Class 2: Jewish Identity in the Roman and Sasanian Empires

Living under Empire: The Roman and Sasanian Contexts

After the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis redefined authority through interpretation and debate. Yet their world was not only Jewish. They lived under the Roman, and later Byzantine, Empires in the West, and the Sasanian Empire in the East. The lives of Jews, rabbis included, were shaped by the power structures, cultures, and civic institutions of these empires. Class 2 focuses on the emergence of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine after the year 70, where the rabbinic movement first took shape, and asks how the rabbis adapted to an imperial world while sustaining a distinct Jewish vision.

Bathhouses and Boundaries: Negotiating Daily Life

Mishnah Avodah Zarah 3:4 addresses whether Jews may enter Roman bathhouses. Although bathhouses were fixtures of  civic and social life associated with health, leisure, and honor, they  also displayed divinities and incorporated acts of worship. The rabbis’ approach to Roman bathhouses was pragmatic: Jews could participate, but not in ways that honored or worshiped idols. Rabbinic identity here was expressed not in retreat from non-Jewish culture but in carefully drawn lines that allowed Jews to live in shared spaces while preserving their religious boundaries. Rabbinic traditions about the Roman bathhouse offer insights into how the rabbis negotiated assimilation and maintained Jewish difference in the midst of a non-Jewish culture.

Honor and Hierarchy in Rabbinic Thought

Practices relating to expressions of honor further enrich our perspective on rabbinic approaches to imperial customs. Roman society revolved around public honor, which was manifested in greetings, titles, and acts of deference. The Palestinian Talmud, in y. Bikkurim 3:3, 65c–d, adopts this cultural language of respect but reshapes it. The text describes rising for patriarchs, judges, and sages yet begins with a bold statement: “The Torah does not get up because of her son.” In other words, true honor belongs not to individuals but to Torah itself. The rabbis engaged with Roman ideals of hierarchy but recast them to elevate Torah knowledge and learning as the highest marker of status.

Greco-Roman Myths, Gender, and Rabbinic Reinterpretation

Rabbinic texts also reflect familiarity with prevalent Greek myths that were central to Roman culture. Genesis Rabbah 8:1, a midrashic text, interrogates the Bible’s account of God’s creation of the first human as both “male and female” (Genesis 1:27). Rabbi Jeremiah ben Elazar imagines the first human as androgynous, while Rabbi Samuel bar Naḥman describes a two-faced being later split into two. These daring interpretations echo Aristophanes’ myth in Plato’s Symposium, wherein primeval humans were also whole before being divided, destined to seek reunion. The overlap suggests rabbinic awareness of Greco-Roman thought, but the rabbinic text reframes the story. Rather than a myth about the origins of desire, it is a teaching about divine creation and a new interpretation of a verse in Genesis (1:27). Here too, the rabbis both absorbed and repurposed cultural motifs and used them to explore questions of gender and identity within the framework of scripture.

Assimilation, Distinction, and Jewish Identity

Together, these texts show how the rabbis navigated the world of empire. Bathhouses, honor codes, and philosophical myths—pillars of Roman culture—were absorbed, resisted, and transformed in rabbinic hands. Their approach was neither wholesale adoption nor total rejection but a careful negotiation in which Torah set the terms. In this way, the rabbis demonstrated that living under an empire required creativity. They could participate in the rhythms of society even as they defined Jewish identity on their own terms.