Archive, Architecture & Politics of Memory

What is it about?

At the end of the Fifth Syrian War (ca. 200 BCE), Judea and Jerusalem became part of the Seleucid empire. Two edicts concerning Jerusalem issued by the Seleucid king, Antiochus III, provide for the city’s repopulation and economic recovery. They reward leaders for loyalty, authorize repair of the temple, and confirm the holiness of its precincts. Original copies of these edicts don’t survive. They are preserved in the writings of the ancient Jewish historian Josephus. Composed ca. 93 CE, Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities presented Jewish history and traditions for an audience of Jews and Romans alike. How did the edicts function in the literary context of Jewish Antiquities 12? Provincial cities in the Roman empire could furnish archival documents to assert precedent and negotiate for status, rights, and privileges. At a time when traditional Jewish archives had been variously destroyed and confiscated, Josephus drew on a wide range of sources to assemble documents and narratives into a literary archive that offered to his readers evidence of Judean fealty, respectability, status, and privileges under the rule of a series of empires and kings. The edicts functioned differently in the context of Jerusalem in the aftermath of the Fifth Syrian War. They erased the wounds of war and projected imperial benevolence and glory onto the city’s very architecture. They also furnished a script for local agency and resilience in the face of trauma.

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Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Photo by Claudio Schwarz on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Antiochus III's edicts concerning Jerusalem have most often been analyzed apart from their literary context. In the first part of the essay, I examine these edicts in the context of book 12 of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities, showing that they contributed to a literary archive that furnished evidence of Jewish loyalty and imperial beneficence. This analysis contributes nuance to our understanding of how Jews in the ancient world related to the empires that conquered and ruled them. Not only could collaboration and resistance exist side by side, but in between them were strategies of mediation, negotiation, memory-work, and cultural repair. Memory-work and cultural repair are also a focus of the second half of the article, which shifts to examine the way the edicts functioned to alter the very landscape of Jerusalem in the early second century BCE. By altering the city's architecture, the edicts also altered its political memory. The example of post World War II Berlin helps to illustrate how this is so. A dichotomous understanding of resistance and collaboration is inadequate to explain the dossier’s functions. Between these poles were mediation, survival, reassembly, and redrawing of boundaries. A key to each was reshaping of political memory. In Ant. 12 the dossier contributed to an archival record of benefaction, loyalty, and respect that provided precedent and warrant for imperial grant of honor, status, and privileges to Judeans in the Roman empire. In the context of Jerusalem after the Fifth Syrian War, the edicts aimed to assert material evidence of imperial beneficence and glory in place of imperial aggression and the ravages of war. They also helped position Jerusalem within the empire’s provincial urban network and furnished a script for local agency and resilience in the wake of trauma