Van Maaren, John. The Boundaries of Jewishness in the Southern Levant 200 BCE–132 CE: Power, Strategies, and Ethnic Configurations. SJ 118. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2022.
Van Maaren begins his volume with the term “Jewishness” as opposed to Judaism, and approaches its topic by examining how Jewishness was understood as bounded in antiquity. How did ancient literature distinguish between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish?” Drawing from Shaye Cohen’s usage in his classic 1999 study, Van Maaren explains that this is an intentional move “to disassociate the study from modern connotations of Judaism.”[1] The key concept which Van Maaren brings to the study of ancient Jewish ethnic identity is Andreas Wimmer’s approach of ethnic boundary making, outlined in Wimmer’s 2013 book.[2] This approach gives less focus to the question of what makes an ethnicity, and more to how such attempts to create and define ethnicity are important. He also points out that in defining ancient Jewishness as an ethnic category, we are applying a second-order concept to greater understand this identity.
Van Maaren then turns to the work of John Hutchinson and Anthony D. Smith, whose six common features of ethnic groups have become somewhat of a “go-to” checklist for scholars working on ancient Judaism.[3] Van Maaren then offers a variety of terms to frame the ways and means of boundary management employed by different groups.
Chapter 2 examines the period from 200–129 BCE, beginning when the Seleucid king Antiochus III issued the prostagma decreeing certain privileges to the Judeans on the basis of some of the six features identified by Hutchinson and Smith (78). Other material included in this chapter is all Jewish-authored and is divided by Van Maaren into works sympathetic towards, or conflicting with, the Temple authorities (72–73). The former include Sirach and Daniel 8–12, while the latter consist of the Temple Scroll, the Apocalypse of Weeks, the Epistle of Enoch, the Animal Apocalypse, and Miqsat Ma’ase ha-Torah (4QMMT). The texts of this period typically present specific practices as significant for establishing ethnic boundaries, often have some interest in the Temple, and lack a general consensus over the nature of any boundary between “Jew” and “Greek,” but rather are interested in “intra-Jewish divisions” (106–108).
Chapter 3 turns to the heyday of Hasmonean hegemony, from 129 to 63 BCE. This period is characterised by the collapse of most vestiges of Seleucid power in the region, and conquest by successive Hasmonean leaders. The texts employed in this discussion include Eupolemus’s Concerning the Kings in Judea, Jubilees, First Maccabees, the Damascus Document (CD), and the Rule of the Community (1QS). Changes to the region brought about by John Hyrcanus I appear to have consolidated the importance of the Temple – Hasmonean policy seemed often to involve the destruction of nearby cultic centres such as at Mt. Gerizim and Scythopolis (120–121). Van Maaren claims that the Hasmoneans in this way “made Jewishness a national identity” (121).
Here, I have to register some disagreement. Their personal connection with the Temple seems enough to warrant the removal of anything which provided alternative power bases in their territory. We are also limited to reading about the activities of Hyrcanus in First Maccabees or in the work of Josephus (also our principal source of information for Alexander Jannaeus). As such, we only know the justification for the Hasmonean actions from these sources, and it is my view that these motivations fit more suitably in the context of late Hellenistic imperialism. The modes of Jewish ethnic discourse can be understood as an outworking of Hasmonean power consolidation.[4]
The dynamics of change identified in this chapter consists of Jannaeus’ decision to permit “non-Jews, as non-Jews, to remain within newly conquered areas” (125). I am also uncertain that this was new, or even not the standard practice of the Hasmoneans, as the two best known accounts of conquered people being made to adopt Jewish customs and become circumcised include the Idumeans and the Itureans, the latter of which appears to be a confusion of Strabo and subsequently transmitted by Josephus. As such, evidence for a Hasmonean policy of “converting” non-Jews into a form of Judaism is weak. Generally, the texts of this chapter either come from a pro-Hasmonean perspective and legitimate particular customs, or from anti-Hasmonean perspectives which use a rhetoric of common ancestry to argue against intermarriage or ethnic boundary crossing. Yet even in these distinctions, there seems to have been emerging agreement at least within these texts, that Jews were distinct from gentile nations, even as the location of this boundary was disputed.
Chapter 4 completes the main portion of the book, covering 63 BCE to 132 CE. Texts selected for this timeframe include the Psalms of Solomon, the War Scroll, the Habakkuk Pesher, the Nahum Pesher, the Testament of Moses, the Similitudes of Enoch, Second Baruch and Fourth Ezra. While the work of Josephus has been included throughout to provide historical information, there is no specific discussion to any of his boundary making strategies (perhaps owing to the writing of these works in Rome), although this could easily be its own volume. Van Maaren concludes that the Roman period can be characterised as one where there was agreement within these texts about the nature of Jewish identity. The specific meaning of the boundary between Jewish and non-Jewish identity was contested, with Jewishness being raised from a subordinated category under Roman rule, to an elevated position in many of these texts.
Van Maaren concludes the work with a short summary of his findings and offers that these impact discussions on the early Jesus-movement and their self-perception. There is a short appendix of material excised from the Introduction, but which also appears in Van Maaren’s 2018 article.
An organising principle of the material in this volume involves the question of textual dating, which while helpful in providing a clear progression of ideas throughout time, nevertheless presents some issues. Firstly, and of limited importance, the ongoing debates around the date of any given text can be raised. In assigning the texts he does to the particular bounded periods, Van Maaren opens himself up to critique on any given decision to date a particular text in the volume (some having a greater consensus around their dating than others).
The second, and in my view more pertinent issue, is the significance of these time periods for dating in the first place, and thirdly, the distinctions between Seleucid, Hasmonean and Roman periods. If every text is understood to be in some way engaging with a discourse on ethnic boundary making, then is it particularly significant if a text was written around the year 140, or the year 120 BCE? To what extent did ongoing changes in the administration of the region impact authors, editors and scribes? This is rather tricky to explore in a short space, but I’d like to at least raise this perspective.
While we may be able to point to specific periods in archaeology, even these dates of material strata are generalised. Material culture develops over time, and not in a uniform process. Did the world of the authors who wrote texts in the latter half of the 1st century BCE turn upside-down because Pompey sided with one Hasmonean brother over the other in 63 BCE?
I have further questions on the role of gender in configurations of ancient Jewish identity, which are largely unaddressed by Van Maaren. I’d be curious to see how strategies of ethnic boundary making interacted with marriage customs, and in women’s expression of Judaism. Discussions of texts like Judith add a richness to this thought process, with the gentile Achior “converting”, while the heroine Judith moves between her Jewish identity and her temporary adoption of aspects of identity from the Assyrian invaders to prepare for her assassination of Holofernes. Yet even in her temporary movement into the Assyrian sphere, she maintains eating, bathing and prayer practices which flesh out the author’s conception of the practice of Judaism.
While I have some reservations regarding the arrangement of the material, alternative arrangements may have been less clear and provided fewer answers to the Van Maaren’s question. As such, this is more of an ongoing discussion than something implicitly problematic about this volume itself, but the framing does raise such questions. It is of course much easier to ask these open-ended questions than to present a clear thesis, and Van Maaren is to be commended for presenting his throughout this work.
Overall, this is an excellent volume which offers a robust overview of various strategies of group management, exercised through the deployment of ideologies that present views on ancient Jewish ethnicity, against a backdrop of political change in the southern Levant. The integration of Wimmer’s methodology is excellent and brings new insights to the material that otherwise may resist such a mapping into discourses on ethnicity.
Joseph Scales is the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Agder
[1] Van Maaren, Boundaries, 1 fn.1. See further Shaye J. D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, HCS (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
[2] Andreas Wimmer, Ethnic Boundary Making: Institutions, Power, Networks (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). Van Maaren refers to Wimmer’s approach as the ethnic boundary making model. See also the use of Wimmer’s work in Stewart Moore, Jewish Ethnic Identity and Relations in Hellenistic Egypt: With Walls of Iron? JSJSup 171 (Leiden: Brill, 2016).
[3] See for example Cohen, Beginnings, 6 (using Smith’s earlier, four-features model); Philip F. Esler, “Judean Ethnic Identity in Josephus' Against Apion,” in A Wandering Galilean: Essays in Honour of Seán Freyne, eds. Zuleika Rodgers, Margaret Daly-Denton and Anne Fitzpatrick McKinley, JSJSup 132 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 73–91; David Goodblatt, Elements of Ancient Jewish Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 11; James C. Miller, “Ethnicity and the Hebrew Bible: Problems and Prospects,” CurBR 6.2 (2008): 170–213; Katherine E. Southwood, Ethnicity and the Mixed Marriage Crisis in Ezra 9–10: An Anthropological Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 31. There are many more who draw directly from Cohen’s work.
[4] These dynamics are further explored in Katell Berthelot, In Search of the Promised Land? The Hasmonean Dynasty between Biblical Models and Hellenistic Diplomacy, trans. Margaret Rigaud, JAJSup 24 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018).