I wrote my MA thesis on the names of Jews in the Land of Israel in the period between 330 BCE and 200 CE. I arrived at this topic because of a hunch I had. In one of my classes I was asked to read one of Josephus’ seven books on the Jewish War, in order to see (with my teacher) that richer Jews had Greek names (implying that they were more Hellenized), while poorer ones had Hebrew or biblical names (suggesting they were less affected by the ruling culture). Yet reading the book brought to my attention something else completely – the vast majority of Jews, whether rich or poor, bore six names repeatedly, and these names were those of Matthias the Hasmonean and of his five sons – Judah, Simon, Jonathan, Eleazar and Yohanan. This had, of course, historical consequences, for it clearly pointed to the popularity of the Hasmonean family, while they were in power and many generations thereafter.
My MA thesis, which was described as an attempt to create a database of all the named Jews of the Land of Israel from the Hellenistic conquest and down to the end of the Mishnaic period (which I nicknamed: a “telephone book”), had a hidden agenda, to try and prove how popular the Hasmoneans were. This is usually how historians work – they have a hunch and then they try to prove it by collecting the right amount of data. Sometimes – as I have often been proven in years to come – the data collection will collapse the thesis rather than uphold it. In this case, however, I was right. Over 30% of the male population in my thesis (and later in the first volume of my name lexicon) indeed bore these six names.[1]
Working on this thesis, and then on the book (or rather books) that came out of it brought me in touch very early (already in 1982) with the new computers that were becoming so helpful in creating and managing large databases. Even though I did not know it then, I was riding on a new wave of scholarship with infinitely more possibilities to answer complex historical questions. Databases, and my particular one, made it possible to answer any number of questions that had nothing to do with the names of the Hasmoneans.
And indeed, I soon moved way beyond the Hasmoneans. My PhD was about the history of Jewish women in the same period that my lexicon covered, and soon I realized that my lexicon of names provided me with many answers to questions I posed in my PhD about Jewish women. For example, why are there so many women named Mary in the New Testament? The answer is that this name was so popular among Jewish women that it was actually born by a quarter of the female population at the time. The repetitive use of the same name in the Gospel is not a proof that the authors of the Gospels were unimaginative, but rather that they were speaking of historical figures. It was not the New Testament that created the statistics for the name Mary, but rather it supported the picture emerging from scores of other contemporary and later sources.[2]
I wrote my MA thesis in 1982. I published a much-extended version of it twenty years later, in 2002. By then, I began feeling an unrest at having done only a small part of the job at hand. What about the Jews who lived under Roman rule in the Land of Israel after 200 CE? What about the Jews who lived in the Diaspora in the same period? These questions gave me no rest and drove me to begin collecting the names of these other Jews already in the 1980s. I still have with me a printout from April 1986 of a list of names for Jewish sages from rabbinic texts of the Land of Israel after 200 CE, and on the margin one can clearly see in my hand writing numbers like “37 minutes”; “32 minutes”; in a descending order, the last one being “20 minutes.” I was told that if the space between the contractions was less than 20 minutes, I should go to hospital since the birth of my first child was about to begin. On April 30 1986 my firstborn son saw the light of day. It was to be ten years before I returned to the said list of names.
Many years later, after my two sons were born, after my PhD was finished and published, after I published another two books on women,[3] after my first lexicon of names was published, I was nominated professor of Jewish studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. I was able to raise funds to work on another three volumes – lexicons of names from the Land of Israel in the years 200-650 CE, from the Western Diaspora (Spain in the west to Egypt and Asia Minor in the east; Wales in the north to North Africa in the south) 330 BCE-650 CE; and from the eastern Diaspora (Syria in the west to Iran in the East; the Caspian Sea in the north, Yemen in the south) for the same years. I had a team of four researchers and between 2008 and 2012 we produced these three additional volumes.[4] Our total database of all three volumes includes 15,490 individuals, of whom 9,247 are certainly Jews.[5]
In working on these volumes, my general knowledge of the Jews of Antiquity and Late Antiquity, and where to find them, has increased to no-end. I have learnt of Jews in inscriptions and on papyri; I have learnt of amulets and incantation bowls; of sages in rabbinic literature; of poets in piyuttim; of converts and Jewish kingdoms in Arabia; and much more. It allows me to quickly answer historical questions on Jews on any number of levels. And it is addictive. I am like a collector, except that the items I collect are a line on my computer. I have never stopped collecting named Jews even after my four volumes were published and I have now collected at least 1,270 additional Jews, most of them published since 2012 (mostly from newly published Jewish incantation bowls). I also have many corrections that need to be made to the old volumes. It is my sincere hope that my, by-now outdated, name volumes will be eventually digitized, so that every new name will be instantly integrated into the database. Every name counts.
My work on the name-database has alerted me to the importance of corpora. I realize that most academics believe that their major contribution to world knowledge is their brilliant theses, in which they demolish the work of their predecessors and suggest new understandings of history and the sources that tell it. And indeed, theses are important and new thinking makes us think hard and keep history alive (albeit in a more “modern” or updated version). However, most theses, as brilliant as they may appear at the time they were composed, tend to have a short shelf-life. Soon new scholars, proliferating new theses, sometimes even based on new sources, will demolish our brilliant ideas. This is different with databases. They too will, eventually be replaced, but first of all not so soon, and secondly, actually when they are replaced, they still serve as the basis for the new database. The work done in creating a database is not so soon lost.
As this understanding has gradually dawned on me, I realized that I should devote my academic life to creating other databases. And indeed, I have been involved in three other projects that can be seen as databases of sorts.
My PhD was about Jewish women in Antiquity. Over the years I became quite well-known in the field of Jewish gender studies, and have published on various issues associated with famous and much less famous Jewish women of Antiquity. The creation of a corpus on Jewish women was also born as a research project in my time in Berlin. I have often stared with awe at the long rows of commentary volumes on the Bible – a volume for each biblical book. And then, feminist scholars began publishing first thin volumes and then thicker ones on feminist interpretations of the Hebrew Bible and on the New Testament. The Jewish equivalent of these last Christian Scriptures are the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud. Over the years, they acquired a canonic status, and have therefore influenced the life and status of Jewish women over the centuries and to this day.
I dreamed up this audacious project, intended to involve many feminist scholars, who will each write a feminist commentary on one tractate of the Mishnah and Talmud. Surprisingly, the project was elected for funding. I set out on realizing it straight away. I wrote to my most esteemed colleagues, I asked them to pick a tractate, I organized a conference for the ones who joined, and I promised to write a commentary on one tractate myself, so as to demonstrate what I understand by “feminist commentary.” I chose Tractate Ta’anit, which means “fasting” and speaks of regular or one-time calamities, which are understood as divine punishments, that may be atone by fasting. The most usual such calamity is drought. Most of the fasts spoken of in the tractate are entreaties for rain, so that plants will grow and supply food, preventing hunger. There is, of course, a reason why I chose this particular tractate. I wrote it in the introduction: “I was born in Kibbutz Lahav, in the northern Negev, a semi-arid region in Israel, where rainfall is sparse and prosperity is conditioned on it. Since I can remember myself, come winter, people I knew, all socialist atheists, began praying for rain.”[6] There is always some personal reason why we turn our attention to a certain text.
There was nothing particularly feminist or gender-relevant about my explanation for choosing this tractate. However, as any scholar who has written a feminist commentary in our series will tell you, soon you do discover overarching patterns relevant to women or gender, that fit the tractate on which one has chosen to work. The pattern I soon discovered in Tractate Ta’anit is the following:
As the fasts progress, more and more hardships are undertaken (mTaan 1:4-7). One is forbidden to work, to wash, to anoint and to engage in sexual intercourse. In a symbolic way, the afflictions which Jews take upon themselves resemble the afflictions suffered by the land in the absence of rain. It is left filthy, idle and unproductive. This last element compares the land under rainfall to a woman in the act of sexual intercourse, and rain’s absence is compared to sexual continence on her part. The symbolic similarity between women and the land is made … apparent when in mTaan 3:1 rainfall is described technically as “copulation” ... This metaphor is amplified in the Tosefta, where the discussion describes a first and second copulation (tTaan 1:2–4) … The … Tosefta ends with the specific inquiry “Why is it called רביעה (copulation)?” And responds: “Because [the rain] copulates with the earth […]” Rain … is overtly compared to a male, when it is described in the first mishnah as ... “virile Rain” (mTaan 1:1).
I have offered this long quote because it demonstrates what happens to the feminist commentator, once s/he undertakes to comment on a certain tractate. It is no more the initial interest that drew the scholar to the text that guides the commentary. It is the text commented upon that guides her. When one approaches a commentary project as one approaches the production of an academic monograph, one will be greatly disappointed; indeed one will often despair and abandon it. I have seen this happen many times. In their hearts, such scholars say: I had not intended to engage this topic. I did not plan to comment on it. I do not know enough on this subject. I have no time to study it. Finally, they drift away producing no commentary. This is because writing a commentary is like creating a database. You read the text and you note that the issue is gender-relevant, and eventually you will have to comment on it. This leads one to write about countless topics that were not in the least in one’s catalogue of interests. In the three commentaries I have written to date,[7] I have had to engage in the study of biblical women, of female beasts (and how they differ from women), of homosexuality and bestiality, of motherhood, of women martyrs, of Roman matrons and Sasanian queens, of feminine metaphors, of feminine plant-names, of rabbinic heroines, of witches and many more. Once in a while, women I had recorded in my name lexicon, and information I had gathered about them, showed up in my discussion of rabbinic women.
The feminist commentary on the Babylonian Talmud is not anywhere near completion. When I vainly undertook it, I did not really know what I was in for. After all, there are only 37 tractates in the Babylonian Talmud. Surely, this will be the number of volumes in the series. This estimate was produced before I realized how intensive some of the commentaries will have to be. My updated rough estimate is of ninety-one volumes. Aside from the thirty-seven tractates in the Babylonian Talmud, there are twenty-six mishnaic tractates that have no Babylonian commentary. Three such tractates can (and have been) included in one volume, adding eight additional volumes. Finally, since five of the seven tractates in the Order of Women (Nashim) are really all about women, each of their forty-six chapters will likely require a volume. I realize I will not see this corpus finished in my lifetime. I am content with the thought that, to-date, 10 volumes of the commentary have been published and I can count at least another 15 that are being composed.
The next corpus that I have been involved in composing is a (small) two-volume collection of parallel traditions, found both in the writings of the Jewish historian Josephus and in rabbinic literature. This collection has always intrigued scholars of texts and historians alike. How is it possible that a serious historian like Josephus incorporated in his oeuvre such trivial stories, nay legends, as those told by the rabbis, for whom the least of interest was history. When my colleague and friend the Israel-prize winner Vered Noam invited me to partake of such a project, I was both flattered and grateful. The work on this corpus – with Vered and other colleagues: Meir Ben Shahar, Yael Fisch and Dafna Baratz – was published in 2017 in Hebrew.[8] It consists of two volumes and analyzes 35 parallel traditions, as well as another 10 traditions listed in appendices, that are possible, but not certain, parallels. It seems an exhaustive corpus of such texts. When describing the genre of this book, I had sorted the various chapters in into three genres simultaneously: a corpus (we collected all the parallels), a commentary (we analyzed all the texts in their historical, archaeological, literary, and finally synoptic contexts) and a monograph (each chapter could stand alone as an academic article). Because of this threefold character of this book’s genre, the conclusions we reached were both general and individual and the corpus supports many theses about the sources, about the purpose of the authors, about the general character of the parallels (and how they differ in both corpora from stories that have no parallels), and much more. This is a good example of theses, and studies deriving from them, that the collection of the sources dictated, and not that the thesis dictated the collection of material.
After completing this corpus, an idea for a similar corpus dawned on me – Second Temple Literature and the rabbis. Rabbinic literature hides within its lines many references and citations of books that the rabbis themselves label “external” and forbid perusing them. I have no doubt that it will be a valuable corpus that will serve many generations of scholars. Unfortunately – this work has not materialized for lack of funds and a sort of fatigue that engulfed my colleagues and myself after completing the above-described corpus.
I end this review with the description of another corpus I am deeply involved in creating these days – a new Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum (=CPJ). In the late 1950s and early 1960s a renown team of classical scholars at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, headed by the papyrologist and historian Victor Tcherikover, attempted to collect all the Jewish papyri found in Egypt from the Ptolemaic (=Hellenistic), Roman and Byzantine periods. The corpus was published in three volumes – each devoted to one of these periods and incorporates in it 520 papyri (and ostraca).
I first became acquainted with this corpus when in 1982, when I attended a class of my late teacher Menahem Stern (who was murdered by terrorists in Jerusalem in 1989) and we read some documents from this corpus in Greek. Stern had been the last scholar to work on the old CPJ, and many times thereafter, when I took the volumes of this corpus off the shelf I thought of him and of the great project that these volumes represented. It was exactly the sort of corpus that shaped my academic horizon. It included fascinating historical documents, like the edict of the Emperor Claudius to the citizens of Alexandria in 41 CE, in which he warns them against attacking the Jews, as they did three years earlier, but also warns the Jews not to exasperate their gentile neighbors. Both the event he is referring to and the edict are mentioned in other documents – the pogrom of 38 CE by Philo, and the edict by Josephus. The historical importance of such a document is doubted by no-one. At the same time, the corpus also includes fragmentary lists of people or small payment receipts, whose immediate importance alludes most readers. However, if the volume includes over 100 receipts, documenting the imposition of the Jewish tax on the Jews of Upper Egypt after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, this evidence more than confirms Josephus’ report on such a universal tax levied on Jews by the Flavian emperors.
I myself had used this corpus extensively when I composed my name corpus – especially vol. III, devoted to the Western Diaspora. However, Because the last volume of the old CPJ was published in 1964, and I was working on vol. III of my name corpus in the 1990s and the early 2000s, I soon realized that the corpus was incomplete. In between, many additional Jewish papyri had been published, and for my new name corpus, I began collecting them. I first collected only those papyri that recorded named Jews, but soon I realized that, while I was at it, I might as well collect them all. When in 2012, I completed my name corpus, I had collected over 100 additional Jewish papyri not included in the old CPJ. Even before the publication of the last volume of the Lexicon of Jewish Names, I was already searching for funds to finance my next corpus project – the new CPJ.
In 2013 such funds were secured and with my new colleague – Noah Hacham of the Hebrew University – we embarked on this new corpus project. We knew from the start that we had no ambition to supplant the old CPJ. People who produce corpora tend to respect their predecessors, giants on whose shoulders they stand. We also decided to adopt the timeline and layout of the old corpus. They produced three volumes – so will we. They devoted a volume to Ptolemaic Egypt – so will we. They ended the second volume in 117 CE, with the crushing of the Jewish revolt in Egypt – we will do the same. Yet, so many years after the first papyrus-project, of course we had criticism to sound. We were amazed that the old team had chosen to ignore literary papyri and work only with documentary ones. The literary corpus – so we discovered – is not immense. Ignoring it could be seen as an insult to Jewish creativity. We were also surprised to discover that the old team had only collected Greek (and three Latin) papyri, but no Hebrew and Aramaic ones, although such papyri had been published and were available to these Jewish scholars. After all, while most Greek papyri talk about Jews, the Hebrew and Aramaic ones were composed by them.
There were also criteria that the old team had used to identify Jews that we had to discard. Thus, for example, after identifying a “Jewish quarter” in Edfu, based on the hundred or so Jewish-tax receipts, the old CPJ team decided to include in their corpus all other tax-receipts found in that quarter in the corpus, assuming that they too were paid by Jewish residents, even when the tax was not the Jewish tax, the person paying it had no Jewish name, and some of them even resided there after 117 CE. We, however, were not completely convinced by the “Jewish quarter” thesis, and there are many documents included in the old CPJ that we would not have included.
We believe that, after publishing two volumes of the new CPJ,[9] and diligently working on the third, we have brought, and are still bringing to light information on the Jewish community in Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine Egypt, that makes major changes in the understanding of its history. For example, until the publication of 21 Jewish politeuma papyri,[10] most scholars did not believe the literary composition, The Letter of Aristeas, which claimed that the Jews of Alexandria, under Ptolemaic rule, entertained such an institution. The newly published papyri put an end to this debate.
We are working on the third volume. It is a torturous endeavor and will take much time to finish. There will be more documents in it than in both volumes 4 (99 documents) and 5 (62 documents), and since it will include many Hebrew and Aramaic papyri – both documentary and literary – there will be many new concepts to develop about how to go along with this sort of find. Since I am now retired, I have time and energy to devote to it. I sincerely hope to see the next CPJ published soon (במהרה בימינו).
[1] Tal Ilan, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part I – Palestine 330 BCE-200 CE (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 91; Tübingen: Mohr. Siebeck 2002), 6-8, 56.
[2] Ibid., 8-10; 57.
[3] The three books are Tal Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine: An Inquiry into Image and Status (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 44; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1995); Mine and Yours are Hers: Retrieving Women's History from Rabbinic Literature (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken , 1997); Integrating Jewish Women into Second Temple History (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 76; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 1999).
[4] Tal Ilan, in collaboration with Thomas Ziem, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part III – The Western Diaspora 330 BCE-650 CE (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 126; Tübingen: Mohr 2008); in collaboration with Kerstin Hünefeld, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part IV – The Eastern Diaspora 330 BCE-650 CE (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 141; Tübingen: Mohr. Siebeck, 2011); in collaboration with Olaf Pinkpank, Lexicon of Jewish Names in Late Antiquity: Part II – Palestine in Late Antiquity 200-650 (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 148; Tübingen: Mohr. Siebeck 2012).
[5] Ibid., Part II, 55.
[6] Tal Ilan, A Feminist Commentary to the Babylonian Talmud, Volume II.9: Massekhet Ta‘anit (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), V.
[7] Aside from Ta’anit, just quoted, see also Tal Ilan, A Feminist Commentary to the Babylonian Talmud, Volume V/3: Massekhet Hullin (Tübingen: Mohr. Siebeck, 2017); in collaboration with Plonit, A Feminist Commentary to the Babylonian Talmud, Volume I/2: Tractates Pe’ah, Demai and Kil’ayim (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2023); and coming up now, in collaboration with Anat Israeli, A Feminist Commentary to the Babylonian Talmud, Volume III/6/d-e: Tractate Gittin Chapters 4-5 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2024).
[8] Tal Ilan and Vered Noam, in collaboration with Meir Ben Shahar, Daphne Baratz and Yael Fisch, Josephus and the Rabbis. Vol. I: The Lost Tales of the Second Temple Period; Vol. II: Tales about the Destruction of the Temple (Between Bible and Mishnah: The David and Jemima Jeselsohn Library; Jerusalem Yad Ben-Zvi Press 2017). In Hebrew.
[9] Tal Ilan and Noah Hacham, in collaboration with Meron M. Piotrkowski and Zsuzsanna Szántó, Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum Volume 4 (Jerusalem: Magness Press, Oldenbourg and Berlin: De Gruyter 2020); eadem and Deborah Jacobs, ibid., Volume 5: The Early Roman Period (30 BCE-117 CE) (2022).
[10] Ibid (2020), 86-134 (nos. 557-77).