EVENTS

Like Chapter 5, this chapter analyses the impact on the Jews of a relatively well-understood historical process. Here as there, the analysis is hindered by our nearly complete inability to reconstruct a narrative history of the Jews. Though late antique Jews, unlike their immediate ancestors, left behind abundant physical and literary remains, there is even less historiography stricto sensu than before: in fact there is none, whether Jewish or pagan or Christian, historiography having now been replaced by chronography, saints’ lives, apocalypses, homiletics and liturgy (the last three in both Jewish and Christian versions). All of these texts aspired to impart religious messages, not describe events, and frequently the events they do describe are incredible, though they are often repeated as fact by modern historians. Aside from the episodes discussed in the body of this chapter there are perhaps three events which have a relatively strong claim on historicity though even these are poorly attested. The Palestinian Jewish rebellion under Gallus Caesar (c. 352) has been alternately magnified and dismissed; indeed, it seems certain that some sort of uprising occurred, centred in Galilee, which may explain the destruction at Sepphoris observed by archaeologists and now conventionally attributed to the effects of the earthquake of 363. Perhaps the same event explains the apparent mid-fourth-century decline in settlement in south-eastern Galilee, as well (see below). But the complete silence about the revolt both in the Palestinian Talmud, for whose editors the reign of Gallus Caesar was probably within living memory, and in the works of Gallus’ staffer Ammianus Marcellinus, is admittedly mysterious. The best explanation may be that the rabbis opposed the uprising and so kept silent about its perpetrators, and for Ammianus it was simply not important enough to mention. The year 352 was a turbulent one and other episodes had a greater claim on his attention (Stemberger 2000: 161–84).