Dominique Desjeux, Anthropologist, Professor Emeritus at Université Paris-Cité, Sorbonne Humanities
Introduction
In the year 70, the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. The religious foundations of Judaism were threatened with extinction, even though the Jewish population represented, depending on the sources, around 5 to 8% of the Roman population around the Mediterranean, making them a significant minority. The Jews who referred to Jesus Christ, one of the messiahs who, according to some, was supposed to deliver Israel from the Roman yoke (מָשִׁיח – mashia’h in Hebrew, χριστός / khristos in Greek), had practically disappeared. All their leaders, the apostles James, Peter, and Paul, had been eliminated. And yet, it was this Jewish minority that would prevail through what would become Christianity. In contrast, the « orthodox » Jews would diminish to around one million over the next 500 to 600 years, and would concentrate around Baghdad in the Middle East.
To solve this puzzle, I used an inductive method, without a guiding principle or hypothesis, which led me back in time to Amenhotep IV, an « Egyptian king who gave himself the name Akhenaten and founded in the 14th century BCE a monotheistic religion » that, according to some authors, may have inspired the Jews (Assmann Jan, 2001, p. 18).
Through this journey, and following other investigations in Africa, Brazil, or China, I rediscover that religion and beliefs in general primarily seek to ensure the « social security » of nomadic, peasant, or urban communities, to protect themselves from the misfortunes of daily life, such as illness, poor harvests, war, and death. This approach falls under what I have called a « strategic anthropology, » or how people seek out the most effective deities to combat life’s uncertainties. The relationship to death and eternal life is one of the key issues that will explain the success of Judeo-Christians compared to Rabbinic Judaism.
The strategic choice between the different factions of the Jewish people was made during two major crises. The first dates back to the conquests of Alexander the Great, which led to the dominance of Greek culture between the 4th and 1st centuries BCE. This period brought about the cultural unification of the Mediterranean, largely due to the spread of the « common language » of Greek. At the same time, it introduced debates and tensions within Jewish culture regarding circumcision, proselytism, and the resurrection of the dead, all of which would be central to the discussions about the survival of the Jewish people.
The second crisis is linked to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE, which led to the emergence of two survival strategies for the Jewish people. One strategy referred to the « rabbi Jesus, » who was more inclined towards proselytism, while the other adhered to the rules of life set out in the Torah, following the Pharisaic tradition of Hillel, which would later form the basis of the Talmud. Both groups believed in life after death. These strategic choices led to a significant demographic shift: the Jewish population adhering to the Torah decreased from 5 or 7 million to 1 million between the 1st and 7th centuries CE, while the Judeo-Christians grew to 9 million within three centuries. The crises that threatened the survival of the Jewish group led to more or less conscious decisions that would determine the course of their history.
1. Greek Domination in the 4th Century BCE as a Factor in the Spread of Judaism:
Diaspora, Proselytism, and the Common Language, the Koiné (κοινή)
A Jewish diaspora developed around the Mediterranean, particularly in Alexandria and Babylon, and later in Antioch and even as far as Lyon (France), from the 4th century BCE to the 1st century CE. This diaspora represented a « pre-digital » social network through which the Judeo-Christian movement would spread.
“I will make you a light for the nations, that my salvation may reach the ends of the earth,” declared the prophet Isaiah as early as the 6th century BCE. Therefore, some Jews were proselytizers long before the future Christians. According to Rabbi J. B. Agus, “the conversion of all men, and not just the Jewish people, was then affirmed as the hope of Israel” (Isaiah 49:6; Isaiah 56:6-7) (J. B. Agus, 1961, p. 29).
Jewish culture spread thanks to the unification of the Mediterranean by Alexander the Great. The common Greek language, the Koiné, which is equivalent to today’s Globish (“global English”), served as a medium for spreading Jewish, and later Roman and Christian, culture. The Torah was translated into Greek in the third century BCE and became known as the Septuagint. It would become one of the tools of proselytism among Hellenized « pagans. » In the 2nd century BCE, two debates emerged: one concerning the existence of eternal life, which went beyond the mere retributive justice on earth found in the Book of Job, and the other concerning the necessity of circumcision.
The Greek domination of the Ptolemies was a source of tension and revolts among the Jews, the most famous of which was the Maccabean Revolt (2nd century BCE). The Maccabees had been massacred while observing the Sabbath. In response to this contradiction of the righteous being punished, the idea emerged that there is eternal life beyond death, and thus, the sufferings on earth could be endured with the hope of a better afterlife.
Around the second century BCE, the Greek practice of gymnasiums spread in Israel. Athletes competed in the nude. The Greeks mocked the exposed glans of the circumcised Jews and barred them from gymnasiums and baths. Consequently, some of the Jewish elite sought to hide their circumcision (Desjeux Dominique, 2022).
The debates about converting pagans, questioning circumcision, and believing in eternal life after death were already underway before the first century CE, the time of the arrival of the Jewish messiah, Jesus.
- The Plurality of Jewish Movements Under Roman Rule
The public life of Jesus, who would become known as Jesus Christ after his death, was brief, lasting only two to three years in the 30s CE. His story is intertwined with that of the Jewish world of his time. Jesus’s teachings are embedded within the Jewish movements of the first century, including the one represented by Hillel, a sage and rabbi about whom little is known, but who lived from 70 BCE to 10 CE. « Like other rabbis, Hillel did not develop a theory about the fate of the soul after death. He held only a deep faith: this world is not the only one; there is a ‘world to come' » (Hadas-Lebel Mireille, 1999, p. 79). Jesus was close to this idea, in contrast to the Sadducees, who were aligned with the Temple priests. Similarly, Hillel’s prescription, « Do not do to others what you would not want done to you, » is echoed in Jesus’s teaching, « Do to others what you would have them do to you » (Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:31) (Hadas-Lebel Mireille, 1999, p. 99).
Jesus’s preaching, as found in the Gospels—written 40 to 70 years after his death—aligns with the continuity of the Torah. One of the significant texts illustrating this continuity is the « Our Father » prayer of future Christians. It is inspired by the morning and evening prayer, the Shema Israel, « Hear, O Israel, » and the Kaddish, a praise to God often used today in funerals, as Didier Long (2011) reminds us.
The competition among religious Jews was particularly intense in Israel, between the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots, and the Essenes, according to the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. Jesus sought to restore the original purity of the Jewish religion, like many prophets before and after him. He did not intend to create a new religion. An 18th-century Jewish thinker, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), who studied the New Testament, concluded that « his reading of the Gospels convinced him that Jesus never intended to create a new religion nor to abolish the law of Moses » (Hadas-Lebel Mireille, 1999, p. 87).
- The Destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE: A Threat of Disappearance for the Jewish People
After the death of Jesus on the cross, his brother James « the Just » settled in Jerusalem to lead the community of Jews who followed Jesus. The apostle Peter took on the task of spreading Jesus’s teachings among the Jews of the diaspora, while Paul of Tarsus, a Pharisee who had never met Jesus, dedicated himself to the « Gentiles. » Paul became the primary « mobilizing figure » in the dissemination of Jesus’s message.
Paul recognized that the Jewish message was difficult to transmit due to the complexities of kashrut (dietary laws) and circumcision. He proposed simplifying the « religious offer » for the « pagan » or « Gentile » populations by introducing a « disruptive innovation » by eliminating these two rituals. This stance brought him into conflict with the « orthodox » Jews.
According to Rabbi Agus, « there were two schools of thought regarding the utility of raising or lowering the barriers between Jews and Gentiles. Before the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem in 69 CE, the intensely nationalist school of Shammai triumphed over the moderate Hillelites and adopted a number of precepts that made social relations between Jews and non-Jews very difficult. In this spirit, Gentiles were declared corrupters; their bread, milk, oil, and wine were prohibited » (J. B. Agus, 1961, p. 68). Tensions between the different Jewish factions were already very strong. The three successors of Jesus died before the year 70. The proselytizing Jewish movement could have disappeared, and Christianity might never have been born.
However, a « black swan » event—an unforeseen occurrence—the revolt of the Zealots against the Romans, led to the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. The end of the Temple priesthood raised new questions about the survival and unity of the Jewish people and the strategy to be followed to avoid disappearing. In the face of this existential threat, Jews developed two opposing survival strategies.
The first was that of the rabbinic movement, which was emerging from the teachings of Rabbi Hillel. This movement would be the foundation for the gradual implementation of the 613 commandments derived from the Torah. After the destruction of the Temple, a Pharisaic rabbi, a disciple of Rabbi Gamaliel, who was himself a disciple of Hillel, Johanan Ben Zakkai, reorganized Judaism from the city of Yavneh. He had not participated in the Zealot revolt against the Romans, who therefore allowed him to reconstitute Judaism.
The second strategy was that of the « Judeo-Christians. » They believed that the Jewish religion needed to open up to the pagan world to grow and avoid extinction. They referred to « Rabbi » Jesus, who would become Jesus Christ, and who had been resurrected.
As Mireille Hadas-Lebel writes, « Of all the movements that stirred Judaism in the first century, the only ones that survived were those stemming from Hillel and Jesus; while the disciples of Jesus founded Christianity, the Pharisaic movement, which survived the catastrophe of 70 CE, insisted that it was perpetuating the teachings of Hillel » (Hadas-Lebel Mireille, 1999, p. 106).
The Judeo-Christian movement grew within the synagogues established around the Mediterranean. These synagogues served as « logistical platforms » for the dissemination of the religion. As Maurice Sachot writes, « At the time when Christianity was about to emerge, the synagogue institution could indeed be considered the most important institution of Judaism, as it was the one that, through ritual and word, structured the entire Jewish people. By this institution, we mean the gathering that, every Sabbath, brought together the members of each Jewish community, whether in a village in Palestine or a neighborhood in the diaspora » (Sachot Maurice, 1998, p. 332). In the first century CE, the synagogue institution of ritual transformed into a physical place.
Proselytizing Jews, who would become the future Christians, entered into conflict with the rabbinic movement, which gradually expelled them from the synagogues from the end of the first century to the final Jewish revolt under Bar Kokhba in 135 CE, as Jacques Giri notes in his exceptional book on New Hypotheses on the Origins of Christianity (Jacques Giri, 2015). They began to create their own places of worship, which would become churches. They increasingly used Greek for their texts, moving away from Aramaic and the Hebrew reading of sacred texts. Gradually, they became the « Great Church, » encompassing Christians of Greek origin. This did not prevent them from being regularly persecuted by Roman authorities, who viewed this monotheism as a true superstition (superstitio) and thus a danger to the empire.
4 . The Birth of Rabbinic Judaism
After the destruction of the Temple, the Jewish population declined from 5 to 7 million—approximately 8% of the Roman Empire’s population—to 1 to 2 million over the next 500 years, with figures varying depending on the sources. This decline posed a significant threat to their survival. Maristelle Botticini and Zvi Eckstein explain that when the Temple was destroyed, religious leadership shifted from the Sadducees, who disappeared along with the Temple, to the Pharisees. The Pharisees were the founders of Rabbinic Judaism, « whose main standard was to require every Jewish man to read and study the Torah in Hebrew and to send his sons, from the age of six or seven, to primary school or the synagogue to learn to do so » (Botticini Maristelle, Eckstein Zvi, 2016, Digital Publishing, p. 157).
However, at that time, the Jewish population was primarily agrarian. The cost of education was too high for them because they needed their children to help cultivate the fields. Those who did not send their children to school became outcasts within their community. As a result, many Jews chose the closest and least demanding religion, which was the proselytizing Jewish movement that referred to Jesus.
Since the time of the Apostle Paul, the proselytizing Jewish movement sought to simplify the rules of Judaism by eliminating dietary restrictions and circumcision. A single ritual, baptism, replaced the many purification rituals involving water. There was no requirement to attend school, making this « religious offer » more economical than Rabbinic Judaism, while also offering a better future through the promise of resurrection. This innovation simplified daily life by reducing the mental burden associated with religious rules and by offering an enchanting view of the afterlife.
This religious competition led to a drastic reduction in the Jewish population. By the 7th century, at the time of Muhammad’s death in 632 in Medina, the Jewish population had decreased by 80%. Seventy-five percent of the remaining Jews were concentrated in Mesopotamia, to the east of the Mediterranean. They had left the countryside to settle in new cities like Baghdad, which were rapidly expanding under the Umayyads (Botticini Maristelle, Eckstein Zvi, 2016, Digital Publishing, p. 661-750). They took up occupations that required literacy. The thesis of Maristelle Botticini and Zvi Eckstein is that « in a world populated by illiterates—as the world of the first millennium was—the ability to read and write contracts, commercial letters, and account books using a common alphabet gave Jews a comparative advantage over other peoples. » Ultimately, the Jews improved « their status through the development of Islam and the cities connected to Islam » (Botticini Maristelle, Eckstein Zvi, 2016, Digital Publishing, p. 3330).
The simplification of rituals, which reduced the mental burden on practitioners, and the low cost of learning the new faith partly explain the success of the Christian monotheistic innovation in the western Mediterranean from the 2nd century CE onwards and the strategic reorientation of Jews who remained faithful to the Torah.
Conclusion
The fate of the Jewish people after the destruction of the Temple is paradoxical. On one hand, they nearly disappeared in the face of the Jewish movement that chose proselytism as a means of growth through the simplification of all religious rules. On the other hand, their survival was only possible due to the religion’s refocusing on these rules and the obligation to attend school. This emphasis on education allowed them to acquire the intellectual skills essential for the development of cities and commerce.
Bibliographie
Agus Jacob Bernard,1959, The Evolution of Jewish Thought: From Biblical Times to the Opening of the Modern Era, Abelard-Schuman (1961, in French)
Assman Jan, 2007, Le prix du monothéisme, Aubier (2003, in German).
Botticini Maristelle, Eckstein Zvi,2012, How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492, Princeton University
Desjeux Dominique, 2022, Le marché des dieux, PUF (Peter Lang, in English).
Jacques Giri, 2015, Les nouvelles hypothèses sur les origines du christianisme, Karthala (Digital Publishing)
Hadas-Lebel Mireille, 1999, Hillel, un sage au temps de Jésus, Albin-Michel, coll. « Espaces libres »
Long Didier, 2011, Jésus de Nazareth, juif de Galilée, Presses de la Renaissance
Sachot Maurice, 1998, L’invention du Christ. Genèse d’une religion, Odile Jacob.