By Malka Z. Simkovich

The question of Jews fitting into a world dominated by others, and the larger world’s perceptions of Jews, is at once ancient and contemporary. In particular, Jews and Christians share a number of misconceptions when it comes to the Second Temple period which color their understanding of Early Judaism and Early Christianity. Perhaps the most damaging of these is that the Second Temple period was a time of divisiveness, sectarianism, and general decline for the Jewish people and its leadership. According to this view, Jews of the era neglected to focus on ethical concerns and social justice in favor of becoming increasingly legalistic.

Many Jews today build on this misconception by presuming that the early rabbis established a normative form of Judaism by retrieving the few functioning remnants of Jewish practice that had been left behind, and expanding them into an intricate legal system. Christians similarly view late Second Temple Judaism as ritualistic and legalistic, which makes space for the construction of a false binary that portrays Jesus and his followers as advocates for universalist ethics, in contrast to the Pharisees and Sadducees, who were enslaved to their own particularist greed. Mutual misapprehensions contribution to mutual mistrust.

In my book, Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories that Shaped Early Judaism, I challenge these misconceptions by providing a complex and multi-layered portrait of a thriving Jewish world which made no distinction between geography and language, on the one hand, and religious observance, on the other. In other words, many thousands of pious Jews lived in the diaspora and spoke only Greek, while others were Hellenized Jews who lived in the region of Judea. The vast majority of Jews, moreover, were neither fully Hellenized nor entirely particularist. They actively identified as Jews by observing their ancestral laws, and yet also sought to engage with the Greco-Roman world around them.

Discovering Second Temple Literature: The Scriptures and Stories that Shaped Early Judaism.

Discovering Second Temple Literature opens with an exploration of how some of the earliest Jewish writings ever produced were preserved and recovered in modern times, from the discovery of a mysterious attic room in an ancient synagogue in Cairo in 1896, where about 250,000 ancient Jewish documents were found, some of which were copies of texts that were composed in the Second Temple period, to remote and isolated regions such as Qumran in the Judean desert, where almost a thousand ancient Hebrew documents were left untouched in caves for almost two thousand years, to a small peninsula named Mt. Athos in Greece which is inhabited only by members of Greek Orthodox monasteries, and where hundreds of copies of ancient Jewish texts have been preserved.

Solomon Schechter in Cambridge with documents brought back from the Cairo Geniza.

Qumran ‘scriptorium.’ (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ea/Qumran_L30_scriptorium.png)

Kloster Dionisiou, Mount Athos. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Athos#/media/File:07Athos_St_Dionysius01.jpg)

By laying the modern discoveries of these ancient Jewish texts side by side, I show how the preservation of these texts have commonalities, and how they came to be lost to Jewish tradition. Since Jews did not preserve these texts themselves, most Jews are not currently aware of them, and do not consider them to be part of their “authentic” tradition. I argue, however, that most of these documents, which have come to be collected into what scholars call the Pseudepigrapha, reflect not the writings of Jews living on the margins of Judaism, but the writings of Jews who practiced traditions such as the Sabbath and dietary laws, and regularly read their scriptures. They represent, in a sense, the silent majority.

The book’s second section is a historical investigation into the biggest Jewish communities in the Greco-Roman world, and the intriguingly unique characters of these communities. The Jews of Jerusalem, for example, were at the forefront of multiple bloody clashes with the Greeks, and later the Romans, while Jewish life in Alexandria, a city where many Jews prided themselves on their integration into Alexandrian philosophical and intellectual life, also suffered brutal anti-Jewish violence. In contrast to both, the Jews of Antioch, a bustling and diverse hub that linked the eastern and western regions of the Roman Empire, were located in a place where pagans, Jews, and the earliest followers of Jesus argued with one another and shared theological ideas.

The third section considers the various worldviews of Second Temple authors, from those who approached Judaism as a sophisticated philosophy that correlated with Greek philosophical schools, to sectarians who believed that piety and salvation could only be achieved by withdrawing from the outside world. Of course, most Jews were neither sectarians nor philosophers, and this review underscores the reality that most Jews adhered to what scholars call Common Judaism: they practiced Judaism by observing the Sabbath and holidays, dietary laws, and circumcision, and they gathered regularly to read their holy scriptures.

The book concludes by exploring the vast body of Jewish literature that has survived from the Second Temple period, a corpus that includes poetry, novellas, biblical interpretations, adventure tales, apocalyptic visions, and historical archives. This review clearly concretizes my most important argument, that the Second Temple period was a time of extraordinary creative expression for Jews, and that, since the normative system of rabbinic practice had not yet become widespread, most Jews felt free to explore their heritage through the lens of the Greco-Roman world in which they lived. A Jew could live in Antioch, for example, and write about what the patriarchs told their children on their deathbeds; it might be collected into a set of texts called the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Another Jew might live in the land of Israel, and write an adventure novel about a Jewish man named Tobit who lived in the diaspora, and was so pious that even angels deigned to show up in times of trouble and save him from danger. Yet a third Jew could live in Alexandria and write wisdom texts in Greek that cite Jewish laws preserved in the Septuagint. But wherever a Jew lived, he or she retained a sense of common scriptures, common practice, and common memory.

In the Second Temple period, Jews paid homage to their scriptures and practices not by keeping them immobile and stagnant, but by exploring new ways to interpret them, and by continually rethinking and expanding their ideas about good and evil, the afterlife, and Israel’s relationship with God. Discovering Second Temple Literature examines these interpretations and ideas, and the communities that nurtured them. In doing so, the book sheds light on how Jews living throughout the Greco-Roman world perceived themselves, how they viewed other Jews, and how they admired and even embraced aspects of Greek and Roman culture, all while fiercely protecting their cherished traditions. It is a familiar picture even today.

Malka Simkovich is Crown-Ryan Chair of Jewish Studies and Director of Catholic-Jewish Studies at the Catholic Theological Union.