Hekhalot literature testifies to the heterogeneous nature of Jewish religious practice and authority at and across the boundaries of rabbinic Judaism. Yet, Hekhalot and rabbinic literatures do not reflect clear-cut social, cultural, and institutional divisions within Jewish society, nor are they complementary facets of a single, coherent religious system. Both of these options oversimplify the complex relationship between these rapidly evolving sites of Jewish literary culture. Rather, Hekhalot literature and the social groups that produced it were subject to the same institutional, technological, linguistic, and demographic transformations that reshaped Jewish society and culture more broadly toward the end of Late Antiquity (500–800 C.E.). The relationship between Hekhalot and rabbinic literatures can thus shed light on the dialectical process by which rabbinic authority was gradually extended into new areas of Jewish life, while itself being transformed in the process.
is paper traces the historical development of the discourse of violent retribution in Jewish culture over the course of Late Antiquity. e paper argues that, although Jews had long engaged in anti-Roman rhetoric, Jewish anti-imperial sentiment intensified in the fifth to seventh centuries ce. is heightened level of antipathy toward the Roman state is perhaps best exemplified by a number of texts that present tableaux of graphic violence directed against the figure of the Roman emperor. e paper shows that these fantasies of revenge redeployed and inverted specific elements of Roman imperial ideology and practice, while at the same time internalizing the pervasive stereotype of Jews in sixth-and especially seventh-century Christian sources as violent troublemakers. e paper argues that, in attempting to assert some measure of control over the "symbolic weapons" of religious violence at play in their society, the Jewish creators of this vivid discourse of retributive justice colluded with their Christian counterparts in constructing the Jew as a member of an oppositional and even dangerous religious minority.
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