Following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple by the Romans in 70 CE, and the failure of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 CE, the Jewish people lost all hope of imminent political salvation, and had to adapt to life as a small religious and ethnic minority in two very large empires – the Roman empire on the one hand and the Sasanian empire on the other. In both empires, Jews developed new modes of religious behavior, new types of leadership, and new kinds of artistic and literary production. One feature of the rebuilding of Jewish culture from the ashes of destruction was the emergence of a whole new set of texts which Jews composed, recited, read, memorized and copied. Of these, by far the most important are the rabbinic texts, which were the product of a new Jewish elite – the rabbis – and a new kind of Judaism, rabbinic Judaism. The roots of this Judaism go back to the Second Temple period, but it became prominent only after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed. And it remains prominent to this very day, as does much of the literature produced by the rabbis of late antiquity. However, whereas rabbinic literature has been the focus of intensive academic study for the last two centuries, many other Jewish texts that were written in late antiquity (i.e. up to the Muslim conquests of the 7th century) have been negelcted in earlier reconstructions of late-antique Judaism. It is to these forgotten texts that JLib is devoted, since they can shed more light on many aspects of ancient Jewish culture, and transform our view of the Judaism of late antiquity.
The forgotten Jewish texts of late antiquity include manuals of astrology and divination, polemical texts, magical and mystical texts, non-canonical prayers and various “secular” poems, medical texts, and collections of proverbs and maxims. Some of these texts are found in archaeological excavations (as in the case of amulets and incantation bowls), while others are found in the Cairo Genizah. They are mostly characterized by the late-antique form of (Palestinian or Babylonian) Aramaic in which they were written, but many of these texts were also translated into Hebrew or Arabic, and kept on being transmitted in medieval and modern manuscripts.
JLib’s main objectives are to edit, translate, and annotate as many new texts as possible, in order to make them available to other scholars and students, and to study the relations between these texts late-antique “pagan” and Christian texts on the one hand, and rabbinic literature on the other. By reconstructing the forgotten Jewish texts of late antiquity, by studying their relations with similar texts outside the Jewish world, and by placing them side-by-side with their rabbinic siblings on the shelves of a metaphorical library, JLib seeks to transform the study of Judaism in late antiquity.
