GEZA AND SCHÜRER

Professor Fergus Millar

University of Oxford

Ladies and Gentlemen, what I have to offer is just in a way a small footnote to a quite substantial project in which Geza and I were involved, namely the revision and English translation of Emil Schürer's History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ.

There are two things to say first about that massive project.

This in the end 2,400 pages took us nearly two decades, during which I think we didn't have one single moment of disagreement, and we certainly never quarrelled, at least, not with each other; we may have quarrelled with other people, but that is another matter.

Secondly, the title for this section, I would like to say, should really have been Geza and Pam and Schürer, for reasons which I will describe briefly later. It was really Pam who held the whole thing together and made it possible for us to do it. But just to come back for a moment to how I came to all this.

I suppose I was always an ancient historian, meaning a historian of Greece and Rome, but always closely related to Jewish studies. I have to confess that my wife and I met at a lecture arranged by David Daube called "The Jewish View of World History" and, indeed, in the same line, I attended Cecil Roth's class on the Zealots, before Geza was appointed here -- and in fact, I was actually the only person who attended that class. But then I also attended Geza's lectures when I was a Fellow at Queen's.

It was at that point that the spectre of work on Schürer arose. It had arisen from the Scottish publishers, T. & T. Clark, who wanted to do another English edition of this great German classic, and they approached what seemed then to be the obvious person, namely Matthew Black, Professor at St Andrew's. He duly took this on, but quickly realised that it didn't fit the particular range of skills and knowledge which he had; so he turned first to Geza, and then Geza asked me to join in this. How on earth we ever thought that this was a sensible idea I cannot imagine. If anybody started on a project of this sort now, of course, they would immediately go to the Arts and Humanities Research Board for an enormous grant with overheads and an office and all sorts of things.

We never really thought in advance about how we were actually going to do it. Matthew Black had arranged translations into English of the texts of various sections. As Geza recalls in Providential Accidents, we found ourselves confronted with crabby typescripts with rather small margins, which somehow or other we were supposed to revise, and of course, this was before word-processing, before information technology. The typescript which was there was a unique thing, and was the only thing that was there; it was possible of course, as we did, to settle down to correct things, and to add other pieces of information in handwriting around the text. What next, how do you turn that into several volumes? Well, the answer was that the person on whom the organisation of the project, if one can use those expressions, depended was Pam. We did the work in our different handwritings, so to speak, on the text, and she amalgamated it into a text which was -- or appeared to be -- ready for the printer. So the first volume, we thought, was ready for the printer, and we duly sent it off and they printed the galleys.

Unfortunately, we hadn't really got more than about half-way on the process of revision, so we did the other half on the galley, producing an effect rather like medieval texts of the Talmud with masses of commentary and text round the central text, which caused the publishers considerable pain. It was only at that moment that we actually got a few grants of a few hundred pounds each from three different sources. One of these, though we wouldn't have it said then, but one can say now, was Isaiah Berlin -- and that was enough to keep the publishers, at least, only moderately unhappy. In effect, they had to reset the whole volume in order to accommodate the corrections. In other words we were learning as we went along. The sort of thing that we were doing was, by and large, by its nature not profoundly novel in itself: adding in new bits of information, adding new bibliography, correcting things where new information had appeared.

It is sometimes said that you can't revise old books, and it's quite true, in many cases you cannot, but Schürer was so clear, so well organised, so logical in what he wrote that when you had a new piece of information you could see immediately, or only with not too great difficulty, where it would go and what difference it would make to what Schürer had said. That applied to most of what we were doing, but I don't think it applied -- and this is the main point really I'm wanting to make -- to the very distinctive intellectual contribution of Geza to this whole project. For the question of how to categorise and how to write about Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period was of a different order of difficulty.

Schürer himself, if one goes back to the original, was very hesitant and quite self-critical about the division that he actually chose to adopt, knowing that it did not one hundred per cent work, namely simply Palestinian Literature on the one hand and Hellenistic Jewish Literature on the other. Anybody who thinks they might have been smarter than Schürer is in for a shock. When you go back to what he wrote, he is always very self-conscious about what sorts of choice he was making. Nonetheless those two categories were the choices he made. That simply wouldn't survive -- and could not and should not survive -- the great single new factor of the body of material which was going to have to be integrated somehow, namely, of course, the Dead Sea Scrolls. That is how there came to be established what is essentially a quadripartite division of Jewish literature. By this time also, Geza, and I too, had begun to feel our limitations. So Martin Goodman by then was playing a very large part. How he managed, in the course of living in Birmingham and having four small children, to do the work faster than we could, I am not able to say, but anyway he did.

The fundamental intellectual novelty was then to divide the material into, firstly, Jewish literature originally written in Hebrew or Aramaic, and secondly, Jewish literature written originally (it seems) in Greek. Thirdly, came the sectarian literature of the Dead Sea community, and fourthly that literature which, because its original forms are lost, you couldn't tell whether it originally had been in Greek or Hebrew or Aramaic. Within all that, the thing which is really distinctive, and particularly applies to the literature written originally in Hebrew or Aramaic, is the integration of the new texts, new material from Qumran, with the older material usually preserved in various complex forms of Christian transmission and so forth; in other words, to divide this literature by its different genres simply into biblical commentary, history, whatever it is -- and in that context, of course, also to pick up the relatively slight, but extremely telling, fragments of the original Aramaic or Hebrew versions of texts. In other words, this was to bring back the whole activity of Jewish religious writing back to its home in Greek or Roman Palestine, and to divide the material by the type of writing that it represented.

In my view, it was an enormous conceptual step forward to reconsider the whole thing, to relate this vast mass of later writing, both in the sense of late antique writing but also of scholarship in the modern world, and to bring it to life again by bringing it into relationship with the new material from Qumran. Perhaps that whole section would deserve actually re-revising now because, by the efforts of Geza and other people, all the materials have now been published, which of course they hadn't been when we were working in the 70s and 80s. But even if it were revised, that would not take away the enormous conceptual step of simply being able to see the whole thing in a different framework, namely that provided by the texts from Qumran.

So, that was how it was done. It reminds me now of the story of the ride across Lake Constance: upon looking back afterwards, I can't imagine how we could possibly have thought that either of us could do it, should do it, or would survive doing it, but somehow or other we did -- and there it is.

It only remains to wish Geza the happiest of birthdays.