Martyrdom as a Contested Practice in Rabbinic Judaism
Parallels in religious practices and outlooks, as well as of continuing modes of interaction, have complicated the classic and historically neat picture of Judaism and Christianity as mother-daughter religions based on a model of the ‘parting of the ways’. A linear genealogy of Christianity as emerging from Judaism has given way to models that see both phenomena as embedded in pluralistic Second Temple Judaism, but only emerging as separate religions as a result of the drastic changes following the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E., or even later, after the Bar Kokhba Revolt. A radical approach even questions the existence of separate religious systems in the second and third century C.E. In his latest works, Daniel Boyarin argues that Rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity should be seen as dialectical variants of a commonly shared religious language. Accordingly, in the initial stages it is hard to define a specific conviction or practice as either typically Jewish or Christian. Martyrdom plays a pivotal role in his paradigm, as a key witness to a shared religious language, both of practice and of underlying convictions. In this essay we will assess this paradigm by reviewing Rabbinic texts adduced by Boyarin. As we will see, some basic motifs obfuscate his model of a shared religious language and resist the view of both religions as embedded in a similar language system.4 In particular, we will point to second and third century C.E. Rabbinic resistance against martyrdom as a religiously significant ‘body practice’, a point somewhat overlooked in Boyarin’s elusive reading of these texts. We will note how this resistance may be influenced by a specific Rabbinic theology of Torah values and the Biblical value of physical life. First, however, we will outline Late Antique martyrdom and present Boyarin’s innovative views.
MartyrdomThe term martyrdom is derived from the Greek word martys, witness, and is used for the first time in Christian texts from the middle of the second century C.E.. In popular usage, martyrdom refers to the public, violent death of a person because of their steadfastness to a particular religious identity. How- ever, violent death was not the distinctive and basic feature of ancient martyrdom, but should rather be seen as the extreme consequence of holding stead- fast to one’s religious identity in the face of imminent threats. Indeed, its Rabbinic terminological equivalent, kiddush hashem, originally had the meaning of sanctifying God through the performance of commandments. Only in medieval times did it become the appropriate term for martyrdom. However, terminology itself is no decisive criterion for a comparison between Jewish and Christian martyrdom. Following a functionalistic definition of martyrdom as proposed in recent scholarship, the connections between Jewish and Christian martyrdom accounts become clear. This approach bases itself upon recurring elements in Jewish and Christian martyrdom texts. Accordingly, van Henten points to the following five motifs in such texts. First, (1) an enactment of the pagan government forbidding religious practices or compelling conformation to a religiously forbidden practice sets the stage. This leads the hero of the story to a conflict of loyalty (2). Faced with the threat of imminent death, the hero chooses death rather than compliance (3). On account of this, he or she is arrested for examination or torture (4) and, finally, (5) finds his or her end in a public execution.
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