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Execution and Invention - Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Hardcover)
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Execution and Invention - Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (Hardcover)
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The death penalty in classical Judaism has been a highly
politicized subject in modern scholarship. Enlightenment attacks on
the Talmud's legitimacy led scholars to use the Talmud's criminal
law as evidence for its elevated morals. But even more pressing was
the need to prove Jews' innocence of the charge of killing Christ.
The reconstruction of a just Jewish death penalty was a defense
against the accusation that a corrupt Jewish court was responsible
for the death of Christ.
In Execution and Invention, Beth A. Berkowitz tells the story of
modern scholarship on the ancient rabbinic death penalty and offers
a fresh perspective using the approaches of ritual studies,
cultural criticism, and talmudic source criticism. Against the
scholarly consensus, Berkowitz argues that the early Rabbis used
the rabbinic laws of the death penalty to establish their power in
the wake of the destruction of the Temple. Following recent
currents in historiography, Berkowitz sees the Rabbis as an
embattled, almost invisible sect within second-century Judaism. The
function of their death penalty laws, Berkowitz contends, was to
create a complex ritual of execution under rabbinic control, thus
bolstering rabbinic claims to authority in the context of Roman
political and cultural domination.
Understanding rabbinic literature to be in dialogue with the
Bible, with the variety of ancient Jews, and with Roman
imperialism, Berkowitz shows how the Rabbis tried to create an
appealing alternative to the Roman, paganized culture of
Palestine's Jews. In their death penalty, the Rabbis substituted
Rome's power with their own. Early Christians, on the other hand,
used death penalty discourse to critique judicialpower. But
Berkowitz argues that the Christian critique of execution produced
new claims to authority as much as the rabbinic embrace. By
comparing rabbinic conversations about the death penalty with
Christian ones, Berkowitz reveals death penalty discourse as a
significant means of creating authority in second-century western
religious cultures. Advancing the death penalty discourse as a
discourse of power, Berkowitz sheds light on the central
relationship between religious and political authority and the
severest form of punishment.
General
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