominant one. More significant for this work is the post-colonial shift of the classicist’s gaze from imperial center to periphery. Scholars such as Millar, Ando, Gruen, Woolf, Harries, Wilker, Cotton, Shaw, Whitmarsh, and Peachin, to name but a few, herald a budding awareness of Jewish law as a provincial library that preserves a subaltern experience in its own voice.18 Awareness of rabbinic materials, however, does not mean they are yet commonly consulted by those outside the guild. They are not. The barriers to access—disciplinary, linguistic, and cultural—are high. But the studies that make up Jewish and Roman Law, here reissued, offer an accessible gateway to the complex labyrinth of legal sources for a new generation of classicists, a rigorous if humbling training ground, and vital conceptual foundation from which to assess cultural contact, sympathy, and divergence. Cohen says that historical studies of ancient law are incomplete without comparative study. We would be wise to heed him.

CONCLUSIONS Cohen ends the collection’s brief postscript with a quotation, thus giving us his own final thoughts on his magnum opus through the words of the historian of Justinian law Fritz Pringsheim (1882–1967): “Where so many different ages and cultures speak, each succeeding age and culture may find something addressed to itself. Out of this multitude of voices, every period can hear what it chooses to hear.” For great works to survive and be meaningful across time, Pringsheim writes, “they must contain many different elements, they have to comprehend contradictions within themselves. They must, beside the simple and obvious, possess some secret which has to be found out…

18 Indeed, attracting Romanists to Jewish law would justify the collection’s focus on civil law, the use of Latin terminology to label the topics and chapters, and the arrangement of the material according to Gaius. xvi JEWISH AND ROMAN LAW

Only a manifold structure which embraces a spiritual universe can be accepted by the universe of the spirit.” (p. 803)19 This coda communicates many of the project’s ideals both manifest and implicit. For one, he gives the last word not to a talmudic sage or aphorism from Avot, but to a classicist whose point of reference is Justinian. Highlighting the spiritual universe and the universe of the spirit, the choice balances religious and humanist tones with a Hegelian whiff. It strikes a decidedly anti-parochial note. Cohen implies that one builds a meaningful world by looking out and looking back to humanity’s best achievement—important works by definition encase a “spiritual universe”—and that the search for meaning is the only constant. It is typically modest. Yet, within this memento mori of scholarly transience, he both blesses his endeavor and makes space for its ongoing relevance. The closing quote may tell us yet more. Fritz Pringsheim was a well-regarded scholar of Greek and Roman law. He was also a Jew from a prominent German family, who, in 1935, was forced from his position at Albert-Ludwigs University at Freiburg and then his home. He emigrated to England and survived the war in Ox- ford. He describes Justinian in words that sound lifted from Jewish exegetical pie- ties—Cohen makes manifest Pringsheim’s (Jewish-toned) observations about the great works of the western legal canon by noting, “This is equally true of the Rabbis of the Talmud, the Geonim, the Early and the Later Jewish legal commentators, codifiers and the writers of Responsa.” Ending with Pringsheim’s sermonic humanism, I suggest, may also allow Cohen to acknowledge the War, which raged while several of these essays were penned, and which makes only the most ghostly appear- ance in the essays themselves.20 Cohen’s is a project of a past generation, one nearly no living scholar could ac- complish. He strives, put plainly, to better understand ancient law. But in doing so without judgment or dogma, he makes rabbinic law a pillar of the humanities writ large. Jewish and Roman Law prepares and seeds the soil of scholarship for genera-

19 Cohen citing Pringsheim’s “Character of Justinian’s Legislation,” Law Quarterly Review 56 (1940): 245. 20 He ends the 1945 essay on “Self-Help in Jewish and Roman Law” (pp. 624–650) with characteristic understatement: “It has often been noticed that war waged by modern states for the vindication of their rights is quite similar to blood revenge practiced by primi- tive and barbarous communities. It is to be hoped that just as self-help in civil and criminal law has been reduced to a bare minimum, similarly, war will someday be frowned upon as an ‘Überbleibsel vorhistorischer Barbarei’ [a remnant of prehistoric barbarism] a phrase used … to characterize Self-Help” (p. 650). Frowned upon? Another of Cohen’s rare mentions of anti-Semitism or the situation in Europe appears in his subtle but unmistakably cutting rebuttal to a slanderous bit of legal scholarship about Jewish laws friendly to fences, which appears in the 40s: “‘Hehlerrecht’ in the Jewish Law” (pp. 615–23; =“‘Juedisches Hehlerrecht’ in Jewish Law,” which originally appeared in Histo- ria Judaica 4 [1942]: 3–11). INTRODUCTION TO THIS EDITION xvii tions to come. “It may be asserted without fear of contradiction that the work has just begun” (p. 12).