Sages and Commoners
In a comment to this post, CK mentions the work of Stuart S. Miller. Since Ancient Judaism is not my area of concentration, I am not so familiar with Miller’s work, but today I happened to see his new book on the shelf. His most recent work is Sages and Commoners in Late Antique Erez Israel. It looks like a very interesting book and I have been reading his introduction which summarizes much of the recent scholarship regarding the size and influence of the sage in ancient Jewish society. In addition Miller writes about the attempts at describing the nature of Judaism(s) during the rabbinic period. Miller opts for using the term “complex common Judaism.”
While there may be whole groupings (e.g. “rabbis”), communities, sects, and factions that are identifiable, these are only a partial representation of the more complex whole. Ancient Judaism is best seen as a type of “complex adaptive system” that maintained enough order or structure to amount to “common Judaism,” but which was sufficiently “chaotic” to allow for innovation and individuality, in short, for the complexity that often resists compartmentalization and easy characterization.
Miller goes on to make a comparison to the contemporary American Jewish community.
Reform, Reconstructionist, Conservative, and Orthodox Jews have considerable differences (even amongst themselves), but there are commonalities: the centrality of the Torah and the Tanakh, worship in a synagogue, symbols, festivals, and life cycle events, to name a few. All of these will serve as Jewish, literary and/or material “markers” for historians and archaeologists who study our times in the distant future.
Miller is not the first person whose study of Ancient Judaism has been connected to the modern Jewish experience. One who reads Shaye J.D. Cohen’s article “The Significance of Yavneh: Pharisees, Rabbis, and the End of Jewish Sectarianism” (HUCA, 1983), cannot but think that Cohen was also talking about the modern Jewish experience, and its “society which would tolerate, even foster, disputes and discussions but which could nonetheless maintain order.”[1]
[1] “The Significance”, pp. 49-50. I also think that Cohen himself has said something similar regarding the subtext to this article, although I cannot remember where I may have read it.