Rotem Avneri Meir, “The Emergence of the Hasmonean Dynasty on the Margins of the Seleukid Empire” (PhD diss., University of Helsinki, 2023).
Bookending my dissertation is a lecture by the historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi entitled “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews” (2013). In his talk, which spanned from the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian Exile to the twentieth century, Yerushalmi sought to restore a sense of Jewish political agency prior to the state of Israel. This came as a response to Hannah Arendt, who, in her Origins of Totalitarianism, suggested that in absence of political traditions, Jews gravitated toward rulers, seeking their protection. While both Yerushalmi and Arendt share a diasporic perspective on Jewish history, for Yerushalmi, the history of Jewish politics was hardly passive. On the contrary, from Roman Alexandria to early modern Iberia and Poland, he saw a deliberate, politically realist effort by local Jewish leaders to ensure communal rights and authorities by appealing to ruling powers. He states, “Jews seem to have discovered early in their experience of exile that their ultimate safety and welfare could be entrusted neither to the erratic benevolence of their gentile neighbors nor to the caprice of local authorities […] the Jewish gravitation toward vertical alliances was, if not inevitable, at least thoroughly realistic” (Yerushalmi 2013: 248). The most prominent of these vertical relationships was the royal alliance. These, according to Yerushalmi, were based on Jewish communities’ and kings’ mutual interests, and ensured communal rights and authorities while maintaining Jewish dependence on royal power, rather than on more localized forms of support from neighbors and elites. Dependance on royal authority was, according to both Yerushalmi and Arendt, the basic condition of Jewish life, and moreover, Jewish political philosophy, after the Babylonian exile, but with one supposed and notable exception: the Hasmonean state, between 142–63 BCE, when Jews suddenly became both independent and kings.
The idea that the polity governed by the Hasmonean dynasty was an independent, national state and a rare case of Jewish political autonomy in antiquity is of course not unique to Yerushalmi. On the contrary, it is still very much common in the study of the Hellenistic world and of ancient Judaism. According to this line of thought, during the mid-second century, under the leadership of the Hasmonean family, Jews achieved national and religious freedom from the Seleukid empire. But even this view of Hasmonean political agency sees it as merely reactive to or gravitating toward larger forces. In fact, Tacitus already attributed the rise of the Hasmoneans to an imperial vacuum: the Judeans could only appoint their own kings because the Seleukids, Parthians, and Romans were otherwise occupied (Hist. V.8.3). Modern scholarship on the Hasmoneans, and the post-Seleukid eastern Mediterranean and Near East more generally, has long adopted a similar perspective, according to which imperial decline fostered the emergence of local groups embracing national ideologies.
Was imperial rule indeed so antithetical to local agency, or was it in fact a facilitating factor in the formation and consolidation of local elite identities? Did the Hasmoneans and their supporters really espouse such an anti-imperial political theology as is often associated with them? What would change in our understanding of emerging Judaism and the Jewish political imagination if we were to reimagine the Hasmonean period without such a heavy emphasis on Jewish national and religious identity in opposition to empire? These are the questions that guided me in my dissertation, in which I revisit the emergence of the Hasmonean dynasty on the margins of the Seleukid empire.
Traditionally, scholars have argued that the Hasmonean dynasty sought national liberation and religious freedom from foreign imperial rule, with the objective of establishing an independent kingdom ruled in accordance with Jewish legal and religious traditions. According to this reasoning, the intentions or interests of the Hasmoneans stood in stark contrast to those of the Seleukid kings who claimed control over the area of Koile Syria and Phoinike in the early second century BCE. This line of interpretation has an intellectual debt to contemporary notions of the nation state and sovereignty—what Ulrich Beck calls “methodological nationalism.” In this tradition, historians posit that the nation is the primary unit of historical analysis, that imperial power structures are based on the suppression of national groups that strive for liberation and self-determination, and that empires are historically determined to give way to autonomous nation- or ethnos-centered states.
In recent years, however, several of the key assumptions that undergird such views of the Hasmoneans’ relationship with the Seleukid empire have faced serious challenges on multiple fronts. First, in recent empire studies, scholars have largely shifted their focus from legal or political frameworks of empire, and narratives of imperial rise and fall, to explore the socio-cultural structures that enable ancient empires to govern and maintain power. Second, historians now agree that, in pre-modern empires, rulers and ruled were entangled in personalized relationships based on concessions meant to maintain power. Third, the imperial turn in ancient studies has led to a comprehensive reassessment of the nature of the primary sources that tell of the origins of Hasmonean hegemony. These changes in the broader study of ancient empires and Hasmonean historiography call for a fresh evaluation of how imperial powers shaped Jewish political culture and religious identity in the early Hasmonean period (roughly 160–110 BCE).
My dissertation offers this reevaluation. It considers the extents and limits of the early Hasmonean polity, examining materials that have long been considered anti-imperial, like the books of Daniel and First and Second Maccabees, and showing how they support Hasmonean consolidation of power within the Seleukid imperial system. I explore the way these texts portray Judea’s imperial history, its interactions with empire, and their ideals of kingship and royal power. In so doing, I expose how the Hasmoneans conceptualized their own dynastic genesis, their relationship with the Seleukids, with other Jewish groups, and consequent developments in Jewish views of God, the cosmos, and the Jewish body politic. I divide my findings into three.
First, I identify Early Hasmonean Imperial Discourse, which I locate in Hasmonean court historiography, (First and Second Maccabees), and show how it explains the rise of the Hasmoneans not as a breakaway from the empire but rather as a way of distinguishing Judea and Judeans within the imperial sphere. The Hasmoneans presented their origins and the cause for their own rise to power as a struggle for correct imperial policy, rather than a struggle against the empire. Moreover, they used an imperial discourse of distinction and its maintenance to validate their own authority.
Second, Hasmonean Power Brokerage, which I examine through the letters and decrees found in the Hasmonean histories and the way they embed imperial royal authority in the Hasmonean dynasts. While actual Seleukid control may have receded, local authority was perceived as the mediation of imperial rulers. The attitude toward empire and local power in our main Hasmonean sources portrays Jewish freedom and autonomy as referential to the empire, its ruler, and royal agents. Hasmonean hegemony is made possible through the mechanisms of imperial rule. The Jewish political imagination thus seems to be defined by imperial rule, which is replicated in miniature to accommodate local concerns.
And finally, Court Service and Hasmonean Ascendancy, and in particular the vision of elite agency in post-Seleukid Judea. The court—that is, the surrounding of the king—is central to Hasmonean notions of historical causality. It is the place from which the troubles in Judea originate, and it is by integration into the court system that the Hasmoneans ultimately restore order. I argue that this was part of a broader discourse on court service employed in a local competition over imperial agency. The book of Daniel attests that this discourse was prominent on the eve of Hasmonean ascendancy. It does not share a genetic literary relationship with either 1 or 2 Maccabees, but nonetheless promotes comparable notions of delegated imperial power and the adoption of a courtly social identity. Moreover, it suggests that it is courtly status that allows for local distinction under empire. The Hasmoneans rose to power in an historical context in which courtly positions were already keenly desired by Jewish leaders; and would thus have participated in a court contest from which they emerged victorious.
These findings correspond to the three main chapters of my dissertation, built upon three earlier chapters where I provide a model of ancient imperial rule based on the comparative study of empires, kingship, and courts; offer a critical reconstruction of imperial rule over Judea in the late Persian and Hellenistic periods; and survey the modern historiography of the early Hasmonean dynasty to expose its reliance on methodological nationalism. I then go on to propose an imperial reading of early Hasmonean history, which in fact reacts to the recent trend that looks to Jewish sources to better understand Seleukid rule and looks back into Jewish history with the current understanding of the Seleukid empire in mind.
So, to return to Yerushalmi. It appears that the royal alliance was just as important an instrument for Jewish political agency in Hasmonean Judea as during any other period or place in Jewish history. It was not that the early Hasmoneans simply gravitated toward the royal, imperial orbit. They rather emerged from and built themselves upon it. By entering negotiations with imperial rulers and integrating themselves in their courts, the Hasmoneans were able to consolidate their power on both the local and imperial levels. They became not only the servants of kings, but imperial servants and local kings.
I see my dissertation’s findings as having three main implications for the study of ancient Judaism and of local communities living under empire more broadly. First, they not only illuminate aspects of local autonomy and independence in the Hellenistic period, but also shed light on the political power structures of the Levant more generally by highlighting the dynamic interplay between “local” and “imperial” elites in ancient empires. Second, this revised image of the early Hasmonean dynasty has the power to change our understanding of the history of Jewish politics and political theology, and Jewish literary production. Jews during the Hasmonean period were agents under empire who were not limited to assimilation or resistance and their literary artifacts are sites for exploring imperial dynamics. This trajectory of Jewish history under empire destabilizes the scholarly dichotomy between the diaspora and Palestine/Judea/Israel and calls for more regional perspectives in the study of communal organization, in-group dynamics, and agency under imperial rule. It also turns much-needed attention to the figure of the Jewish courtier, who acts as a mediator between localized communities and the imperial sphere and the personified and embodied nature of (pre-modern) politics. Finally, it is my hope that this dissertation will encourage scholars to further investigate the overlap between imperial and religious discourse in the history of emerging Judaism where the language and imagery of empire seems to be transposed to the realm of the divine.
Rotem Avneri Meir is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki studying Ancient Judaism and the Hellenistic Levant with a focus on Jewish political culture and local interactions with imperial rule.
Bibliography
Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim. “Servants of Kings and Not Servants of Servants: Some Aspects of the Political History of the Jews.” In The Faith of Fallen Jews: Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi and the Writing of Jewish History, edited by David N. Myers and Alexander Kaye. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2013.