Real and Imagined "Others" in Ancient Jewish Literature

Second Temple–era texts and later rabbinic texts both echo biblical concerns about who may join the religious community and who may not. Biblical texts do not share one unified attitude toward non-Jews, nor do the texts of the period explored in the Posen Library. Jews have long constructed their identity in opposition to various Others. In these texts, we read the ways in which Second Temple-era writers extend biblical concerns and explore the reasons marrying a non-Jew poses a danger to the Jewish spouse, usually focusing on the potential for the person to be drawn away from proper worship of God. We also encounter other ways the rabbis legislated and theorized the boundary between Jew and non-Jew, questioning whether the sacrifices of a non-Jew in the Temple are valid and whether a Jew can marry a non-Jew, do business with non-Jews on certain days, sell particular items to them, drink their wine, or eat their bread. Non-Jews appear in literary texts as well, including as characters in parables.

Constructions of the Other generally serve as a means by which a group can explore its own internal ambiguities, experiment with alternative possibilities, and even valorize what they themselves are not. In short, in rabbinic literature, the Other is deployed not only to facilitate the construction of a Jewish—or more precisely, rabbinic—self but also to complicate and even undermine that construction. We include a number of rabbinic legal texts because they explore and inform the rabbinic construction of Others and so illuminate the reading of the literary texts as well. It is also worth noting that the legal and the literary are often in tension with one another. A legal tenet may be predicated on an assumption that the literary undermines—a wonderful example of the complementary and dialectic nature of the legal (halakhic) and the literary (aggadic) in rabbinic texts (“The Nations” for an example).

Some rabbinic sources imagine the Other in universal and undifferentiated terms, as Noahides or “nations” (goyim) who stand as binary opposites of the Jew. Other sources imagine non-Jews as particular Others who exhibit points of similarity to and difference from Jews as well as from one another: Samaritans, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Christians, God-fearers, righteous gentiles, and converts. These particularized and differentiated Others are presented with distinctive, often stereotyped features. Positioned at various points along the scale from enemy to sympathizer to full convert, from moral inferior to moral equal to moral superior, these differentiated and varied representations of non-Jews contest the simple Jew-goy binary and expose its unrealistic character. Finally, some rabbinic sources contend with internal Others, addressing concerns about those within the Jewish community who depart from its norms in one way or another.