historical perspectives: from the hasmoneans to bar kokhba in light ...

JUDEAN NATIONALISM 13
Anderson emphasizes the importance of vernacular 'print languages'
for the emergence of nationalism in the early modern period. 26 He
too requires a mass, public culture.
What both approaches share is the sense that as long as the belief
in common descent and culture is limited to small circles of the elite,
nationalism cannot emerge. What they and other students of nationalism
look for is a mass movement, which would seem to require
widespread literacy with access to material printed in a vernacular
language, at least prior to the age of mass communication. Yet Millar
and Smith realize that dissemination of the shared culture and national
language could take place before printing (hence, their references to
schools and synagogues). Indeed, mass communication through nonprint
media did not have to await the invention of radio and television.
The potential of mass oral culture in antiquity is increasingly
recognized. 27 The question now is whether we have sufficient evidence
for the existence of any mass medium, either written or oral,
for the broad dissemination of the socially constructed belief in a
common descent and culture. In the case of the Judeans we must
ask whether the biblical books, the repository of the shared culture
and the source of the belief in shared descent, were widely disseminated
in Second Temple times.
The schools and synagogues invoked by Millar and Smith are, in
fact, difficult to trace back into Second Temple Judea. Close to
twenty years ago I reviewed the evidence for the existence of a network
of Jewish elementary schools (or community-supported teachers)
in pre-70 Judea and discussed at length the two rabbinic texts
that are the basis for the claim that such a network existed. J. Ket.
8:11, 32c attributes to Simeon son of Shetah an ordinance that "the
children should attend school." Simeon is portrayed in rabbinic tradition
as a contemporary of Alexander Jonathan and Salome Alexandra
and so can be dated to the early first century BCE. B. B. Bat. 2la
attributes to Joshua son of Gamala the ordinance that teachers should
be appointed in every town and district to teach children beginning
at age six or seven. This person is commonly, though not universally,
identified with the Joshua son of Gamala who served as high
26 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37-46.
27 See R. Thomas, Oral Tradition and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); S. Niditch, Oral World and Written Word: Ancient
Israelite Literature, Library of Ancient Israel (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
1996).