In 2001, James M. S. Cowey and Klaus Maresch presented the edition of a papyrus archive documenting the internal administrative affairs of the Jewish politeuma of Herakleopolis (the capital of the Herakleopolites administrative district). This archive is referred to in papyrological research as P.Polit.Iud. It consists of twenty Greek papyrus texts dating between 144/3 and 133/2 BCE. This collection was later expanded by Thomas Kruse, who identified another related text preserved in the Bavarian State Library’s papyrus collection (P.Graec.Mon. 287 + 293).
P.Polit.Iud. has captivated researchers since its discovery. Robert Kugler takes up the much-debated aspect that the petitions contained in P.Polit.Iud. uniquely demonstrate the influence of Jewish beliefs and legal concepts on the argumentation and formulation of the petitions. These petitions were addressed to the leading representatives of the Jewish politeuma of Herakleopolis, the politarches and the archons, usually in connection with private legal disputes among Jews, but sometimes also in the context of disputes between Jews and non-Jews; the petitioners appear to have always been members of the politeuma, or Jewish non-members. Kugler has been at the forefront of illuminating and interpreting the Jewish elements in the petitions of P.Polt.Iud. through several individual studies and now crowns his long-standing engagement with this topic with a monograph.
Kugler introduces the topic in section 1 in a general sense, discussing the goal of his analysis, the formalities related to P.Polit.Iud., the context of the petitions under examination (i.e. the Jewish politeuma of Herakleopolis), and previous research on the relevance of discernible Jewish content in the petitions. Section 2 serves as a methodological prelude in which Kugler uses two previously-known petitions with Jewish backgrounds to demonstrate “what a strategy for reading petitions contextually looks like” (p. 3) and what insights can be gained from it regarding the uncovering of previously unseen Jewish legal content—a methodological insight that, according to Kugler, is even more to be expected for the petitions of P.Polit.Iud. His aim is then to examine those petitions that, due to their state of preservation, allow for an evaluation of their content (a total of 13 texts) in terms of their underlying argumentation strategy and the references to Jewish law contained within them. This forms the core of the study, comprising sections 3-5, making up the majority of the book. In these sections (which may be more readily received by papyrologists than by historians or scholars of religious studies), the individual petitions are presented in the form of comprehensive and meticulous (re)editions, including formal description, introduction, translation, and line-by-line commentary. The study concludes with a summary (section 6) and a bibliography of literature and sources (pp. 257–274). In the following, I will provide a brief overview of the contents and the Jewish elements that Kugler has identified in the petitions of P.Polit.Iud. he examined.
Section 3: “Delicts against the Person”:
- He links the dispute documented in P.Polit.Iud. 1 between a member of the politeuma and a person referred to as a resident of the harbor district, with no mention of violence, to Deut 19:15–19, where false accusations are already established as punishable.
- Kugler explains the rhetoric presented in P.Polit.Iud. 2, involving an incarcerated Jew, with Deut 25:1–3, where it is portrayed as offensive and dishonorable to hold someone in prison longer than necessary.
- In the context of P.Polit.Iud. 6, where Theodotos complains about a paidion (a slave or, as favored by Kugler, a servant) who died while in the service of Timotheos and (also against the background that an investigation by the village elders of Onnes led to no decision) demands compensation, Kugler argues that this aligns more with Jewish (Exod 21:20, 32) than Greek legal concepts.
Section 4: “On marriage and family” (leaving out the incomplete P.Polit.Iud. 5):
- P.Polit.Iud. 3 concerns an unfulfilled agreement that, in addition to the dowry recorded in a marriage contract, was supposed to be enforced through an oath according to paternal custom (horkos patrios) and, after an initial petition to the archons, led to the involvement of the village elders of Tebetnoi. Here, Kugler reconstructs a Jewish legal practice that allowed for the transfer of daughters’ parental property apart from the dowry stipulated in the marriage contract. He connects this practice with Num 27:1–12, 36:6–9, and Lev 25:23, with the oath-taking linked to Num 30:3.
- P.Polit.Iud. 4 (where hitertho the strongest influence of Jewish legal thinking has been perceived) involves a sworn agreement between a groom and the bride’s father for marriage, which the bride’s father did not fulfill because he had given his daughter to another man without receiving the customary writ of divorce from the groom. Kugler sees this as an explicit reference to Deut 24:1, where a Jewish husband could divorce his wife if he “found something shameful about her” by writing a certificate of divorce and sending her away, and links the oath (as in P.Polit.Iud. 3) to Num 30:3.
- P.Polit.Iud. 7 concerns Dorotheos’ request to return to his care his niece, who was taken from him by the wife of his brother, Iona. Regarding the rhetoric underlying the text, Kugler identifies connections to Jewish legal thinking as follows: the mention of the petitioner having been entrusted with the guardianship in question (Exod 22:21–22; Deut 10:18; 14:29; 24:17, 19, 21; 26:12–13; 27:19); the previously demonstrated ability to assume guardianship (Lev 25.35–37); and the fulfillment of guardianship over a period of four years, which, according to Jewish custom, would de facto constitute a guardianship (m. Git. 5.4).
Section 5: “On Loans, Leases, Sales, and Labor Agreements” (leaving out the very short P.Polit.Iud. 10 and 11):
- P.Polit.Iud. 8 concerns a loan agreement between Jews with unpaid debts, resulting in the seizure of land designated as collateral and transferred to the wife of the lender. After intervention by Jews from the village of Teis, a new repayment plan was apparently agreed upon but was also not adhered to. Assuming that the lender’s wife was not Jewish but Greek, Kugler wants to explain the apparent negotiation process in Teis with the Jewish principle that land owned by Jews should not be taken from them or should remain reserved for them (Lev 25:23; cf. Lev 25:10–13; Num 27; 36:6–9).
- In P.Polit.Iud. 9, a Jewish woman from the town or village of Aphroditopolis complains about a Jew from the village of Peempasbytis for not adhering to the agreements recorded in an ἐπιστολὴ ὅρκου πατρίου. This involved the payment for a slave and her child, including the due penalty fees for non-payment and the provision of a midwife. Kugler elaborates that the violation of the ἐπιστολὴ ὅρκου πατρίου, which he regards as a revision of an original sale and nursing contract, would imply a violation of the patrios nomos (line 29), the Jewish law. The act of swearing itself brings in Num 30:3, and due to the nurse to be provided, Lev 19:13 and Deut 24:14–15 should also be considered, as they concern the reliable and timely payment of wages for labor.
- The case of P.Polit.Iud. 12 concerns unpaid rent, which the lessor sued for. The leasing relationship (which the lessor apparently inherited from his father) was subject to a ἐπιστολὴ ὅρκου πατρίου. Kugler suggests that, as in the case of P.Polit.Iud. 9, it involved a revision of an existing contractual agreement following the death of the lessor’s father and that the ἐπιστολὴ ὅρκου πατρίου imposed an obligation in accordance with Num 30:3; additionally, according to Lev 25:13–17 the defaulting lessee might have been considered a fraudster.
- Pap.Graec.Mon. 287 also discusses a leasing relationship, but in this case, from the perspective of the lessee who reports that the leased land was insufficiently flooded by the Nile for a year before the end of the three-year contract period. Consequently, the lessee intended to continue farming the land for another year but was confronted with the fact that the lessor had re-leased the land to someone else after the agreed contract period. Kugler suspects that the petitioner’s concern (as in the case of P.Polit.Iud. 12) could be related to Lev 25:13–17.
Kugler has undeniably achieved the goal he set out to accomplish with his study. He has unequivocally demonstrated that the petitions of P.Polit.Iud. suggest an awareness of Jewish legal thinking based on the Torah, that corresponding elements were utilized within the underlying argumentative strategy, that the legal reality reflected in the petitions was characterized by legal pluralism, and that the recourse to Jewish legal principles can be attributed to a certain pragmatism serving the purpose of substantiating and ultimately enforcing the petitioner’s position (p. 255).
Despite the wealth of possibilities for a Jewish interpretation that Kugler provides, much will remain speculative, as he himself repeatedly emphasizes. Therefore, especially with regard to the further handling of the results, caution is required. Sometimes, the search for Jewish explanations also seems to lead to mind games that are hardly comprehensible anymore, as in the case of P.Polit.Iud. 4 and 11. Likewise, the last word has certainly not yet been spoken on the two petitions discussed in section 2, which were already known before P.Polit.Iud. (P.Tebt. III.1 800 = CPJ I 113 and P.Enteux. 23 = CPJ I 128). And apart from the fact that one can debate the criteria chosen by Kugler for the substantive classification of the petitions examined (e.g., in the case that a paramone contract underlies P.Polit.Iud. 6, or if one accepts that there is no contract mentioned in P.Polit.Iud. 10 and 11), one would definitely have wished for a more nuanced embedding of the petitions in a broader context and in the current research discourse in some places, especially in sections 1.6 and 1.7. When assessing the powers vested in the politarches and the archons of the Jewish politeuma of Herakleopolis in jurisprudence, Kugler primarily relies on the interpretation provided in the editio princeps (pp. 24–25). However, the notion that, even in the context of Beamtenjustiz, one should cautiously operate with the idea of a specially created tribunal for Jewish legal matters is not taken into account here (for this approach, see Sänger 2016 and 2019, 125–140). Indeed, in this context, one wonders why the consideration that the archons, like in other Jewish communities, may have been general officials who, like other Ptolemaic officials, had roles in jurisprudence (see also Honigman 2003, 94–95), is not given any space. And in the context of Kugler’s reflections on the degree of “Hellenization” that one might attribute to the legal contents in the examined petitions, Sylvie Honigman’s (2002) criticism of the editio princeps of isolating the case of the Jews, is seen as a contradiction to the otherwise widely perceived alignment of the documented legal practices with the norms of Ptolemaic legal everyday life, as suggested by Cowey and Maresch (pp. 27–28). However, Honigman’s criticism was primarily focused on the tendency to portray the politeuma as an institution that would allow for the protection of the Jewish faith. This is an old approach that has been consistently dismantled by scholars like Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski (e.g. 1983), Honigman (e.g. 1997), and in my own studies (for an overview of the debate and related literature, see Sänger 2018). Exactly because Kugler cannot be accused of endorsing this old approach and downplaying the aspect that the Jewish community in Herakleopolis, as a politeuma, was integrated into a regional, multi-ethnic system of other groups’ politeumata created by the Ptolemies (as indicated on pages 18-20), the depiction of the nature of the jurisdiction exercised by the politarches and archons remains slightly unbalanced. For if one accepts the integrative nature of the institution of the politeuma and the recurring manifestation of legal pluralism in the petitions as a sanctioned state (as indicated on pp. 19, 26-27, n. 65), then why is the conflict resolution process documented in P.Polit.Iud. described as “an adjudicatory venue distinct from the regular Ptolemaic system” (p. 26)? The immediately pressing question is whether–by linking the fact of a now more visible infiltration of the petitions with Jewish legal content to the model of (Jewish) jurisdiction exercised by the officials of the politeuma and separately granted by the government–Kugler is not depriving himself of the opportunity to address identity issues in a less restricted framework. We are eager to see how he will address this question in light of his next announced book project, which will delve beyond Herakleopolis into an examination of petitions submitted by Jews and their significance for Jewish ethnic self-understanding (pp. VII, 256).
However, the preceding remarks, which do not pertain to the main concern of the book under review and are intended as suggestions rather than criticism, in no way undermine the fact that Kugler has done invaluable pioneering work with his analysis of the Jewish contents in the petitions of P.Polit.Iud. For this reason, it is to be hoped that the book will attract numerous readers, and the academic community will gratefully embrace the impetus that the debates surrounding P.Polit.Iud., the petitions contained therein, and the manner of documented jurisprudence will receive!
References
Honigman, Sylvie. “Philon, Flavius Josèphe, et la citoyenneté alexandrine: vers une utopie politique.” JJS 48 (1997): 62–90.
Honigman, Sylvie. “The Jewish Politeuma at Heracleopolis.” SCI 21 (2002): 251–266.
Honigman, Sylvie. “Politeumata and Ethnicity in Ptolemaic Egypt.” AncSoc 33 (2003): 61–102.
Mélèze Modrzejewski, Joseph. “Le statut des Hellènes dans l’Égypte lagide: Bilan et perspectives des recherches.” REG 96 (1983): 241–268.
Sänger, Patrick. “Die Jurisdiktion der jüdischen Gemeinde von Herakleopolis: Normal- oder Sonderfall im hellenistischen Ägypten?” In Symposion 2015. Edited by Delfim F. Leão and Gerhard Thür, 213–232. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2016.
Sänger, Patrick. “Die soziokulturelle Stellung des ägyptischen Diasporajudentums im Hellenismus nach Joseph Mélèze Modrzejewski.” In Symposion 2017. Edited by Gerhard Thür, Uri Yiftach, and Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz, 3–15. Wien: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2018
Sänger, Patrick. Die ptolemäische Organisationsform politeuma. Ein Herrschaftsinstrument zugunsten jüdischer und anderer hellenischer Gemeinschaften. TSAJ 178). Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2019.