1In the middle decades of the twentieth century, in the shadow of the Holocaust, Yitzhak Fritz Baer and Saul Lieberman addressed the problem of martyrdom in rabbinic literature. Baer’s purpose was to restore to history the Jews’ struggle against Roman oppression from which Christian accounts had excluded them.1 Lieberman, by contrast, in a series of articles insisted that Jews in Palestine suffered only during and in the wake of the Bar Kokhba revolt and otherwise enjoyed a positive relationship with the state. Along the same lines, Lieberman was at pains to minimize the impact of the “war of Qitos” in the second century Palestine and any revolt by Jews under Gallus Caesar in the fourth.2

2In order to make his case, Baer was forced (with some circularity) to rely heavily on a discursive analysis of Christian authors to map the exclusion of Jews and Judaism and to show how Jews could and should be read back in. For Lieberman, a central focus of the argument was rabbinic accounts of Roman judicial procedure, including those in which rabbinic figures were tried and killed. Lieberman went so far as to argue that passages like these should be treated as documentary evidence, much like papyri. Lieberman was obviously aware that rabbinic materials were reworked later but, somewhat contradictorily, allowed himself to quote from sources early and late and also concluded that there was little change in Roman punitive or judicial practices from the second century to the considerably later contexts of the Talmuds and midrashim. Since these foundational studies, which had in common a high regard for the historicity of rabbinic texts, the focus of historical study has shifted to the work of tradents and redactors of rabbinic texts. In this paper, I want to work outward from the intersection of two sets of texts treating death at government hands to a discussion of how emperors are depicted as meting out violent justice to Jews dying for the observance of Torah. The first is the group of passages dealing with Pappus and Julianus (or Lollianus). The second is the narrative of the mother and her sons brought before “Caesar” although clearly retelling a story that circulated much earlier in connection with events of the reign of Antiochus IV.

3The first half of the second century in Palestine almost certainly saw its share of judicial violence directed at Jews,3 and we cannot exclude incidents of violence later. After Josephus, our sources are so overwhelmingly focused on Palestine that we should not reject out of hand the possibility of Roman imperial prosecution of Jews in Syria under Trajan. But the accounts of Pappus and Julianus cannot be satisfactorily explained as accounts of such events. Something else is at work here. Indeed, two of the traditions make eminent sense against a background that is no earlier than the fourth century – in one case the Christian memory of martyrdom; in the other the reign of Julian. In other words, the memory of Pappus and Julianus was deployed for contemporary purposes in Late Antique Palestine. Even more clearly in the case of the story of the mother and her seven sons, it seems likely that the rabbinic discovery of the story is tied to the rise of the Christian cult of the Maccabaean Martyrs.

4More broadly, I wish to argue that the editors of Palestinian texts roughly from the late fourth to the seventh century, and particularly Lamentations Rabbah, constructed a history of martyrdom set in the early second century that is deeply informed by the Christian celebration of martyrdom. This recovered, and at least in part invented, history of martyrdom has the effect of reinscribing the alterity of Jews within the empire, or rather, from the perspective from which the stories are told, the alterity of the persecuting emperor with respect to “us”.

5Central to this invented history is the depiction of the accused, typically a Rabbi (although not in the case of our two sets of traditions), and the emperor, who presides as judge over a cognitio extraordinaria. The hero triumphs by resisting the demands of an oppressive state to violate the divine Torah, and in the case of both Pappus and Julianus and the mother and her seven sons, by calling into question the very legitimacy of the emperor as judge. The depictions occur overwhelmingly in “amoraic” works that came to completion in the fifth to seventh centuries, suggesting an engagement with late antique Christianity for which the constructed memory of the martyrs was a crucial element of both piety and belief.

6This leaves us with an interpretative puzzle. Rabbis are deploying a discourse of imperial tribunals that is certainly aware of and making use of conventional provincial knowledge of the activities of imperial judges at work. To a certain extent those conventions are, if not appropriated from then at least articulated in the context of, contemporary Christianity. As a result, the narratives depicted Jews as resisting the very same pagan emperors whom the Christian martyr acts presented as the enemy. Are these emperors stand-ins for Christian rulers (and Christianity identified with idolatry) in a thoroughgoing, if submerged, rejection of the contemporary state? Or are rabbinic stories, like Christian stories, seeking out the memory of tribunals of the persecutory past?

Pappus and Julianus

7Pappus and Julianus appear in some five distinctly discernable traditions (one, at least, with significant sub-variants). On balance, it is very difficult to either show the development of their story or to recover anything like a historical substratum to the events which they depict. I suggest that this was because the events were famous enough for later tradents to refer to in passing, allowing audiences to fill in the details, but also therefore convenient sites for further embellishment.

8Two traditions appear in the tannaitic midrashim. These are works that were significantly shaped as early as the third century, but whose final form cannot be firmly dated. The first is merely the notice that the referent in Leviticus 19:26, “I will destroy the pride of your strength” is “the proud, who are the pride of Israel, like Pappus b. Judah and Julianus of Alexandria and his friends”.4 That their glory has been broken suggests some sort of degradation, and in fact this comment does not even require that Pappus and Julianus make up a pair. To my knowledge there is no other “Julianus” or “Lollianus” with whom our Julianus might be identified, but there are several traditions about a Pappus b. Judah (or Judah b. Pappus) in various strata of the literature who could conceivably be associated with our Pappus.5

9The second tradition, which is repeated in a number of locations, is rather more dramatic. As it is narrated in the Sifra to Leviticus, when Trajan(?)6 killed7 Pappus and his brother Julianus in Laodicaea, the emperor challenged their God to save them as he had saved Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in the book of Daniel.8

They said to him: Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah were good and Nebuchadnezzar was worthy that a miracle happen through him, but you are a wicked king and are not worthy that a miracle happen through you. And we are guilty of death from the heavens, and if you do not kill us, there are many sources of danger before God (lit. “the place”): there are many bears, many lions, many tigers, many serpents, many scorpions, that may strike us.
However in the end, God will demand our blood from you.
They say: He did not travel from there before two emissaries9 from Rome arrived and removed his brains with staves.

10Here, Pappus and Julianus are brothers, although we might want to take the term figuratively. They were tried in Laodicaea, and if the identification of the prosecuting king is correct, this took place in the reign of Trajan and in Laodicaea in Syria, not Palestine. The accused understand themselves as having being guilty of death for their own sins – although not certainly for the sins for which they are being tried – but any legitimacy the emperor might have with his Jewish prisoners is denied by the text. Strikingly, Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king responsible for destroying the first Temple and for testing the three young men in the fiery furnace is held up as worthy of being the agent of miracles, while the Roman emperor himself is unworthy. While the death of Pappus and Julianus is not narrated, the assassination of the emperor is.

11We can only imagine here what historical circumstances, if any, lie behind this story. One such circumstance might be the revolts of Egypt, Cyrene, and Cyprus in 115-117 that decimated the Jewish populations of those regions, or punitive acts directed at Jews in their aftermath. Perhaps, too, Jews might be accused of being atheists and opposed to the gods or the empire whom the gods supported and brought to trial on that basis. Or perhaps they were accused of other crimes having nothing to do with their association with cult, beliefs, or ethnicity, guilt for which they acknowledge, in which case the reason to note the story consists solely in the challenge put before their God by the emperor. Nothing in this version hints at a demand for sacrifice or at the valorization of the death itself. The only aspect of divine justice and oversight explicitly addressed is the fact that the emperor himself dies at the end.

12The two Talmuds mention Pappus and Julianus in connection with the list of minor festivals known as Megillat Ta‘anit, although the specific festival on the twelfth of Adar (Day of ṬWRYYNWS, presumably Trajan) does not occur in the surviving manuscripts of this work itself but only in a late version of the scholion to the work.10 In the Palestinian Talmud, whose closure we can date to the fifth century or perhaps the late fourth, we have the notice that the “Day of ṬYRYWN” was cancelled by the death of Pappus and Julianus.11 The Babylonian Talmud’s version appears to understand the festival as originating because of the episode of Pappus and Julianus, in which case the key point is again the death of the emperor. It may also be significant that this version opens with him “seizing” (not killing) the pair, so it is possible that we should read the story as ending with their salvation.12

13Genesis Rabbah, a work completed in perhaps the fifth or sixth century, attaches another Pappus and Julianus tradition to its exposition of Genesis 26:29. The tradition is eponymously dated to the days of Joshua b. Hanania (thus, the early second century), and depicts a decree by the emperor to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem. Latter day Kuthaeans (Samaritans)13 reprise the role that the opponents of rebuilding the Temple play in Ezra 4, quoting Ezra 4:13 to the king, and suggesting that he specify minute changes to the plan for siting or building the Temple so that the Jews withdraw from the plan of their own accord. The role of Joshua here, as a scholastikos of the Torah, is to quiet an angry mob that wants to revolt, by quoting a fable akin to that of the Aesopian “The Wolf and the Crane”. He concludes somewhat obscurely: “So too, it is enough for us that we entered this people (Rome) in peace and we have exited in peace”. Parenthetically in this ambivalent story about the restoration of the Temple, we learn that “Pappus and Julianus set up money changers from Akko to Antioch, and they would provide provisions for the exiles who were going up”.14 Although some scholars persist in seeing an underlying second-century incident here that can be recovered (perhaps in the reign of Nerva),15 it seems more likely in its present context to reflect on Julian’s abortive attempt to rebuild the Temple and perhaps attendant enthusiasm about the redemption.

14The final tradition is the example of “Julianus and Pappus his brother, who were given water in colored glass and they did not receive it from them”. The citing pericope, which twice refers to this tradition, itself appears twice in the Palestinian Talmud.16 The water stands in for prohibited wine, presumably tainted by libation. That is, Pappus and Julianus were permitted merely to appear to drink (or pour) libation wine, but, in the context of the passage, since their public apostasy was on the line they properly refused. If so, the context is an episode of mandatory offering, familiar from Christian martyrdom texts.

15The broader discussion is the obligation of Jews to die rather than transgress the Torah. Pappus and Julianus are brought as exemplars of a circumstance involving even a minor infraction when it is public. However they are given as counter-examples to cases where rabbis themselves permitted the transgression of ritual laws in order to respond to the requirements of the state: to pay taxes in one case, or to satisfy the demands of Ursicinus and his troops or entourage in the other. The pericope ultimately justifies this with the observation that “they do not want to cause you to apostatize, but to collect taxes” or “… to eat warm bread”.

16The putative dates of the tradents cited in this pericope and the presence of Ursicinus require that the present form of this pericope dates to no earlier than the mid-fourth century.17 It is striking that in order to give an explicit case of mandated sacrifice involving Jews, the editor of the passage has to reach back to the second century, and outside Palestine or any rabbinic figures known to have been executed. The public persecutions of Christians, and particularly those of the first decades of the fourth century, may be lurking under the surface. If, in fact, the Pappus and Julianus unit focuses on libation, this may presuppose familiarity with those persecutions.18

17In addition, immediately following the second iteration of our text about Pappus and Julianus, Abuna asks: “Are gentiles commanded to sanctify God’s name?” that is, to suffer death rather than transgress? The answer, proven from a biblical verse, is no. Who are these gentiles who die unncecessarily? In the fourth or early fifth century context of our text, those that loom largest both in terms of the Christianity that was becoming dominant in Palestine and in terms of relatively recent local events – on an early dating of the Palestinian Talmud,19 perhaps still barely within living memory – are the Christians who died in public displays during the Diocletianic persecutions.

Maccabaean martyrs

18Although we cannot outline a clear development of the Pappus and Julianus materials, one of the two earliest fragments of that tradition that appears in tannaitic works does appear in another connection: the rabbinic story of the woman and her seven sons who died as a result of imperial persecution. This is an episode that is well known from 2 Maccabees 7 or 4 Maccabees 8-14, which place the events in the context of the prohibitions of Judaism associated with Antiochus IV. The seventh, youngest son and the persecuting emperor reproduce the dialogue about Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah that appears in the Sifra and preserved portions of the Mekhilta of R. Shimon b. Yohai. In the rabbinic account of the mother and her seven sons, the evil king is “Caesar” (not Antiochus IV), and the events take place within the rabbinic construction of historical memory about the consequences of the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple.20 In addition, the critical act demanded of the martyrs is idolatry rather than eating prohibited food.

19Despite significant differences, the account clearly echoes the much earlier accounts in 2 and 4 Maccabees. Origen and Eusebius certainly attest to knowledge of 2 Maccabees in Palestine.21 However, it is striking that no Jewish text from Palestine documents any familiarity with either the story or with 2 and 4 Maccabees in general before the story appears in Lamentations Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud, with parallels in other, later midrashic texts. Lamentations Rabbah cannot be securely dated beyond the rough assignment to the fifth or sixth century, and like all rabbinic works draws on earlier materials (demonstrably so, in our case), so it is impossible to date with precision the moment that this martyrdom story first entered rabbinic literature.22 Nevertheless, it is possible to make a circumstantial case that our Lamentations Rabbah text is informed by the cult of the Maccabean Martyrs, and the emergence of the cult provides a terminus post quem for its formation.

20The origins of the Christian veneration of these martyrs and of the establishment of their feast day are somewhat vexed, in part by the question of whether Christians have coopted an Antiochian Jewish practice and its ritual space, and also by conflicting accounts of where within Antioch or its outskirts the martyr cult would have been located.23 The earliest date for a Christian cult depends on the sources of a Syriac martyrology of 411/412 CE, according to which Ab (August) 1 was the date of the veneration of the Maccabean Martyrs, who were buried in Antioch.24 If, in fact, the practice first arose in Antioch in the mid-fourth century, it spread widely rather quickly. Gregory Nazianzus’s Homily 15 on the Martyrs was given in Nazianzus no earlier than 361. The practice, and the strangeness of Christians venerating Jewish martyrs who died for the Law, are the subject of sermons by John Chrysostom later in the century in Antioch and apparently Constantinople, as well as by Augustine at Hippo at the turn of the fifth century.25 Ambrose of Milan in his Epistle 40 to the Emperor Theodosius notes in passing that insult to the monks celebrating the festival of the Maccabees was the event that precipitated the destruction of the Valentinian temple in Callinicum (present day Raqqah).26

21On the face of it, the relatively short, coherent version of the story that appears in the Babylonian Talmud (b. Gittin 57b) reflects an early stage of the development of our text. That version, attributed to a second generation Babylonian sage (putatively, the late third century) is brought to illustrate the verse “Because for your sake we have been killed all the day, we are considered sheep for slaughter” (Ps 44:23). The composition is also inflected by Persian terminology which locates it in the Sasanian Mesopotamian context.27

22Each of the first six brothers is brought before the emperor; each casts his refusal in the form of the quotation of a verse; and each is killed. The seventh and final son provides a somewhat longer exegetical response, affirming that God and Israel have sworn fealty to one another. The king proposes to toss his ring for this son to pick up, thus allowing him the mere appearance of having bowed down, but the son refuses. The mother asks to kiss her son, and tells him to report to Abraham that while the Patriarch made only one altar, she had made seven. Finally, the mother too went up to a roof and fell to her death. A divine voice quoted Psalms 113:9 on her behalf, apparently devoid of the bitterness or irony that is deployed in the longer Palestinian forms: “Happy is the mother of children”.

23We cannot be certain that the rabbinic story we have been discussing directly responds to stories about the persecutions of Antiochus, rather than retelling a martyrdom story around an established narrative pattern.28 It is worth noting, however, the mother’s reference to Abraham, which possibly indicates familiarity with how the story was told in 4 Maccabees (see her speech at 4:16-23).29 More strikingly, the comparison to Abraham – who has been outdone by the mother – echoes the purpose to which at least one Christian orator, Gregory Nazianzus put the Maccabaean story:

What an incredibly magnanimous act, a sacrifice equal to Abraham’s if one should not venture to say even greater! For Abraham willingly offered one son, though it was his only child and the one of promise, indeed the one to whom the promise referred and more important, who formed the root and firstling (aparchē) not only of his race (genos) but also of sacrifices of this kind; while she, on the other hand, consecrated all of her children (dēmon holōn paidōn), showing herself without peer among mothers and priests because of the willingness for slaughter that the victims, these spiritual (logikois) sacrifices and eager (epeigomenois) holocausts, displayed.30

24I have suggested that the Babylonian version represents an earlier, simpler version of the story. Whether we can use the named rabbi to roughly date the story (i.e., to assign it a third century provenance rather than a much later one) will depend on a study of the broader context of the story in the Talmud that is beyond the scope of this paper. Here, I do not intend to claim that the story entered Palestinian works via Babylonia (usually the flow of narratives of this sort moves in the other direction), but neither can I exclude it.31

25Our focus here is the version that appears in Lamentations Rabbah. In this context the story has been substantially developed from a core shared with the Babylonian Talmud.32 Arguably, some features that appear in the Palestinian version may have been original to the story but stripped out by Babylonian tradents in order to simplify it: for instance, the insistence that the brothers were separated (so that, explicitly in version B, each brother could be told that his predecessor succumbed to the pressure to worship idolatry); or the subsequent madness (and in version B the explicit suicide) of the mother.

26However, other differences do not lend themselves to this interpretation. Lamentations Rabbah introduces a dialogue with the seventh son that is structured around Psalm 115:5-7. This is a midrashic set-piece contrasting the emperor’s gods’ lack of true mouth, eyes, and so on, with the fact that Israel’s God has all these features. It is also closely related to a passage that already appears in the Mekhilta de-Rabbi Shimon b. Yohai.33 This same set of exchanges culminates in a dialogue between Caesar and the seventh son that invokes the story of Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (Daniel 3), and that appears independently in the Sifra in connection with Pappus and Julianus. Yet another possible example of material not originally connected with this story into the narrative of the mother and her seven sons is the empathetic cry “What is the God of these people doing to them…”34

27It seems, then, that the late antique Palestinian editors of this expanded narrative actively constructed a story of martyrdom. We can speculate about the motivations or roots for some of the elements that appear in the Lamentations Rabbah version. First, there is an expanded comparison to Abraham:

His mother said to him: My son, do not let your heart go soft, and do not fear. You are going to join your brothers, and you will be placed in the bosom of Abraham our father.35
Say to him in my name: You built one altar and did not sacrifice your son. But I built seven altars and sacrificed my sons upon them. And not only that but your experience was a test and mine were acts carried out.36

28This sharpens the contrast that was of interest also to Christian commentators. In addition, the image of the “bosom of Abraham” (cf. Luke 17:22-23), rare in rabbinic literature, plays an important role in late antique Christian discussions of the afterlife.

29Introducing Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah into the story also brings it further into line with 4 Maccabees, where the mother, immediately after invoking Abraham, mentions Daniel and Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah (4 Macc 4:21), as well as with Christian exhortations to martyrdom like that of Origen.37 Along similar lines, where the mother refers to the breasts that fed her son (2 Maccabees 7:27), Gregory has the mother bare her breast, while Lamentations Rabbah has the mother nurse the child.38 Fourth, Lamentations Rabbah describes the woman as having become incompetent (nišṭatâ; in legal contexts: lost the capacity to exercise will or intention). This can be read as an explicit counterpoint to 4 Maccabees, which is framed as a discourse on logismos, “reason” (see especially 15:11, 16:4). The willing participation of the mother is an important theme in Gregory and John Chrysostom’s homilies on these martyrs, as well.39

30For these examples to be persuasive, we must assume deep textual or discursive engagement with Christian arguments in support of martyrdom and in particular celebrating the Maccabean martyrs. Even absent this assumption, the narration of the story of the woman and her seven sons in the Palestinian Lamentations Rabbah should be read as in conversation (contestation) with Christian martyr discourse. Late antique Palestinian Jews cannot have missed the fact that the result of a Christian martyrdom narrative is inevitably a victory. Chrysostom, for instance, refers to the crowning of the Maccabean martyrs and compares this to the procedures of the Olympic games.40 In Lamentations Rabbah, as noted, the mother’s speech encouraging her son is amplified. In addition, she asks to be with (Version A: before) her last son. Yet, at the end her agency is stripped away and her suicide an act of madness. After her death, “they read about her: The mother of children is happy (Psalms 113:9),” more or less as in the Babylonian Talmud.41 However, the story ends: “And the Holy Spirit cries out and says: For these do I cry (Lamentations 1:16)”. This, of course, links the narrative back to its context as a midrash on Lamentations. The expression of divine grief also has the effect of undercutting any unilaterally heroic and joyous reading of this story of martyrdom.

Martyrdom and judicial violence?

31No version of the Pappus and Julianus story attempts to link the fragments into a complete account. In the anecdote about water in colored glass, the threat of death as judicial punishment, rather than the use of torture to extract confession or compliance, is implied. In other Pappus and Julianus traditions it is neither certain nor necessary that the principals died. The Lamentations Rabbah story about the mother and her seven sons may feature some procedures (the holding of prisoners in cells,42 their interrogation) and especially their execution at the hands of a king who demands that they perform idolatry. This is distinctly different from many Christian martyr acts in which the violence done to the body in advance of execution, and the mode of execution itself play a central role in the narrative.43

32What role do law, tribunals, and judicial torture play in classical rabbinic discourse, and how are they mobilized in accounts of pious death? At some fundamental level, rabbinic texts take the connection of imperial justice and violence for granted. The Mishnah, in delineating those activities where Israelites can interact with idolators, specifies:

One does not sell them bears or lions or anything that has the potential to harm the many.
One does not build with them a basilica, gradus, stadium,44 or bema.
However, one does build with them public bathhouses45 and baths.
Once they arrive at the niche where they erect the idolatry, it is forbidden to build.46

33The first statement almost certainly refers to animal displays that led to loss of life, although possibly in the form of venationes rather than punitive damnatio ad bestiam. The second connects the stadium with other monumental, architectural settings for the appearance of a governor or judge. The Tosefta makes the connection between stadium and execution explicit:

One who sits in the stadium,47 lo, this one is one who spills blood.
R. Nathan permits for two reasons: Because he cries out and can save souls, and because he can then testify regarding a woman that she may remarry.
One may go to stadia because he cries out and saves lives, and to the military camp48 because of the settlement of the land. But if he gains status thereby(?) (’im mitḥašeb hu), lo, it is prohibited.49

34Paradoxically, it is the murderous activities of the stadium that justify the presence of an Israelite there.

35Elsewhere, traditions in both tannaitic and amoraic corpora retroject judicial violence onto biblical scenarios. Dathan and Abiran brought Moses up to the bema, bound him and were ready to kill him, were it not for divine intervention.50 The Babylonian general who took the First Temple is said to have hung priests from the gradus to force them to reveal the source of mysterious flowing blood.51 A parable in the Sifre to Deuteronomy characterizes the typical king as meting out capital and monetary penalties in an arbitrary fashion, in contrast to Moses who has to answer even for his monetary verdicts.52

36Less relevant to formal trials than to public vengeance manifesting the authority of the ruler are some traditions from tannaitic midrashim about kings carrying out public summary justice with harsh penalties. Sifre Deuteronomy compares Israel, which when it has power treats its subjects with mercy, to gentiles who when they have power treat Israel with cruelty, killing them, burning them, and crucifying them.53 It would be wrong to assume that only wicked kings do this. God at the splitting of the sea is the king in a parable involving brigands who attack the king’s palace. The account ends with them being judged first, then captured and crucified: “afterwards his kingdom is known in the world”.54 To punish the Israelites who sinned “with the daughters of Moab” and worshipped Ba‘al Pe‘or, God instructs Moses to appoint judges who will crucify the sinners publicly.55 Potentially quite late non-legal sources cite the principle that brigands are crucified in the place of their brigandage, in one case justifying the role of Jerusalem in the events of the eschaton.56

37As for martyrdom, there are several tannaitic texts that remember prohibited ritual acts and capital punishment for defying the prohibitions. Thus, those who “love me and keep my commandments” (invoking God’s promise of justice in the Ten Commandments, no less) are glossed in the Mekhilta to Exodus (20:5):

These are the Israelites who live in the land of Israel and give up their lives for the commandments.
Why are you going out to be killed? Because I circumcised my son.
Why are you going out to be burnt? Because I read the Torah.
Why are you going out to be crucified? Because I ate unleavened bread.
Why are you beaten with a scourge?57 Because I took the lulab.
And it says: [The wounds] with which I was wounded in the house of my beloved (Zech. 13:6): These blows have caused me to be more beloved to my father in heaven.58

38In the same work, Aqiba is credited with a dialogue in which the nations ask Israel: “How is your beloved more than another beloved (Cant. 5:9) that you die for him so, that you are killed for him so?”59

39Aside from the story of Eliezer, who was tried for minut, that is, on the grounds of being a Christian, and released, a small number of second century rabbis are said to have been executed.60 When Ishmael and Simeon were killed, Ishmael reassures his fellow that he in fact deserved punishment before God for putting his own comfort or convenience above those of clients coming to be judged.61 Perhaps the most dramatic account of martyrdom in tannaitic corpora is the execution of Ḥanina b. Teradion and family. In Sifre to Deuteronomy,62 he is sentenced to be burnt “with his book,”63 his wife to execution (i.e., by the sword), and his daughter to forced labor.64 In addition, a philosopher in the entourage of the emperor reproaches him, and the philosopher gratefully accepts the Jews’ fate and a portion in the world to come.65

40There is an important element of theodicy in these stories. In the story of Ḥanina b. Teradion and family each of the convicts recites a verse that affirms God’s justice (ṣidduq ha-din). In one of the traditions we have seen, Pappus and Julianus affirm that they are indeed guilty. In the story of the trial of Eliezer (although it does not result in death) and of Simeon and Ishmael, there is some infraction that does not justify the trial itself but merits divine punishment meted out through imperial hands.66 The point is significant because here again is a difference from the conventional Christian narrative of martyrdom, where the virtue and blamelessness of the victim is part of what gives the story its power.

41The traditions of rabbis suffering death at the hands of the empire expanded in later periods. The development of the Babylonian Talmud’s version of Rabbi Aqiba into a full-blown martyr’s tale has been dealt with considerably in recent scholarship.67 Even within the later Palestinian literary tradition, there are martyrdom traditions that are not attested earlier. Aqiba himself appears to be one such example.68 Lamentations Rabbah knows of a list of rabbinic martyrs, and we cannot always trace how these figures came to be on the list.69 At least in the case of Judah b. Baba, the missed opportunity to eulogize him has been transformed into a martyrdom by the addition of the gloss “for one does not eulogize those killed by the kingdom”.70

Conclusion

42To return to Baer and Lieberman, it is at least conceivable that Jews were the victims of the same kinds of accusations that brought Christian martyrs before provincial governors, particularly in the second century after three disastrous waves of violence.71 Nevertheless, Lieberman was undoubtedly correct that the martyrdom stories in rabbinic literature, which constitute almost the exclusive source for any persecution of Jews pre-Constantine, attach for the most part to early second century figures. Rabbinic narratives cannot be used to uncover a pervasive history of persecution.

43However, much as with the persecution of Christians in most parts of the Roman world in late antiquity, the history of rabbinic martyrdom is the construction and management of memory, set in the increasingly distant past.72 The Pappus and Julianus traditions are distinct from one another and do not necessarily presuppose the same background. At least one of the traditions makes sense responding to Julian’s permission to rebuild the Temple – and the project’s failure – suggesting that traditions about these paradigmatic martyrs continued to be reshaped or invented well into the fourth century if not later. The brief review of the treatments of judicial violence indicates that there is a broader pattern at work here. A small number of rabbis are said to have died in the tannaitic works, most dramatically Ḥanina b. Teradion. In texts edited in later periods, their number expanded and their role as martyrs became more explicit. Indeed, in the case of the mother and her seven sons, especially as retold in Lamentations Rabbah, fragments of the rabbinic past, earlier traditions, and recovered Jewish narratives mediated by Christian martyr acts, polemic, and cult may have thus been utilized in the reconstruction of a now Roman imperial past.

44At the center of these accounts of pious deaths at the hands of the Roman state, are the tribunal and the judge, typically depicted as the emperor himself. The developed martyrdom history of later texts like Lamentations Rabbah presents rabbis’ or other heroes’ willingness to die for the Torah as a drama of resistance before the state. At the time these corpora were collected and edited few Jews actually died through tribunals that challenged Jews’ right to perform the commandments. However, the imperial quaestores who drafted constitutions that appear in the Theodosian and Justinianic Codes, the editors who compiled the laws into Titles, and ecclesiastical writers increasingly agreed on the fundamental alterity of Jews. The rabbinic texts we have been reviewing invoke that very alterity, but cast the same Roman emperors who persecuted Christians as the villains in their own stories.

45I caution to add that we do not entirely understand this resistance. The motif of the unassimilable Jew is so familiar as to be taken for granted, but needs further inquiry. Scholars of late antique Palestinian literature also have yet to deal adequately with a deep-seated rabbinic reticence. It is a basic fact that we cannot firmly date any rabbinic text because the texts refuse to reveal almost anything substantive about their political, administrative present except in passing. Yet the preceding discussion suggests that the production of new rabbinic traditions did not cease with the middle of the fourth century, when the last named rabbis will have flourished. If the proposed reading of the introduction of the motif of the mother and her seven sons against the rise of the cult of the Maccabean Martyrs is correct, it provides a relatively rare example to which we can point and date (unfortunately, not precisely but likely after the mid fourth century) the introduction of new material into the rabbinic corpus. However, this is only possible (even if consequently impossible to prove definitively) because we are able to work comparatively with other material from outside of the rabbinic corpus.

46What makes Baer’s argument possible, even if we cannot accept his conclusions, is this fundamental reticence that we can only occasionally peer through, often with the help of external intertexts. How much self-censorship, how much esotericism is embedded in the very texture of Palestinian rabbinic literature? Following Baer’s lead, we might view rabbinic literature as the product of such a self-policing literary culture that even ongoing or recurrent experiences of persecution needed to be transposed to the safely distant past. Alternatively, and no less profoundly, in late antiquity, sectors within the rabbinic community reframed their orientation to the state and society in the present by discovering themselves in a history of second century imperial tribunals.