151 Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism

Review of Books / Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007) 92-159 151

Households, Sects, and the Origins of Rabbinic Judaism. By Alexei Sivertsev . (Supple- ments to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 102). Leiden and Boston, Brill 2005. Pp. viii, 301. Cloth with dustjacket. €95.00/$136.00. ISBN 90 04 14447 1.

With this second book, Sivertsev continues the project begun with his previous monograph Private Household and Public Politics in the 3rd-5th Century Jewish Pal- estine (2002). Working his way chronologically backwards, he examines the role of the private household in Jewish society and culture during the Second Temple period and in early rabbinic Judaism. In a certain sense, this highly suggestive, and at the same time problematic book is more ambitious than Sivertsev’s previous book. Not only does Sivertsev attempt to present a historical-social, and therefore descriptive- analytic study of the basic structure of Jewish society during a much longer time- period than in his first book, but the patriarchal household as the “basic social unit of religious learning and piety within Judaism” is now also turned into the fundamental explanatory model for the Jewish sectarianism of the later Second Temple period, as well as the origins of rabbinic Judaism. The household, therefore, is made to carry a significantly larger explanatory weight than in his first book. Basically, the argument of the book is the following. Judaism remained essentially a family-dominated religion till the advance of the rabbinic movement. Sivertsev rejects the explanatory model of scholars such as A. Baumgarten and others, who have argued for the influence of the Greco-Roman model of voluntary associations on Jewish society during the Hasmonean period as one important reason for the rise of Jewish sectarianism. While he does not discard that idea altogether, Sivertsev considers the impact of that aspect of Hellenistic influence to come to fruition only in the master-disciple circles of the rabbis. The Jewish sectarianism of the Second Tem- ple period should in fact be understood as the by-product of the familial setting of religious learning. Rather than posing a fundamental discontinuity from the Persian to the Hellenistic period, therefore, Sivertsev insists first of all that structurally speaking Jewish society survived the transition from the Achaemenid to the Helle- nistic period without any noticeable change. Based on his reading of the rise to power of Nehemiah’s clan and later of the Tobiads, Sivertsev points out that the basic political and administrative power structures in Jewish society continued along the lines of “aristocratic clans,” whether in priestly circles as exemplified by the Oniads or in lay circles, such as the Tobiads. Sivertsev’s insistence on social continuities from the Persian to the Hellenisitic period is in and by itself not entirely surprising, nor is it really innovative. But Sivertsev extrapolates from these social continuities to argue for significant cultural continuities as well, again in contrast to the model of increased cultural helleniza- tion during the Hasmonean period. Accordingly, the “religious movements” of both Persian and Hellenistic periods have more in common than not, since, so Sivertsev, it is those same “aristocratic clans” that dominate the religious scene as well (45).

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The Second Temple Period can therefore be characterized by the particular “dis- course of holiness” that perceived the “traditional patriarchal household and its religious practices as the prime settings and true embodiments of sanctity” (21). The great cultural divide occurred only with “the transition from a household to a disciple study circle as the basic social unit of religious learning and piety,” and this is what marks the beginning of rabbinic Judaism as well as Christianity. Accordingly, the book is divided into two main parts. The first (“Households and the Origins of Jewish Sectarianism”) devoted to the literature of the Second Temple Period, and the second (“Rabbis and Households: Negotiating Holiness”) to the late first century C.E. and early tannaitic literature. Of course, no cultural divide is abso- lute and Sivertsev acknowledges that much. Thus, he traces the rise of the new setting for religious piety in “an association of like-minded male adult individuals” to the Qumran sectarians. In what appears to me a particularly careful and insightful reading of the texts from Qumran, Sivertsev makes a phenomenological distinction between different forms of religious identity for the Qumranites, with a more family or household-based matrix of religiosity on the one hand, exemplified by theDamas- cus Document and the Messianic Rule, and a Hellenized type of voluntary association of mostly male individuals on the other, this form of religious identity being exemplified by the Community Scroll. To Sivertsev, the Dead Sea Sect appears to be the first unambiguous example of a transition from the traditional framework of family alliances that envisioned the household and its everyday life as prima embodiment of sanctity, to the new association-type movement (96, 142). As an aside, though, it is somewhat curious that Sivertsev completely disregards the example of Philo’s idealized community of the Therapeutae in the entire book. Perhaps he does so, because it is still controversial whether this group really existed or whether Philo wrote it into existence. Nonetheless, it would seem that for his project this group is not entirely unimportant, and certainly further puts into question the overall domi- nance of the Jewish household religion he projects into the period prior to the rise of the rabbinic movement. On the other end of the chronological spectrum, he also demonstrates the persis- tence of the household as an embodiment of halakhah, and networks of households as sharing common social and ideological space during the early rabbinic movement. By taking the locution “tradition of the fathers” quite literally, he considers pre- Destruction halakhah to be a sum total of household traditions, in the priestly case with regard to temple related halakhah as much as in the case of the tannaitic repre- sentations of Sadducean and Pharisaic halakhah. Thus another point (or rather pro- cess) of transition is noted, namely of the “transition from family-based Jewish halakhic traditions centered around the ritualized ancestral (family) lore to the abstract and totalizing reasoning of rabbinic disciple circles” (199). The picture that emerges from Sivertsev’s careful analysis of the tannaitic case-stories (mahasim), especially centered around the family of Rabban Gamliel, is one in which the early rabbinic halakhah evolved within close-knit structure of families, before becoming

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