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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 12-2019 THE PASSOVER SEDER: THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY Jacob F. Love University of Tennessee, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Recommended Citation Love, Jacob F., "THE PASSOVER SEDER: THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2019. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/5797 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Jacob F. Love entitled "THE PASSOVER SEDER: THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. Jay Rubenstein, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Christine Shepardson, Thomas Heffernan, J P Dessel Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) THE PASSOVER SEDER: THE HISTORY OF A MEMORY A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Jacob F. Love December 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Jacob F. Love All rights reserved. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I cannot begin to express the gratitude I feel for the many scholars who have freely rewarded me with their knowledge and encouragement over the four decades this dissertation has been in progress. Nevertheless, begin and end I must. At the University of Wisconsin, my mentors Michael Clover and Rabbi Alan Lettofksy sat with me for hours a week for a full academic year. At the University of California, Berkeley, my mentors in biblical and rabbinic literature, Professors Jacob Milgrom and Baruch M. Bokser; my mentors in Aramaic, Professors Ariel Bloch and Francis Guinan, my mentor in the Greek New Testament, Professor John Dillon, and my mentors in History, Professors Erich Gruen, Peter Brown, and Victor Gold. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, I must acknowledge and thank the guidance of Professors Menahem Stern and Emmanuel Tov during my graduate fellowship there, and Professor Samuel Sandmel for reading Philo in Greek with me at Hebrew Union College in 1978 shortly before his passing. For the last stage of this work, recommenced at the University of Tennessee in 2012 I must express my gratitude to Christina Shepardson who read my undergraduate thesis and pressed me to continue my research. Professor Shepardson was joined by Professors Thomas Burman (now at Notre Dame), Thomas Heffernan and J.P. Dessel all of whom worked with me, read this dissertation, and contributed their knowledge, patience and occasionally necessary humor to the work. I cannot express sufficiently my gratitude to Professor Jay Carter Rubenstein for accepting the stewardship of the project with all that entails. iii In addition to those who made up my committee, Professor Daniel Boyarin was kind enough to answer my questions and suggest resources, and Professor Galen Marquis assisted me with his vast knowledge of Biblical Hebrew and ancient Hebrew manuscripts. iv ABSTRACT The Passover Seder marks a semaphore in the history of Rabbinic Judaism. It created an unprecedented new holiday observance marking the beginning of the seven-day Passover holiday which had been observed for centuries past with various manners of fulfilling biblical requirements to abstain from leavened bread and eat bitter herbs along with the meat of the Passover offering. Throughout the period of the Second Temple, those who worshipped at the Temple understood that this required a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the only place where sacrifice was permitted. There are hints of new thinking about the observance of such festivals in the works of Philo who lived too far from the Temple to contemplate annual journeys. Several Greek authors including Plato, Xenophon and Plutarch describe festive meals in ritual settings which facilitated discussion of the issues of day in Hellenistic Greek and Mediterranean society. The Tanaitic rabbis, confronting the fact that they were physically unable to honor the biblical requirement of sacrifice in the Temple of Jerusalem designed other mechanisms for celebrating the holiday. One of those mechanisms was the ritual that would become known in later Jewish liturgy as the Passover Seder. This thesis demonstrates that the Passover Eve meal as celebrated by third century rabbis created new and noteworthy innovation, transforming the basis for the holiday into something different from what it meant in earlier periods. I will show that the rabbis not only invented ritual not known before the third century, but used that ritual to create a memory which allowed succeeding generations to imagine that in celebrating this ritual they were somehow fulfilling the requirements set forth in the much earlier periods of the people who accepted the Hebrew Bible as their basic text and guide to religious observance. In a v very real sense, the Seder became the collective memory of a ritual that could not possibly have been authentic to the era it portrays but set the standard for the perception of the correct way to honor the festival for anyone claiming to practice rabbinic Judaism. vi PREFACE כָּל הַמִּסְתַ כֵּל בְאַרְ בָּעָּה דְ בָּרִּ ים, רָּ אּוי לֹו כְאִּ ּלּו לֹא בָּא לָּ עֹולָּם, מַה ּלְמַעְ לָּה, מַהּלְמַטָּ ה, מַ ה ּלְפָּנִּים,ּומַה ּלְאָּ חֹור. Anyone who investigates four things, it would have been better had they not been born. What is up, what is down, what went before, and what comes after. ― Hagigah 2.1 The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember. ― Harold Pinter Measured in the span of a human lifetime this project began a very long time ago. At the Bronx H.S. of Science, now more than fifty years ago, I elected to take Advanced Placement History for two years. Two teachers there influenced my life’s direction: Mr. Stuart Elenko and Mr. Emmanuel Harrison. Mr. Elenko later developed the first center at any High School devoted to the study of the Holocaust. He taught world history in the first of the two years of the course. Mr. Harrison taught the second, devoted to American history, and imbued in his students the understanding that history cannot be understood as a set of facts in some linear alignment but is rather the product of the interpretation of those facts which often results in vastly different assessments of what may have transpired in any given place and time. We studied how different lenses and theories could explain events. We became familiar with terms like “manifest destiny” and “frontier theory” just to name a few. The University of Wisconsin rewarded me with a year of academic credit for my studies at Bronx Science and I went on to declare a major in History. At the University of Wisconsin, Professor Frank “Mike” Clover, of blessed memory, took me under his wing and yet allowed me to follow my own paths of discovery. Prof. vii Clover was an expert Latinist and historian of Rome but had only limited knowledge of Jewish sources and texts. For that area, I had a stroke of luck. A new director had just been hired by the campus Hillel Foundation, Rabbi Alan Lettofsky. Rabbi Lettofsky had impeccable academic credentials: ordination from the Jewish Theological Seminary (NYC) having studied under the legendary Saul Lieberman. He was himself working on a Ph.D. in Talmud at Yale after spending several years teaching in the Seminario Rabínico Latinoamericano, Buenos Aires. Together these two scholars were kind enough to lead me through the forest of languages, texts and literatures I would need to understand to attempt to make sense out of an event in Jewish history. What had sparked my interest was a little-known episode in the history of the Jewish people (or at least that was a common term for this history back then—a bit more problematic now as this thesis demonstrates): a series of revolts by people claiming some affinity to Judea about a half-century after the Roman-Jewish War that had ended with the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem. Across North Africa, Egypt and Cyprus there were serious rebellions requiring the Roman Emperor Trajan to summon his legions from all over the Empire to quell. And on Trajan’s eastern front, there were also reports of Jews fighting Romans in Parthia. What could have caused these disturbances? And how could people who were in some sense “Jews” be involved in these events without any direction from the center of the Jewish nation? Was there also a locus of anti-Roman activity in Jerusalem or Judea? My undergraduate thesis won an award and the credit certainly belongs at least as much to these fine scholars as it did to me. From Madison, Wisconsin I headed to Tel Aviv, Israel. I spent a year at Tel Aviv University beginning to make up for a serious deficiency in the language skills I would need viii to pursue these lines of historical inquiry. During that year I learned a great deal of Hebrew and joined a first-year Latin course that was the first in Israel to be taught using a textbook written in the Hebrew language. From Tel Aviv I traveled to the University of California, Berkeley at the invitation of Prof.

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