KATELL BERTHELOT “NOT LIKE OUR ROCK IS THEIR ROCK” (DEUT 32:31) RABBINIC PERCEPTIONS OF ROMAN COURTS AND JURISDICTION * INTRODUCTION For the Palestinian rabbis in the 2 nd and 3 rd centuries CE, Roman law clearly was one of the forms taken by Roman power, and rabbis sometimes explicitly characterized the Roman court as a place of violence, assimilating the tribunal to the arena of the amphitheater and other places where people were violently put to death. 1 Nevertheless, as both Martin Goodman and Hannah Cotton have emphasized, few tannaitic texts reject non-Jewish (including Roman) courts, and tannaitic sources contain very few examples of a concrete confict of jurisdiction. 2 Moreover, rabbinic state- ments concerning the safekeeping of documents such as wills in the archives of the Roman authorities reveal a great deal of leni- ency in that matter, showing how essential those archives were. 3 It seems at frst glance that as far as Roman courts and archives were concerned, the rabbis adopted a pragmatic and accommodationist attitude. Yet this view requires refnement. First, we must understand what possibilities there were for settling disputes in Roman * This study was funded by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s 7 th Framework Program (FP/2007–2013)/ERC Grant Agreement no. 614,424. It was conducted as part of the ERC project Judaism and Rome, under the auspices of the Centre national de la recherche scientifque (CNRS) and Aix-Marseille University, UMR 7297 TDMAM (Aix-en-Provence, France). 1 See esp. m. Avodah Zarah 1:7 (on which see below). 2 Goodman 2000, p. 155; Cotton 1993, p. 102; Cotton 1998, p. 170-171. 3 See Goodman 2000, p. 164-165. On the importance of archives in rabbinic sources, see e.g. m. Gittin 1:5 (and discussion in y. Gittin 1:4, 7a); t. Avodah Zarah 1:8. This importance is corroborated by the testimony of the documents from the Judean Desert; see Cotton 1998, p. 169-170.