Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism

MIKA AHUVIA University of Washington, Seattle Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism ABSTRACT This article interrogates the historiography of the field of classical Judaism and like. Feminist analysis of gender, class, and race in antiquity allows us to see how scholarly biases today reinscribe and even exceed ancient prejudices. Building on Blossom Stefaniw’s essay “Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past” and deploying Saidiya Hartman’s method of critical fabulation to analyze synagogue inscriptions and rabbinic texts, this article offers counternarratives of Jewish daily life in the period of Late Antiquity. Through investigation of evidence for enslaved, manumitted, and fostered people in the households of the late antique Jewish patriarchs, this article emphasizes the contribution of ostensibly nonnormative Jews to late antique synagogues, rabbinic learning, and Jewish society in Late Antiquity. It argues that our imaginings of Jewish society and the Jewish household in premodernity must change to accommodate the evidence of these heretofore marginalized Jews and the challenges posed by their enslaved status and/or gendered identity. This restoration of excluded perspectives and traditions represents a more ethical historiographic practice, which produces more inclusive and accurate representations of the past, sets the stage for recognizing continuities through the medieval era, and, finally, enables a different present, one with subjects empowered to construct more ethical social norms within and outside the academy. KEYWORDS Judah the patriarch, Severus, slavery, foster child, handmaid, astrology, zodiac 1. INERTIA IN CLASSICAL JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY The narratives that scholars use to frame the history and foundation of classical Judaism rest on a few watershed dates: the Roman destruction of My thanks to the editors of the Studies in Late Antiquity and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and generous feedback, especially in the lingering late days of the pandemic. This article benefited from the insights and feedback of many colleagues who were fellows with me at the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington in 2021–22. Special thanks to Simpson Center director Kathleen Woodward for her support, to Sarah Levin-Richardson for sharing her essays on critical fabulation prepublication, and to Sarit Kattan Gribetz for encouraging this work from its earliest stages. Studies in Late Antiquity, Vol. 7, Number 1, pp. 29–74. electronic ISSN 2470-2048 © 2023 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://sla.ucpress.edu/content/permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/sla.2023.7.1.29 29 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 suggests what a revisionist feminist historiography of this foundational period might look 1. Recounted most recently in John Efron, Steven Weitzman, and Matthias Lehmann, The Jews: A History (Upper Saddle River: Routledge, 2009). 2. Talya Fishman, Becoming the People of the Talmud (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). 3. Eve Krakowski, “Maimonides’ Menstrual Reform in Egypt,” Jewish Quarterly Review 110, no. 2 (2020): 245–89. 4. The last provocative and much discussed alternate history that was written in the field of classical Judaism was Seth Schwartz’s Imperialism and Jewish Society: 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). Schwartz offered another institutionally-oriented history but credited successive external imperial powers with empowering select Jewish leaders and thus shaping Jewish society and Judaism through the ages. 5. See Bernadette Brooten, Women’s Leadership in the Ancient Synagogue (Chico: Scholars Press, 1982), which surveys inscriptions of Jewish women with many different leadership titles. Among others, Brooten discusses a burial inscription from Venosa, Italy, of Alexsanria the pateressa (female father, or fatheress). To my knowledge, this person whose title defies the gender binary has received no further attention. See transcription in David Noy, Jewish Inscriptions of Western Europe, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 84 no. 63. Ross Shepherd Kraemer explains the 30 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SPRING 2023 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 the Jerusalem Temple (70 CE), the redaction of the rabbis’ foundational documents in Roman Palestine and in Sasanian-Persian Mesopotamia (the Mishnah, ca. 200 CE, and the Babylonian Talmud, ca. 500 CE). The established narrative is that the end of Jewish Temple–centered practice marks the beginning of the transition to text-centered rabbinic Judaism.1 These dates are conducive to a perception of the past that focuses the transition of power from one class of men (priests) to another (rabbis), but, as most scholars would readily acknowledge, this narrative quickly falls apart under scrutiny. The redaction of the foundational documents of rabbinic Judaism were the activities of a minority movement and were imperceptible to most Jews. The way of life found in these rabbinic texts would become socially ascendant among Jews only circa 1100 CE.2 It took the rabbis hundreds of years to gradually persuade and, at times, forcefully compel Jewish men and women to follow their strictures.3 All the traditional dates, while significant, are misleading because they direct our gaze toward authorities at exactly the time when the majority of Jews were least oriented to those Jewish institutions.4 A more accurate account, grounded in the evidence, would highlight the fact that Jewish communities spread over three continents lacked uniform, central, or stable governance structures for the first 1000 years of the common era. Diverse Jewish practices—diasporic, liturgical, synagogal, ritualmagical, gendered and embodied, decentralized, regional, and contested— characterized Jewish communities scattered throughout North Africa, West Asia, and Europe. Jews had local leaders (and not just male ones5), informal - prominence of women leaders (including the pateressa) as evidence of an adaptive strategy to male absence in the public domain in The Mediterranean Diaspora in Late Antiquity: What Christianity Cost the Jews (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 363–70. 6. See discussion of this issue in Sara Parks, “‘The Brooten Phenomenon’: Moving Women from the Margins in Second-Temple and New Testament Scholarship,” The Bible & Critical Theory 15, no. 1 (2019): 46–64. Brooten’s research on synagogues, Tal Ilan’s many volumes on women in Second Temple and rabbinic literature, and others’ work remain absent from the curricula of Jewish studies at the undergraduate and graduate level, meaning that almost every scholar with feminist inclinations must train themselves and has difficulty building on the work of their predecessors. 7. Bonnie Smith, The Gender of History: Men, Women, and Historical Practice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). 8. Smith, Gender of History, esp. Chapter 5: “Men and Facts,” 131. Ahuvia | Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism 31 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 networks of communication with each other, and customs that cannot be easily generalized but which certainly did not resemble those of the communal structures that are known from the European Middle Ages. The evidence for this diversity is best captured in synchronic analysis, not diachronic narratives that make historical developments seem inevitable. However, the powerful narrative of transition from one group of elite men to another is difficult to dislodge, even as the evidence against it has been stacking up for decades. When archaeological evidence emerged that challenged conceptions of rabbinic leadership in the Byzantine era, it was, for the most part, judged through the eyes of an imagined ascendant rabbinic elite that tolerated this deviation. The findings of two generations of feminist scholars on the presence, contributions, and leadership of women in ancient Jewish communities have remained largely ignored, devalued, or segregated to the “gender” section of volumes on Jewish history.6 If one trusts in the story of academic progress, then this scholarly stagnation is difficult to comprehend. And it bodes ill for any intellectual endeavor that attempts to construct a more inclusive historical narrative. Two scholars illuminate how we arrived at this moment and how we might move forward: Bonnie Smith and Blossom Stefaniw and their interventions deserve close attention. Smith’s book The Gender of History traces, over the last three centuries, the gendered nature of the foundation of the historical profession, whose practices and norms would be adopted by Bible and religion scholars using the “historical-critical” methods, in turn.7 Smith demonstrated how the study of political history came to be naturalized as objective, scientific, and neutral whereas the study of cultural history (labor, ethnic, and gender history) was deemed subjective and feminine, biased and frivolous, inferior and unworthy of study.8 As she explains, in the development of the field of history, it became taken for granted that “truth was Feminist historiography poses questions which patriarchal historiographies cannot answer. Feminist historiography requires grappling with foundations of the discipline, with problems of archives, representation, and textual practices of translation, editing, and other acts of preservation and valorization, including academic study. That grappling must take place with a force proportionate to the absurd profundity of patriarchy. It must be executed on a scale appropriate to a world in which half of the population is routinely ignored and de-valued and excluded as bit-parts in a story where only men can be main characters. It is not radical, it is simply accurate, to take very decisive steps toward fully feminist historiography given that patriarchal historiography ignores not just half the population, but is necessarily also colonial and racist and homophobic and ableist and classist historiography, treating the vast majority of the earth’s population, past and present, as the scenery through which great men stride.12 Though she writes about late antique Christian historiography in particular, Stefaniw’s insights are equally applicable to the distorted historiography of 9. Smith, 150. 10. Smith, 13. 11. Blossom Stefaniw, “Feminist Historiography and Uses of the Past,” Studies in Late Antiquity 4, no. 3 (2020): 260–83. 12. Stefaniw, “Feminist Historiography,” 282. 32 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SPRING 2023 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 where women were not—some invisible and free territory purged of error by historical work; purged of superficial, trivial, and extraneous detail.”9 She goes on to say that that realm was historical writing in service of the nation state. Smith’s monograph illuminates the unspoken and deeply gendered biases that structure prevailing historical accounts. The exclusion of women from the imagination of the Jewish past can be seen as another iteration of what Smith calls the fantasy “of an exclusively male subject of historical truth.”10 While the profession revels in exploring the variety and nuances of male authority in antiquity, explication of such evidence related to women’s authority is deemed feminist fantasy. If the subject is enslaved, they are even more invisible from historical accounts. Despite some progress in diversifying academic guilds, the exclusion of all subject matter deemed feminine still exerts a powerful force on the study of the past, especially in late antique Jewish studies. Writing over 20 years after Smith, Stefaniw offers a searing critique of the sexism, classism, and racism that persist in adjacent fields, like late antique studies, and outlines how historiographic practices must change:11 2. PRODUCING BETTER HISTORIOGRAPHY THROUGH CRITICAL FABULATION Stefaniw argues that producing better historical accounts requires an effort “with a force proportionate to the absurd profundity of patriarchy.” She writes that scholars of religion in Late Antiquity must draw on other disciplines, those less “enmeshed with dehumanizing racial and gendered orders.”16 Drawing inspiration from critical race theory (CRT), Stefaniw writes: 13. Jonathan Hatter, “Slavery and the Enslaved in the Roman World, the Jewish World, and the Synoptic Gospels,” Currents in Biblical Research 20, no. 1 (2021): 97–127, esp. 111. Ilan and Hezser are listed among the notable exceptions; Bernadette Brooten deserves mention, too. See Brooten, ed., Beyond Slavery: Overcoming Its Religious and Sexual Legacies (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010). More recently, see Hezser, “What Was Jewish about Jewish Slavery in Late Antiquity,” in Slavery in the Late Antique World, 150–700 CE, ed. Chris De Wet, Maijastina Kahlos, and Ville Vuolanto (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 129–48. 14. The history and demographics of the profession of Jewish studies in the US is discussed in Shaul Magid, “As Transition Looms, Jewish Studies Is Mired in Controversy,” Religion Dispatches, 11 May 2021, https://religiondispatches.org/as-transition-approaches-jewish-studies-is-mired-incontroversy. 15. See Gilah Kletenik and Rafael Rachel Neis, “What’s the Matter with Jewish Studies? Sexism, Harassment, and Neoliberalism for Starters,” Religion Dispatches, 1 9 April 2 0 2 1 , https:// religiondispatches.org/whats-the-matter-with-jewish-studies-sexism-harassment-and-neoliberalismfor-starters. See also their follow up essay: “Decolonizing Jewish Studies Part II: A Response to the Backlash,” Religion Dispatches, 5 May 2021, https://religiondispatches.org/decolonizing-jewishstudies-part-ii-a-response-to-the-backlash. 16. Stefaniw, “Feminist Historiography,” 263. Ahuvia | Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism 33 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 classical Jewish studies. Beyond a few notable exceptions, the field of early Jewish studies has also resisted the “new consensus” on slavery, which acknowledges both its prevalence and brutality in the Mediterranean world, including in the foundations of rabbinic communities.13 The problematic ways of viewing the past cannot be separated from the problems of the profession itself, where certain classes of men are credited as worthy of attention and the rest are ignored. The continued significance accorded to rabbinic sources in Jewish studies has meant that most scholars of Judaism have constructed their views of the past with these belated victors in mind: they have imagined an exclusive, Ashkenazi male scholarly elite, which conveniently mirrors the makeup of the Jewish studies’ profession for most of the 20th and 21st centuries.14 Evidently, it is still challenging for the gatekeepers of the discipline to allow ancient people who do not look or sound like normative male Jews to take the place of rabbis in foundational Jewish narratives.15 Stefaniw calls for a powerful investment in counter-narratives opposed to traditional patriarchal accounts of the past. Such counter-narrative must be powerfully reorienting, disorienting even, to exert a force proportionate to established patriarchal narratives; accuracy is not at odds with ethical commitments here but rather dependent on them. Applying Saidiya Hartman’s critical fabulation to late antique sources provides a way of enacting feminist historiography that can produce more accurate and ethical historiography. In building a case for counter-storytelling, Stefaniw cites Hartman’s famous essay “Venus in Two Acts” as a model for future scholarship. Focusing on the archives of Atlantic slavery, Hartman observes that few stories survive about hundreds of thousands of girls who experienced horrific conditions of enslavement and that “the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes.”18 Only brief mentions in court proceedings, ship manifest lists, or ledgers attest to the lives of enslaved girls named Venus, Rachel, or Sara, their biblical or mythological names belying their powerlessness. To provide a fuller cultural history of these erased lives in the archive, Hartman deployed a method that she terms critical fabulation: The intention here isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible. This double gesture can be described as straining against the limits of the archive to write a cultural history of the captive, and, at the same time, enacting the impossibility of representing the lives of the captives precisely through the process of 17. Stefaniw, 282. 18. Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 2. 34 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SPRING 2023 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 The act of telling, archiving, collecting, and persistently repeating counterstories must be the central act of feminist historiography. If the received story is manifestly false, then it is impossible to see what academic merit or intellectual value there could be in continuing to repeat that story. In other words, all historiography must be feminist and anti-racist historiography to have a hope in hell of being accurately human historiography. Counterstorytelling, the final core tenet of CRT, is a key ethical requirement and a key methodology which can change how we use the past and build the sort of world it is worth using the past for.17 narration . . . . By playing with and rearranging the basic elements of the story, by re-presenting the sequence of events in divergent stories and from contested points of view, I have attempted to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.19 19. Hartman, “Venus,” 11. 20. Hartman, 12. 21. See A Mieke Bal Reader (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 22. Mieke Bal, Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 5, 9. Summarized in Mieke Bal, “Dealing/With/Women: Daughters in the Book of Judges,” in Women in the Hebrew Bible (New York: Routledge, 1999), 317–33. Ahuvia | Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism 35 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 To displace the authorized account of an enslaved girl’s death, for example, Hartman rearranges and re-presents events from multiple perspectives, foregrounding the “clash of voices,” albeit with “narrative restraint.”20 She carves out a space for this analysis at the edge of historical practice, in the fissure between history and storytelling, eschewing purely literary, fictive, or creative composition. Hartman admits that her practice is “an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak). It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.” In this essay, Hartman offers a new approach to walking the tightrope of academic historical writing and the feminist inclination to read against the grain. Hartman herself, when she deployed the term fabulation in that essay or fabula as a basic element of a story, cited Mieke Bal, a well-known scholar of comparative literature who also wrote several books on the Hebrew Bible.21 Bal is most famous in religious studies for engaging with the book of Judges, the most violent book of the Bible, which had been read mainly as presenting the political, monarchical, and national agenda of the ancient Israelites. Bal demonstrated, quite convincingly, that Judges is not about “political coherence,” “military and political chronology,” or honorable men and their sons (Sirach 46.11–12) but rather, at its core, is a book about gendered social strife.22 Decades after publication, Bal’s scholarship still stands out for affirming that every ancient story that features sexual violence is about gendered violence. Deploying what she termed feminist philology, Bal closely analyzed biblical terms with fraught gendered background (e.g., virgin, maiden, concubine) alongside anthropological evidence to offer lucid readings of otherwise If this seems a radical step, we might consider that scholars routinely fill in gaps in the historical and epigraphic record, especially when reconstructing the lives of famous individuals or the chronology of famous events from Greco-Roman history. We extend the same courtesy to less famous individuals and events, taking seriously the lives of those on the margins rather than relying on lacunae as an excuse not to explore the past. If the narratives that this methodology conjures from the past are multiple, conflicting, and unverifiable, they also reveal that all narratives from antiquity are, to some degree, fictions and fantasies created by agendas past and present.25 23. Bal, Death and Dissymmetry. 24. Mika Ahuvia and Sarit Kattan Gribetz, “The Daughters of Israel: An Analysis of the Term in Late Ancient Jewish Sources,” Jewish Quarterly Review 108, no. 1 (2018): 1–27. 25. Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson, “Epigraphy and Critical Fabulation: Imagining Narratives of Greco-Roman Sexual Slavery,” in Dynamic Epigraphy: New Approaches to Inscriptions, ed. Eleri Cousins (Havertown: Oxbow Books, 2022), 201–21. 36 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SPRING 2023 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 opaque stories.23 She argued that choppy biblical narratives reflect memories of a traumatic age shifting from matrilocal to patrilocal marital practices. Bal uncovered not the historical experience of any one woman but a plausible episode in the history of gender relations. Bal argues that close reading of biblical stories can reach back into history to recover something of women’s struggles and women’s language, even if their full expression and their names were lost in transmission by male tradents who did not care to preserve their stories or experiences. Bal’s feminist philological approach is productive for unpacking hints of women’s experiences and language as accidentally preserved by later sources, especially rabbinic ones. Where rabbinic writings record terms, rituals, and traditions associated with women that stand in tension with their own norms, alternative storytelling opportunities abound for careful readers.24 Scholars of classical studies are already deploying Hartman’s approach productively in their analysis of ancient sources. In a chapter titled “Epigraphy and Critical Fabulation: Imagining Narratives of Greco-Roman Sexual Slavery,” Deborah Kamen and Sarah Levin-Richardson analyze and elaborate on manumission inscriptions from Delphi and a graffito from a brothel in Pompeii, imagining the different perspectives that produced the inscriptions. By deploying critical fabulation, they challenge current traditional historical and philological approaches in classical studies, with this explanation: 26. Robert Kraft, “Para-mania: Beside, Before, and Beyond Bible Studies,” Journal of Biblical Literature 126, no. 1 (2007): 1–27, esp. 23. Thanks to Eva Mroczek for directing me to this source. 27. Kraft, “Para-mania,” 22. 28. Kraft, 23. 29. Two scholars of ancient Judaism appended short stories to their traditional monographs: Philip Esler, Babatha’s Orchard: The Yadin Papyri and an Ancient Jewish Family Tale Retold (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Hagith Sivan, Jewish Childhood in the Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018). Laury Silvers withdrew from academia and used her training to write historical mysteries set in Medieval Muslim lands (see The Sufi Mysteries Quartet, 2019–21). Two other important feminist works of scholarly storytelling predate Kraft’s address: Ruth Calderon, Hashuk. Habayit. Halev (Jerusalem: Keter, 2001), published in English as A Bride for One Night: Talmud Tales, trans. Ilana Kurshan (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2014), and Athalya Brenner, I Am . . . : Biblical Women Tell Their Own Stories (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005). Ahuvia | Critical Fabulation and the Foundations of Classical Judaism 37 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 In the field of religion studies, only Robert Kraft has come close to expressing similar sentiments. In his presidential address to the Society of Biblical Literature in 2006, Kraft, a scholar of early Judaism and Christianity, described three overlapping directions for future research, which he termed para-scriptural, para-textual, and para-historical.26 With para-scriptural, Kraft challenged scholars to think beyond the category of the Bible, reminding hearers that such a singular book and defined set of scripture did not exist in the minds of ancient Jews or Christians before the fourth century CE (at least). He reminded scholars that women as well as men took part in the transmission of scriptural texts as copyists through the ages (a gendered intervention that shouldn’t be controversial but still is). By para-textual, he challenged scholars to think about what was transmitted alongside texts that have come down to us, “embracing also the materials studied through art and archaeology, liturgy and song.”27 Finally, with what he calls the “parahistorical world,” Kraft called on the members of the profession to pay attention to the life setting in which ancient people encountered scriptural stories. Importantly for my endeavor, Kraft further noted that “the complex para-historical world is perhaps best represented through the imaginations of well-informed novelists, who attempt to recreate a feeling for what it may have been like ‘back then.’”28 Kraft asserted that a novelistic approach could provide deeper historical analysis of the daily life and struggles of ancient people. Very few scholars have heeded his call or reflected on it further.29 Informed by Smith, Stefaniw, and Hartman’s approaches as well as Kamen and Levin-Richardson’s example, in the rest of this essay I demonstrate what critical fabulation with Jewish sources could look like and how it might 3. THE HAMMAT TIBERIAS SYNAGOGUE Uncritical Fabulations As is well known, the excavation of a number of late antique synagogue mosaics from Byzantine Palestine, a number of which depict a zodiac with a personification of the sun at their center, challenged scholars to make sense of evidence that did not accord with prevailing understandings of Judaism, where Judaism was understood as synonymous with rabbinic Judaism. The ancient rabbis prohibited making icons, especially of a figure holding the cosmos in his hands, exactly like the Helios figure found in the synagogue mosaic shown in Figure 1.30 Much ink has been spilled trying to harmonize 30. According to m. ‘Abod. Zar. 3.1, “All images are prohibited, because they are worshipped [at least] once a year, according to Rabbi Meir. And the Sages say: only that which has in its hand a stick [e.g., a scepter], or a bird, or an orb is prohibited. Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel says: Anything that has anything in its hand [is prohibited].” According to y. ‘Abod. Zar. 3.3 (42d), “In the days of Rabbi Yohanan [third century CE], they [Jews] began to paint on the walls and they [the sages] did not stop them.” 38 STUDIES IN LATE ANTIQUITY SPRING 2023 Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/SLA/article-pdf/7/1/29/774637/sla.2023.7.1.29.pdf by University Of Washington user on 31 March 2023 improve our analysis of both material and rabbinic evidence and enrich our understanding of late antique Jewish culture and society. I analyze two sources from late antique Roman Palestine, which happen to take us into the milieu of the Jewish patriarchs, in particular the enslaved members of their households. I revisit the mosaic floor of the Hammat Tiberias synagogues to highlight the differences between the established scholarly narrative that valorizes the rabbinic perspective while explaining how, with critical fabulation, we can bring to the foreground the perspective of a Jewish freedman instead. Subsequently, I examine a cluster of rabbinic traditions about a so-called handmaid in the house of Rabbi Judah the Patriarch and suggest that a more accurate and ethical reading would highlight her enslaved status and the circumstances of similarly enslaved women in Late Antiquity. Certainly, the sources I work with are very different from Hartman’s and Bal’s. Where I have embellished details in my fabulations, I have been careful to draw on local or regional sources, especially contemporary epigraphic and material evidence. Like Hartman, I am not claiming to “give voice to the slave” or to claim that this story really happened in this way but rather create a space for imagining the lives of the many people, perhaps most people, who have been excluded from our imagining of the past.