Foreign Holidays and Festivals as Representative of Identity in Rabbinic Literature: a Dissertation Spotlight

Catherine Bonesho, “Foreign Holidays and Festivals as Representative of Identity in Rabbinic Literature” (PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 2018).

In the United States, it should come as no surprise, that holidays are evoked for polemical purposes. On October 13, 2017 Donald Trump declared, “We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values…They don’t use the word ‘Christmas’ because it’s not politically correct. You go to department stores, and they’ll say, ‘Happy New Year’ and they’ll say other things…Well, guess what? We’re saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again.” At first this categorization of Christmas as representative of so-called “Judeo-Christian values” seems absurd because Trump mentions neither Hanukkah nor other Jewish holidays. As Meredith Warren writes, Trump “in no way intends a campaign to Make Hanukkah Great Again.” Furthermore, Trump’s statement should by no means be read as a reflection of the status of Christmas prior to his election.[1] Rather, Trump uses the holiday of Christmas and excludes Jewish holidays towards a larger political goal—to make a claim that Christianity was under threat. Christmas is not just Christmas; the holiday represents a powerful polemical site in modern American politics.

One can find instances of the political importance of holidays and calendars in the Hebrew Bible, as well as in early Jewish and rabbinic literature. For example, the authors of the Book of Deuteronomy rewrote legislation on Passover for political purposes, reinventing Passover as a national holiday centered in Jerusalem.[2] The importance of the calendar to group identity in antiquity has been extensively studied, especially among Jewish groups in the Second Temple Period, when, according to Jonathan Ben-Dov, different Jewish groups “aim to define the calendar as a mark of Jewish identity.”[3] But this interest in identity is not limited to the enumeration of different calendars by different communities. In my dissertation, which I am currently developing into a monograph, I investigate the political and polemical use of individual foreign holidays in rabbinic literature.

Rabbinic literature includes a substantial discussion of foreign holidays, their prohibitions, and their origins. These holidays and their descriptions are predominately found in the rabbinic tractate ʿAvodah Zarah, which forbids rabbinic Jews from interacting economically with non-Jews three days before a foreign festival (M. AZ 1:1) and lists the Roman holidays of the Kalends of January, Saturnalia, and Kratesis, among others (M. AZ 1:3). For the rabbis, I argue, these holidays served an ideological purpose. [4] Rabbinic discussions of Roman holidays are by no means neutral, historical retellings of the religious observances of gentiles in Roman Palestine or Sasanian Babylonia; rather, the rabbis generated their own myths for these holidays towards their own political and polemical goals. I argue that rabbinic discussions of foreign holidays show three primary interests. First, interactions with non-Jews on foreign holidays were prohibited because of the prohibition against idolatry. Second, the rabbis allowed for some interactions with non-Jews in order to benefit from involvement in the imperial economy. Thirdly, and most prominently, through tales about the various origins of Roman holidays, the rabbis used holidays to simultaneously index the identities of Self and Other.

As part of my analysis of the use of foreign holidays in rabbinic literature to construct identity, my dissertation opens with an introduction to my methodology and an overview of previous scholarship. I concentrate especially on the use of holidays for political aims as a cross-cultural phenomenon, as well as Russell McCutcheon’s and Bruce Lincoln’s respective theories on myth and mythmaking, which inform my readings of the Talmudic origin stories for Roman festivals.[5] In the next chapter, I present a sample of rabbinic texts that discuss foreign holidays, whether by introducing the prohibition of foreign festivals or adjusting the prohibition, focusing on the rabbinic inclusion of foreign festivals in the broader category of idolatry (עבודה זרה). I argue that rabbinic legislation on foreign holidays shows how the rabbis use the concept of idolatry as a strategy to negotiate living in imperial contexts, both Roman and Babylonian, allowing rabbinic Jews to navigate where and when assimilation and resistance to imperial influence are appropriate. Furthermore, by analyzing the various layers of rabbinic literature and the propensity to explicitly associate foreign holidays and idolatry, I offer a decipherment of the relationship between m. ʿAvodah Zarah and t. ʿAvodah Zarah. T. ʿAvodah Zarah’s more explicit association of idolatry and holidays possibly indicates a later date for its composition relative to m. ʿAvodah Zarah.

In the next two chapters, I find that there is more at stake in the Talmudic descriptions of foreign holidays. In Chapter Three, I first examine the Yerushalmi’s origins for the prominent Roman holidays of Saturnalia and the Kalends of January (y. ʿAvodah Zarah 1:2, 39c). Instead of merely representing rabbinic knowledge of Roman political and religious terms, I argue that the rabbis use foreign holidays to characterize Rome as the paradigmatic Other of Israel through etymological wordplays on Greek and Latin terms. For example, the rabbis claim in the Yerushalmi that the Latin name of the festival Saturnalia is derived from a Hebrew phrase meaning “hidden hatred” (שנאה טמונה), implying that Saturnalia and those who celebrate it are hateful. In regard to the Kalends, the Palestinian rabbis provide two origin stories, one which traces the holiday to the biblical Adam and the other to the suicide of a Roman general. I provide new readings for these origin stories and highlight the narrative techniques used by the rabbis in order to denigrate Rome. I then turn to the Bavli’s origin stories for Saturnalia and the Kalends (b. ʿAvodah Zarah 8a) and find that the Babylonian Sages interpret details of the Roman winter holidays to promote the rabbinic version of Hanukkah. Overall, the rhetoric against Rome in the Yerushalmi is more antagonistic than that of the Bavli, likely a result of its Roman Palestinian context as well as the popularity of Saturnalia and the Kalends in Late Antiquity.

In Chapter Four, I turn to the Talmudim’s interpretations of the rather unknown Roman holiday of Kratesis and the general rabbinic term for foreign holidays, איד. In the Yerushalmi (y. ʿAvodah Zarah 1:2, 39c) both Kratesis and איד are disparaged by an association with idolatry in particular (e.g., Kratesis is linked to Jeroboam’s erection of the golden calves). This association functions two-fold: to justify the holidays’ inclusion in the Mishnah’s prohibition and to assert that Romans are the true idolaters. Though the polemic used against Rome and their holidays are markedly negative in the Yerushalmi, the Bavli expands on this tradition and presents a more engaged polemic against gentiles (b. ʿAvodah Zarah 2a-3b). The Bavli spends significant energy discussing Torah in its origins for Roman holidays. For example, in its interpretation of איד, the Bavli links the observance of proper Jewish festivals, especially Sukkot, to Torah, while the observance of the festivals of the gentiles is linked to the rejection of Torah and consequentially to the gentiles’ rejection from the World to Come. Though the Bavli is typically seen as more lenient in regard to interaction with gentiles on holidays, I argue that the rhetoric and polemic used against gentiles in the origin myths for איד and Kratesis indicate that the Sages of the Bavli are using relatively unknown holidays for their own interests of highlighting the importance of Torah and rabbinic authority.

Finally, in Chapter Five, as a sort of excursus, I turn the tables and instead of asking how the rabbis living under the Roman Empire used holidays to disparage their conquerors, I look to a Roman law from the Theodosian Code (16:8:18) that discusses the Jewish holiday of Purim to see how the conquerors used foreign holidays. Much like the rabbinic legislation and narratives on Roman holidays, this law has been used to reconstruct religious rituals in antiquity, in this case, the celebration of Purim in the Roman Near East. However, using McCutcheon’s theory of mythmaking, I find that the law sets Judaism and Christianity in competition with one another and, in the process, the law authorizes the imperial version of Christianity while asserting the nefarious qualities of Jews and Judaism. Taken together with the rabbinic origin myths for Roman holidays, it is clear foreign holidays represent a powerful political and polemical site in Late Antiquity.

Catherine E. Bonesho is an Assistant Professor in Early Judaism in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA.

[1] Meredith Warren, “Why ‘Judeo-Christian values’ are a dog-whistle myth peddled by the far right,” The Conversation (November 7, 2017): Cited 26 March 2019. Online: http://theconversation.com/why-judeo-christian-values-are-a-dog-whistle-myth-peddled-by-the-far-right-85922.

[2] Bernard M. Levinson, Deuteronomy and the Hermeneutics of Legal Innovation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 72.

[3] Jonathan Ben-Dov, “Time and Natural Law in Jewish-Hellenistic Writings” in The Construction of Time in Antiquity: Ritual, Art, and Identity (Jonathan Ben-Dov and Lutz Doering, eds.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 10.

[4] Sarit Kattan Gribetz also has recently analyzed the Roman holidays included in rabbinic literature in her larger dissertation study on the concept of time in rabbinic literature. In her study she finds that “ironically…the rabbis of the Mishnah actually integrated the rhythms of the Roman calendar into their own daily lives, embedding Roman time into the Jewish calendar (“Conceptions of Time and Rhythms of Daily Life in Rabbinic Literature, 200-600 C.E.,” [PhD diss., Princeton University, 2013], 32). My dissertation and monograph build on the work of Kattan Gribetz.

[5] For Bruce Lincoln’s conception of myth, see Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Gods and Demons, Priests and Scholars: Critical Explorations in the History of Religions (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012).