Speculative Fiction and Judaism?

Well, that depends.

That's pretty speculative! I know of no fiction like this, and the result might be terrific and I don't see that it would be 'painful' at all. But, whether it would be problematic depends on how it was handled. Would the Jews have all converted to Christianity (not good) or trying to take over the world (also not good) or are they just another country selling software and high-tech gee-gaws (boring but good)?

There's also a problem with some controversial archeology of Jewish practices between the 1st and 2nd temples and the period just afterwards. (If you want to know more, check out the arguments in Biblical Archeology Magazine.)

Basically, I'd have to know more about this book to give an opinion, but since they are discussing it on the Christian line, I'd be suspicious, not because I think the folk there want to cause trouble, but because I think many there don't really understand Jews and Judaism and would be writing based on a Christian viewpoint. I'll go check it out, but I don't have the time right now.

Does that answer your question? What's your opinion?

You might like to look at Robert Silverberg's Roma Eterna. It is a novel made up of several novelettes, each of which covers a time period in human history, with the premise that the Roman empire never fell. I found it fascinating. The final chapter is set in the future, and covers the attempt of the Jewish people to leave the Earth for a new world. Another earlier chapter covers the stillbirth of Islam; also extremely well done.

Hmmmmm.

I do want to mention that as a kid, I saw a Star Trek episode where the crew went to a planet where the Roman Empire never ended. The rebels on this planet seemed to be worshipping the Sun God, and the officers thought this was odd in an advanced civilization.

Then one of them realized that it was not the Sun but the Son (of God.)

I almost puked. Ya can't go anywhere without Christianity being shoved down your throat. I also wondered how Nemoy and Shatner felt about this, both of them being Jewish.

Makes ya wonder.

Constantine makes the Roman Empire Jewish, and the forcibly converted northern Euorpeans get pissed paying shekels to the corrupt High Priest in Jerusalem/Rome, and they break off and create Protestant (Reformed) Judaism, hence igniting wars of religion.

Sarpedon said:

Well thanks.


I expressed my opinion that IF the Temple were never destroyed, then the whole bit about animal sacrifices would still be in force, and as (I believe) religious law dictates that all legitimate sacrifices MUST be done at the Temple, that would make Jews reluctant to journey across the entire planet and settle there, as it would interfere with their religious practices.

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Not necessarily. Even when the Temple was standing, there were permanent, flourishing Jewish communities in cities across the Mediterranean, from Alexandria to Rome, and eastward into Babylon/Mesopotamia. Many of the Jewish communities in the Middle East that withered away in the 20th Century predated the rise of Islam. Check out the Wikipedia entry on Philo of Alexandria.

Agree with Ted --- I read in DAILY LIFE AT THE TIME OF JESUS only 10% of the Jews living in the Roman Empire resided in Palestine.

donroc said:

Constantine makes the Roman Empire Jewish, and the forcibly converted northern Euorpeans get pissed paying shekels to the corrupt High Priest in Jerusalem/Rome, and they break off and create Protestant (Reformed) Judaism, hence igniting wars of religion.

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It's not 'reformed', it's 'reform' The analogy is not quite correct; Protestants are not simply less stringent Catholics, but I do get what you mean.


Also, Jews (not just Orthodox) still keep track of who is of the priestly caste, so making some bad guys 'high priests' does reflect on modern Jews.

Yeah, I added the -ed, sorry and I was bar mitzvahed at a reform temple too, and I meant the Protestants broke away from the central authority of the Pope and Catholic dicta, imagery, and ritual. I never implied less stringent.

Sarpedon said:

Over in the christian section of 'share your work' someone is writing a piece in which, among other things, the Diaspora is assumed not to have occurred, and Israel is considered to have been more or less continuously independent until the present day. I remarked over there that I'd have a hard time imagining how different Jewish culture would be.

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Interesting questions. What would happen if Jewish religious and secular thought would not be influenced by other cultures, sometimes even defined in opposition to these cultures? What if there is no Yiddish, no Ladino, no Chassidic movement, no Jewish migration to America, no Jewish involvement in the Russian revolution, no Holocaust?

I would have to assume that the Jews in Palestine would have had different historical developments, but still influenced by something - some other cultures - a whole alternate history would need to be developed to lend this idea credit.

The changes in Rabbinic literature alone would be extremely hard to conceptualize, even if the author has detailed knowledge of Judaism. Would there even be rabbinic literature?

The world-building would be MASSIVE. I wouldn't dare touch something this massive.
Should be interesting to see something like that, though - but the amount of world-building required to carry this off would defeat the purpose, IMHO.

Gray Rose said:

Should be interesting to see something like that, though - but the amount of world-building required to carry this off would defeat the purpose, IMHO.

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The original author was clearly uninterested in anything like that. For him, Jews were stage-dressing for the Messiah.

No way to tell. If the diaspora never occurred, neither would Christianity I reckon, and neither would most of that which transpired. The simplest event, such as one great man throwing a rock in a stream has the most profound impact on history. If one central person did even one thing differently, everything would unravel in a different way. Everything that anyone who writes about this would be pure guesswork without much sense. None of the inventions or any other form of progress that has occurred could have happened in the same way.

Sarpedon said:

Well thanks Ted. I didn't know that most Jews in Roman times didnt' live in the 'holy land' BEFORE the diaspora.

Though I still would be skeptical that a purely Mediterranean power would have been involved in colonizing the new world, as none of them did in real life. Though presumably they could have gone out via their Red Sea port and gotten in on all the east asian trade goodies.

And I totally agree that if the diaspora never happened, christianity would never have happened. However, our christian author friend is obviously operating under the belief that Jesus was a real person, so christianity happens whenever he shows up, and for the purposes of speculative fiction, I'll accept that.

I tremble to think what the absense of Jews would have done to European intellectual life in the middle ages and afterwards. (presumably, having no reason to flee from one place to another, they might stay put in the mediterranean) Perhaps some other group would have stepped into the gap.

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My pleasure, Sarpedon.

But - big caveat here - I didn't say that MOST Jews lived outside the Holy Land at the time. Donroc said that, and in fact he was quoting a single book, so we have no idea how good the research is. All I know is that SOME, not MOST, Jews lived in the Diaspora.

As for Mediterranean powers not reaching the New World, there is some evidence (intriguing, but not conclusive) that Moslem traders did reach the Americas prior to Columbus, although they didn't seem to have settled. And once the navigational technology was available, any power might have done it.

Actually, I'd disagree about the link between the Diaspora and Christianity. There were initially two branches of Christianity - Jewish and Gentile - and the Gentile church was strongest in Greece, Rome and Asia Minor. When the Romans razed the Holy Land in the Second Century, they took the Jewish Christian church (founded by Peter) with it; only the Gentile Christian Churches (promoted and expanded by Paul) remained. Whether or not the Jews were outside of Judaea, the Gentiles certainly were, and it was to them that Paul preached. The Eastern Roman Empire was also fertile ground for preachers of new religions - the cults of Osiris, Cybele, and Mithra all made big inroads.

Anti-Semitism was created by members of the very early church (as in the apostles), who were angry that the Jews, who they were counting on to convert in large numbers, didn't. But when the spreaders of the new religion traveled to Greece, they found a willing audience and that's where Christianity as a popular religion actually began.

It wasn't Jews who felt betrayed or abandoned by their deity who became the Christians, but members of the Pagan religions of the Roman Empire.

I would have to say that there are many Jews today who feel that the Diaspora and anti-Semitism actually helped keep the Jewish people around for the last 2,000 years. Jews are make stronger by persecution, it seems. Notice the murder of the 6-million resulted, not in a dispirited and broken people, but in Israel.

Spain would not have been anti-Semitic, because at the time, the Jews were just another set of middle eastern tribes, one with an especially bad attitude when it came to people trying to convert them to something else. Anti-Semitism simply didn't exist. Spain had a fairly vibrant Jewish community until 1492. But because of Christian hatred of Jews, Jews were ousted from country after country as soon as they got powerful or comfortable.

Jews had been respected (although not totally popular) members of Germany for 500 years before Hitler. Many Diaspora Jews, even today, have a 'keep your bags packed' attitude, something that seems to astound many christians.

Gray Rose said:

Interesting questions. What would happen if Jewish religious and secular thought would not be influenced by other cultures, sometimes even defined in opposition to these cultures? What if there is no Yiddish, no Ladino, no Chassidic movement, no Jewish migration to America, no Jewish involvement in the Russian revolution, no Holocaust?

I would have to assume that the Jews in Palestine would have had different historical developments, but still influenced by something - some other cultures - a whole alternate history would need to be developed to lend this idea credit.

The changes in Rabbinic literature alone would be extremely hard to conceptualize, even if the author has detailed knowledge of Judaism. Would there even be rabbinic literature?

The world-building would be MASSIVE. I wouldn't dare touch something this massive.
Should be interesting to see something like that, though - but the amount of world-building required to carry this off would defeat the purpose, IMHO.

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And by the same token, European culture would be entirely different. If you still get a Roman Empire, and it still conquers Europe, then Europe would develop for centuries under that religion, and without the Jewish diaspora, without the influence of Jewish education and thinkers since the Renaissance, assuming you get one, so no Marx, no Einstein...

I guess you'd have a stable Jewish civilization in the Mid-East, co-existing with other cultures and nations there, for hundreds of years, and various wars and stuff. Are there Romans in this story? Or do you avoid the diaspora because the Jews win? Jews take over the Roman Empire?

Silverberg is an excellent writer.

Also maybe exploration would have proceeded East toward India and China, and exploration and colonization south toward Africa, rather than west across the Pacific?

Another Greek of the same name

Sarpedon said:

Hmmm, I would dispute that simply because it takes for granted certain things, like for example, the existance of Peter, and presupposes that Christianity developed more or less as it is claimed in the new testament; i.e. first in Jerusalem and neighboring regions, then spreading North and West.

I'm not much of a scholar of this, but I was always under the impression that it was the immigration of Jews to greece, and the subsequent mistranslating of the Torah into Greek that led to the writing of the gospels, some 100 years or so after the destruction of the temple. I have also heard that it may have been refugee Jews who felt betrayed and abandoned by their god who gave rise to the idea of the messiah who was betrayed and abandoned by the people. That is to say, the emotional shock of the Diaspora led some Jews to reinterpret their religion, in the context of the other religions they were exposed to, and thus arises christianity.

Just a theory though, I don't know much evidence to support it, other than timeline coincidences, and the fact that the Gospels are clearly of greek origin. And of course, if large numbers of Jews were leaving Israel pre-diaspora, this could have happened at any time.

It seems to me that both Jesus and the apostles are purely fictitious in nature. The disciples, including Peter, are like stock characters in a Platonic dialogue; they are there to be foils for Jesus. Paul is the only apostle who seems like a real person. Even if he isn't, I think its much more likely that there was a historical equivalent to Paul rather than Peter. (of course, I take Paul's account of events with a great deal of skepticism, given his published attitude toward lying) Speculation of course, documents are sketchy, and lots of religions (perhaps all) have fictitious accounts of there origins which obscure the reality of the situation.

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Hmm, well...

Whether or not Jesus, Peter and Paul were actually prophets of God (clearly I don't believe they were) there is evidence (however flawed) that they existed and led the church, and no evidence that they didn't.

In addition to the Gospels and the Epistles, Josephus, Suetonius and Tacitus all mention Jesus or his followers. (The reference in Josephus was for some centuries faked by zealous Christian scribes to provide evidence of Jesus' divinity; the original version refers to little more than Jesus' existence as a religious figure.) When they mention Christians, they always refer to them as followers of a specific individual, not as adherents of a particular doctrine - which implies that Jesus the person was more than mythological.

As for timeline, the Septuagint was written about two hundred years before the Common Era, not "100 years after the destruction of the Temple." The best evidence we have as to its place of origin says that it was created in Egypt, not Greece.

Internal evidence in the Gospel of Mark indicates that it was probably written about 70 CE, about the time of the destruction of Jerusalem, or even before it. Most scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was based on an even earlier source, dubbed "Q." This would mean that the beginning of Christianity was an event in itself, not a response to the destruction of Judaea.

Although there were Jewish communities in Greece and Rome, the great centers of Jewish life outside Judaea were Egypt and Mesopotamia, south and east, not northwest.

The "messiah who was betrayed and abandoned by the people" is not a Jewish concept. It is purely Christian...or perhaps one should say gentile. The passage in Isaiah that is pointed to as evidence of the "betrayed and abandoned Messiah" is actually misinterpreted. In the original Hebrew, it is clear that the "man of sorrows" is a metaphor for the Jewish People as a whole, not for one man. However, the human scapegoat is a tradition of many other religions of the Near East - the cults of Tammuz and Dionysos Zagreus, for instance. This makes it more likely that this aspect originated in non-Jewish communities that converted to Christianity, not Jewish communities that evolved into Christians.

Also, the Roman exile was not the first time the Jewish community had been uprooted from its homeland. The Babylonian exile and the destruction of the First Temple (the one destroyed by the Romans was the second) were even more traumatic, and they led to the writings of many of the prophets, but not to the creation of an entirely new faith.

Yes, there were significant if not huge populations of Jews in Alexandria, Cyrenica (which had a major Jewish rebellion in the 2nd centure CE), Spain, Rome, Anatolia, and Greece. The book I cited earlier and no longer have, which had plenty of sources, stated the Roman Empire's population was around 100,000,000, and 10% were Jews. And 10% of the Jews lived in Palestine. Accurate or not, it is a starting point to consider regarding where Jews lived at the time of Jesus.

Where indeed?

"I understand that they weren't confined to Israel, but just where would all these extra Jews come from? Surely they couldn't go to other countries and outbreed the native population.[/quote]


We moved in from Boca, that's where the extra Jews came from.

Sarpedon and Stephanie, I am merely quoting from what I remember reading in a book back in the 1960s I no longer have. I wish I had it still so I could point you to its sources. DAILY LIFE AT THE TIME OF JESUS, not another titled DAILY LIFE IN THE TIME OF JESUS.

Jews do have a major lost chunk of history destroyed by the Church and memory after forced conversions. Great researchers have done some wonderful detective work, guessing through fragments, newly discovered documents, and from Church responses to "lost" Jewish writings.

Typical are: A JEWISH PRINCEDOM IN FEUDAL FRANCE by Zuckerman and POPES FROM THE GHETTO by Prinz.

At a quick search, I cannot find it on the Internet. There is that other by Vanos, which is definitely NOT it. Anyway, it is a starting point for arguing %'s. I am not committed to it.