Yet if fourth-century Caesarea is a quintessential locale in which the transformations and developments pertinent to late antiquity are both reflected upon and manufactured, why are Rabbi Abahu’s teachings usually not of interest for understanding these transformations? Why, more broadly, are the teachings of the greater circle known in Palestinian rabbinic sources as “the rabbis of Caesarea” (rabbanin dekisrin) not brought into this conversation, as well as the teachings of the circles that often position themselves against the rabbis of Caesarea — the rabbis who dwell in the Galilee? And if we’re already at it, where are the Babylonian rabbis, many of whom have emigrated to and from Palestine and transmitted various teachings between the two Jewish centers of learning of the third to the sixth centuries? In short, why is the vast Jewish literature of late antiquity so rarely considered a part of “late antiquity”?I think the part about Hebrew and Aramaic in that last sentence is an overstatement, but certainly the work is in its early stages and much remains to be done.
The answer to this question has to do in part with conventions of archiving and classification — which, as Ellen Muehlberger powerfully argues in this forum, determine our ways of approaching and assessing our materials more than we tend to realize. First, the “late ancient” library is still conceived almost exclusively as a Greek and Latin library. Only fairly recently have Syriac, Coptic, and to some extent Armenian claimed a place on this library’s shelves; Hebrew and Palestinian/Babylonian Aramaic, however, have not been introduced to this library at all (as is the case with Pahlavi, Arabic, and other non-European languages). ...
This is the second essay in a series of five coming in the Late Antiquity and the New Humanities Forum.