Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Interaction of Canon and History: Some Assumptions
- 2 The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
- 3 lsquo;Who Were the Maccabees?’: The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference
- 4 Perpetual Contest
- 5 ‘Martyrs of Love’: Genesis, Development and Twentieth Century Political Application of a Sufi Concept
- 6 Commemorating World War I Soldiers as Martyrs
- 7 The Scarecrow Christ: The Murder of Matthew Shepard and the Making of an American Culture Wars Martyr
- 8 Icons of Revolutionary Upheaval: Arab Spring Martyrs
- 9 Yesterday's Heroes?: Canonisation of Anti-Apartheid Heroes in South Africa
- 10 The Martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers in Transformation: From Syriac Christianity to the Qur’ān and to the Dutch-Iranian Writer Kader Abdolah
- 11 ‘Female Martyrdom Operations’: Gender and Identity Politics in Palestine
- 12 Hollywood Action Hero Martyrs in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’
- List of Contributors
- Index
2 - The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 The Interaction of Canon and History: Some Assumptions
- 2 The Changing Worlds of the Ten Rabbinic Martyrs
- 3 lsquo;Who Were the Maccabees?’: The Maccabean Martyrs and Performances on Christian Difference
- 4 Perpetual Contest
- 5 ‘Martyrs of Love’: Genesis, Development and Twentieth Century Political Application of a Sufi Concept
- 6 Commemorating World War I Soldiers as Martyrs
- 7 The Scarecrow Christ: The Murder of Matthew Shepard and the Making of an American Culture Wars Martyr
- 8 Icons of Revolutionary Upheaval: Arab Spring Martyrs
- 9 Yesterday's Heroes?: Canonisation of Anti-Apartheid Heroes in South Africa
- 10 The Martyrdom of the Seven Sleepers in Transformation: From Syriac Christianity to the Qur’ān and to the Dutch-Iranian Writer Kader Abdolah
- 11 ‘Female Martyrdom Operations’: Gender and Identity Politics in Palestine
- 12 Hollywood Action Hero Martyrs in ‘Mad Max Fury Road’
- List of Contributors
- Index
Summary
Abstract
Yair Furstenberg discusses the changing nature of canonisation of a cluster of martyrdom traditions about the ten rabbinic sages, who were executed by the Romans in the First or Second century CE. The canonical texts were transmitted as isolated stories in several rabbinic writings, which were only combined to a grand narrative in Late Antiquity or the early Medieval period. One indication of the major re-interpretation of martyrdom in this period is the fact that instead of idolatry or the transgression of a Roman decree or another reason that was obvious from a Roman perspective, the ten Rabbis were executed because the emperor found out that the Jews were never punished for the ancestral sin of selling Joseph to the Ishmaelite merchants (Gen. 37:23-37). This implies that their death was intended by God, which was confirmed by the heavenly journey of one of these Rabbis, Rabbi Ishmael, to inquire about their case. Furstenberg argues that the evolution of the Story of the Ten Martyrs from its Talmudic foundations in interaction with Christianity betrays a fundamental shift in Jewish martyrological discourse that reveals the strategy for confronting the religious claims of political power through the act of martyrdom.
Keywords: classical rabbinic period, Late Antiquity, Merkabah mysticism, theodicy and Talmud, changing nature of canonisation
Sometime between Late Antiquity and the early middle ages a story of the cruel executions of ten of the most prominent Jewish sages of the classical rabbinic period (first and second centuries CE) by the Roman emperor was formulated and was disseminated in various forms in homiletical, mystical and liturgical texts. This story drew on some earlier Talmudic traditions concerning eminent rabbis who died at the hands of Rome, but it integrated them into a completely novel literary framework that roughly runs as follows.
Having studied the laws of the Torah, the Roman emperor decided to punish the Jews for the ancestral sin of selling Joseph to the Ishmaelite merchants who brought him to Egypt (Gen. 37:23-37). Despite their grave offence, Joseph's brothers were never punished for transgressing the prohibition (Ex. 21:16): ‘Whoever kidnaps a person, whether that person has been sold or is still held in possession, shall be put to death.’ Therefore, the Emperor demanded in exchange to execute the most distinguished of the Jewish people, the ten most prominent rabbis of that period.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- MartyrdomCanonisation, Contestation and Afterlives, pp. 55 - 78Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020