Over the past several decades, scholars have proposed a variety of models for understanding interactions between minority groups and the dominant socio-cultural forces of the Roman Empire, typically framed as alternatives to (or adaptations of) Romanization. In his second monograph, Yaron Eliav adds one more to the mix, coining the term “filtered absorption” to describe the processes by which imperial subjects adopted core qualities and practices of romanitas while integrating and rationalizing them within their own unique identities. His model, he argues, allows for a middle ground between “the oversimplified binary notions of conflict or influence” (9). The rejection of this binary is not necessarily novel, echoing similar sentiments expressed in the work of Louise Revell, among others, but the coining of a new term does provide a concise way of tying them up in a neat bow.[1] What truly sets Eliav’s work apart, however, is the way in which he goes about developing and validating the model of “filtered absorption”: his focus is not only on one particular group (the Jews, specifically those living in Judea/Syria Palaestina), but also on their engagement with one particular cultural institution (the public bathhouse). In doing so, he reconciles rabbinic literature—so often neglected by classicists working on the imperial Mediterranean—with the wealth of written, visual, and archaeological evidence for bathing culture in Roman Palestine and beyond, thereby putting in conversation two fields that have been kept distinct in unnecessary and unproductive ways.
Eliav begins with an effective introduction, which lays out the questions and approaches undergirding his analysis as well as information on scholarly interlocutors and historical context; readers coming from a background in Classics will particularly appreciate his brief but informative overview of rabbinic literature and the rabbis (11-14). The eight chapters that follow are divided into three parts. Part I, “Setting the Stage”, expands upon the public bathhouse, Roman Palestine, and rabbinic literature as worthy lenses through which to consider cultural interaction in the ancient Mediterranean and thereby lays the foundation for the rest of the book. Chapter 1 (“The Miracle of (Hot) Water”) traces the structural development and design of the Roman bathhouse and the evolution of the bathing experience in imperial society. Citing textual evidence from the Republic through late antiquity, Eliav demonstrates how the public bathhouse, with its unique emphasis on pleasure and its longevity as a popular pastime, became a symbol of romanitas for those at the heart and periphery of the empire, including in Jewish sources.
Chapter 2 (“A Literary Bathhouse”) provides an overview of how the bathhouse, as an imaginary concept rather than a specific physical place, was conceived in rabbinic literature. Even the terminology used to refer to these institutions is meaningful: the coining of new Hebrew words like merḥats and dimosin to describe Roman facilities speaks to the novelty of Roman bathing culture as well as its integration into Jewish life in the eastern provinces. Putting rabbinic discussions of the bathhouse’s construction, operation, and appearance next to contemporaneous Greco-Roman evidence, Eliav shows that these Jewish sources generally present a realistic picture, and that the way in which information is presented—and, occasionally, what is not included—reflects a desire to couch a familiar feature of Roman civic life within a Jewish conceptual framework.
In Chapter 3 (“Earliest Encounters”), the discussion shifts from literary to archaeological evidence, focusing specifically on Roman Palestine in the Early Roman period, defined loosely as the first centuries BCE and CE (81). Though the book as a whole is set up as a departure from previous scholarly consensus, particularly within Rabbinic and Jewish Studies, it is in this chapter where this really comes to the fore. Eliav takes issue with the argument, put forward in the work of scholars such as Ronny Reich, Samuel Krauss, and Stefanie Hoss, that an absence of public bathhouses in the archaeological record correlates to Jewish animosity towards the institution as reflected in rabbinic texts. There is, in fact, ample evidence for the construction of bathhouses in Judaea and Galilee, and good explanations for the absence of evidence in cities like Jerusalem, Caesarea Maritima, and Tiberias.
Part II of the book (“Filtered Absorption”) returns to rabbinic literature to determine what Jews—or at least, the authors of these texts—thought about the bathhouses that populated their cityscapes. In Chapter 4 (“A Sinful Place?”), Eliav looks specifically at the supposed problems presented by the Roman bathing experience in discussions of Jewish law (halakhah): interference with the laws of the Sabbath; the practice of bathing nude; contact with ritual impurity; and idolatrous decoration (109). He argues that “the entire premise of discerning halakic ‘problems’ and equating them with hostility and rejection is based on a deep misunderstanding of the nature of ancient Jewish law” (110); instead, their presence in rabbinic literature should be read as an effort to integrate them into Jewish thought and practice, and, in some cases, as evidence for outright acceptance and enjoyment of public bathing. The model of filtered absorption is reintroduced as the best way of understanding this dynamic.
The subsequent two chapters build on this analysis, continuing to deconstruct erroneous, and sometimes anachronistic, interpretations of rabbinic sources and illustrating the efficacy of filtered absorption. Chapter 5 (Tsni’ut in the Halls if Promiscuity) examines the practices of mixed and nude bathing as it pertains to rabbinic modes of modesty, or tsni’ut. Overall, it appears that most Jews in Roman Palestine bathed in the nude and in facilities frequented by both men and women and showed little interest in the alternative options attested across the empire. Furthermore, though rabbinic authors do occasionally express reservations, similar ones can be found in textual evidence from other groups, and there are cases of more condemnatory opinions, as found in some Christian sources like Clement of Alexandria (148). Chapter 6 (“The Naked Rabbi and the Beautiful Goddess”) begins with the famous passage from the Mishnah (m.’Abod.Zar. 3:4-5) in which a rabbi and non-Jew, visiting a public bathhouse, discuss the idolatrous potential of a statue of Venus. Eliav uses this as a springboard to discuss Jewish engagement with the statuary landscape of the Roman baths (and civic spaces more generally), determining that the wide range of opinions and categorizations found in rabbinic texts often reflect common ways of engaging with sculpture during the imperial period.
Part III (“Social and Cultural Textures”) is the most disjointed section of what is otherwise a very methodically organized book, its two chapters seemingly paired together not so much because they belong together as that they do not fit with those that came before. Nevertheless, they both demonstrate further that the Jews of Roman Palestine—including but not limited to the rabbis—engaged with the public bathhouse in similar ways to other imperial subjects and framed their conceptions and practices in Jewish terms. Chapter 7 (“A Social Laboratory”) compares the dynamics of status and hierarchy at play in the bathhouses of Roman Palestine with those attested in other, more central regions of the imperial Mediterranean, where most surviving sources on Roman bathing culture were produced. Eliav concludes that the environment of the bathhouse served as a social experiment in which groups from across the social and cultural hierarchies of imperial society could test out the boundaries that divided them, and that these dynamics are reflected in rabbinic literature. Chapter 8 (“A Scary Place”) explores the physical and emotional dangers of the public bathhouse and their magical associations and solutions. In rabbinic and non-rabbinic sources alike, we see that Jewish bathers used magic to ward off these dangers just like the rest of imperial society, and their attribution of the power of these techniques to the Jewish God is no different from what we find among other religious or ethnic groups operating in these contexts, including Christians, worshippers of Mithras, and Phoenicians (250-251).
The short conclusion reiterates the main objectives of the book. The first is to “encourage us to rethink our conception of ancient rabbis and ancient Judaism and to revise our understanding of the ways these people engaged with Graeco-Roman civilization” (253) through his proposed model of filtered absorption. In this, Eliav is certainly successful. He maintains a nice balance between “small history”—an approach to which he claims allegiance in the introduction (16)—and its applicability to broader social and cultural landscapes. His approach of using one group’s engagement with one institution as a way of understanding the dynamics of cultural interaction is productive and allows him to demonstrate that the rabbis engaged with Roman culture just as other imperial subjects did, with a diversity of opinion and action that echoed those of groups at the center as well as the periphery of the empire.
However, he does not dwell on the potential causes of that diversity. The rabbinic texts (the Mishnah, the Tosefta, Midrash, the Palestinian Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud) at the core of his analysis include several centuries’ worth of rabbinic scholarship, and he cites Greco-Roman evidence from across the Mediterranean, dating from the first century BCE to the sixth century CE. The general emphasis on continuity rather than change sometimes results in a frustrating lack of historical contextualization, both for the rabbinic and Greco-Roman evidence. Eliav is quick to signal when passages derive from similar chronological and/or geographic contexts, but he glosses over instances where this is not the case: on p. 145, for example, a quote from Quintilian, writing from first-century Rome, is nestled amongst references to the Tosefta, Ulpian, and Apuleius, all from the late second to early third century; later in the same chapter (153), the discussion moves without remark from the fourth-century Rabbi Zeira to the second-century Rabbi Meir. Explicit references to these variant contexts and an exploration of their impact on his interpretation would have contributed further to his arguments, even if a comprehensive treatment of chronological developments lies outside the scope of the book.
The second goal, and the one with which he leaves his reader, is to illuminate the value of rabbinic literature to the study of the Roman Mediterranean and the need to put these sources in conversation with contemporaneous archaeological, visual, and literary evidence from non-Jewish contexts. Eliav’s decisive accomplishment of that goal is impressive and, in many ways, constitutes the most significant contribution of A Jew in the Roman Bathhouse to scholarly discourse on imperial society and culture. It is a rich, well argued, and thought-provoking study that, for methodological reasons as much as for its conclusions, could be read profitably by anyone working on the Roman Empire.
Notes
[1] L. Revell, Roman Imperialism and Local Identities, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009; Revell, L., Ways of Being Roman: Discourses of Identity in the Roman West, Oxford: Oxbow, 2016.