Jewish Travel in Antiquity
Jewish Travel in Antiquity

Author: Catherine Hezser

Publisher: Mohr Siebeck

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 552

ISBN-13: 9783161508899

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This book provides the first comprehensive study of Jewish travel and mobility in Hellenistic and Roman times, based on a critical analysis of Jewish, Graeco-Roman, and early Christian literary, epigraphic, and archaeological sources and a social-historical evaluation of the material. Catherine Hezser shows that certain segments of ancient Jewish society were quite mobile. Mobility seems to have increased in the later Roman period, when an extensive road system facilitated travel within the province of Syria-Palestine and the neighbouring Middle Eastern regions. Second Temple Judaism was centralized, with Jerusalem as its central space and seat of priestly authority. In post-70 rabbinic Judaism, on the other hand, connections between rabbis could be established through mutual visits and second- and third-degree contacts only. Mobility formed the basis of the establishment of a decentralized rabbinic network in Palestine and Babylonia in late antiquity. Numerous narrative and halakhic traditions indicate the importance of mobility for communication and the exchange of knowledge amongst rabbis. It is argued that the rabbis who were most mobile sat at the nodal points of the rabbinic network and elicited the largest amount of influence. They would have combined business travel with scholarly exchange. Scholars' journeys between Palestine and Babylonia are viewed within the wider context of Rome and Persia's economic and cultural exchange in which Jews, just like Christians, may have played the role of intermediaries.

Travel and Religion in Antiquity
Travel and Religion in Antiquity

Author: Philip A. Harland

Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press

Published: 2011-03-15

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1554583446

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Travel and Religion in Antiquity considers the importance of issues relating to travel for our understanding of religious and cultural life among Jews, Christians, and others in the ancient world, particularly during the Hellenistic and Roman eras. The volume is organized around five overlapping areas where religion and travel intersect: travel related to honouring deities, including travel to festivals, oracles, and healing sanctuaries; travel to communicate the efficacy of a god or the superiority of a way of life, including the diffusion of cults or movements; travel to explore and encounter foreign peoples or cultures, including descriptions of these cultures in ancient ethnographic materials; migration; and travel to engage in an occupation or vocation. With interdisciplinary contributions that cover a range of literary, epigraphic, and archeological materials, the volume sheds light on the importance of movement in connection with religious life among Greeks, Romans, Nabateans, and others, including Judeans and followers of Jesus.

Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Travel Experiences
Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Travel Experiences

Author: Susanne Luther

Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG

Published: 2023-10-04

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 3110717484

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Travel and pilgrimage have become central research topics in recent years. Some archaeologists and historians have applied globalization theories to ancient intercultural connections. Classicists have rediscovered travel as a literary topic in Greek and Roman writing. Scholars of early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have been rethinking long-familiar pilgrimage practices in new interdisciplinary contexts. This volume contributes to this flourishing field of study in two ways. First, the focus of its contributions is on experiences of travel. Our main question is: How did travelers in the ancient world experience and make sense of their journeys, real or imaginary, and of the places they visited? Second, by treating Jewish, Christian, and Islamic experiences together, this volume develops a longue durée perspective on the ways in which travel experiences across these three traditions resembled each other. By focusing on "experiences of travel," we hope to foster interaction between the study of ancient travel in the humanities and that of broader human experience in the social sciences.

Jewish Slavery in Antiquity
Jewish Slavery in Antiquity

Author: Catherine Hezser

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2005-12-22

Total Pages: 452

ISBN-13: 0191515663

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This book is the first comprehensive analysis of Jewish attitudes towards slavery in Hellenistic and Roman times. Against the traditional opinion that after the Babylonian Exile Jews refrained from employing slaves, Catherine Hezser shows that slavery remained a significant phenomenon of ancient Jewish everyday life and generated a discourse which resembled Graeco-Roman and early Christian views while at the same time preserving specifically Jewish nuances. Hezser examines the impact of domestic slavery on the ancient Jewish household and on family relationships. She discusses the perceived advantages of slaves over other types of labor and evaluates their role within the ancient Jewish economy. The ancient Jewish experience of slavery seems to have been so pervasive that slave images also entered theological discourse. Like their Graeco-Roman and Christian counterparts, ancient Jewish intellectuals did not advocate the abolition of slavery, but they used the biblical tradition and their own judgements to ameliorate the status quo.

Jews and Journeys
Jews and Journeys

Author: Joshua Levinson

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Published: 2021-08-06

Total Pages: 363

ISBN-13: 0812297938

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Journeys of dislocation and return, of discovery and conquest hold a prominent place in the imagination of many cultures. Wherever an individual or community may be located, it would seem, there is always the dream of being elsewhere. This has been especially true throughout the ages for Jews, for whom the promises and perils of travel have influenced both their own sense of self and their identity in the eyes of others. How does travel writing, as a genre, produce representations of the world of others, against which one's own self can be invented or explored? And what happens when Jewish authors in particular—whether by force or of their own free will, whether in reality or in the imagination—travel from one place to another? How has travel figured in the formation of Jewish identity, and what cultural and ideological work is performed by texts that document or figure specifically Jewish travel? Featuring essays on topics that range from Abraham as a traveler in biblical narrative to the guest book entries at contemporary Israeli museum and memorial sites; from the marvels medieval travelers claim to have encountered to eighteenth-century Jewish critiques of Orientalism; from the Wandering Jew of legend to one mid-twentieth-century Yiddish writer's accounts of his travels through Peru, Jews and Journeys explores what it is about travel writing that enables it to become one of the central mechanisms for exploring the realities and fictions of individual and collective identity.

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism
A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism

Author: Gwynn Kessler

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2020-03-26

Total Pages: 604

ISBN-13: 1119113970

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An innovative approach to the study of ten centuries of Jewish culture and history A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism explores the Jewish people, their communities, and various manifestations of their religious and cultural expressions from the third century BCE to the seventh century CE. Presenting a collection of 30 original essays written by noted scholars in the field, this companion provides an expansive examination of ancient Jewish life, identity, gender, sacred and domestic spaces, literature, language, and theological questions throughout late ancient Jewish history and historiography. Editors Gwynn Kessler and Naomi Koltun-Fromm situate the volume within Late Antiquity, enabling readers to rethink traditional chronological, geographic, and political boundaries. The Companion incorporates a broad methodology, drawing from social history, material history and culture, and literary studies to consider the diverse forms and facets of Jews and Judaism within multiple contexts of place, culture, and history. Divided into five parts, thematically-organized essays discuss topics including the spaces where Jews lived, worked, and worshiped, Jewish languages and literatures, ethnicities and identities, and questions about gender and the body central to Jewish culture and Judaism. Offering original scholarship and fresh insights on late ancient Jewish history and culture, this unique volume: Offers a one-volume exploration of “second temple,” “Greco-Roman,” and “rabbinic” periods and sources Explores Jewish life across most of the geographic places where Jews or Judaeans were known to have lived Features original maps of areas cited in every essay, including maps of Jewish settlement throughout Late Antiquity Includes an outline of major historical events, further readings, and full references A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism: 3rd Century BCE - 7th Century CE is a valuable resource for students, instructors, and scholars of Jewish studies, religion, literature, and ethnic identity, as well as general readers with interest in Jewish history, world religions, Classics, and Late Antiquity.

The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity
The Jewish People in Classical Antiquity

Author: John Haralson Hayes

Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press

Published: 1998-01-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9780664257279

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John Hayes and Sara Mandell provide a clear exposition of Jewish history from 333 BCE to 135 CE. This volume focuses on the Judean-Jerusalem community from a historical rather than ideological or theological perspective. With the inclusion of charts, maps, and ancient texts, the authors have constructed a fascinating account that is indispensable for the study of this crucial period.

Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages
Jewish Travellers in the Middle Ages

Author: Elkan Nathan Adler

Publisher: Courier Dover Publications

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 440

ISBN-13:

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This fascinating book vividly portrays the wandering Jew as a very real character in the great drama of history. In nineteen engaging narratives, some twelve centuries old, travelling Jewish scholars, merchants, pilgrims, ambassadors, and others are revealed to be men of many moods and missions. In these pages you will meet: Isaac, an interpreter in the service of the Emperor Charlemagne, who in the year 802 escorted an elephant named Abulabaz, a gift to the Emperor from the caliph Harun ar-Rashid, over the Alps to the Emperor's court. Eldad the Danite, who lived on the Gulf of Aden and in the late ninth century was shipwrecked and seized by cannibals, though he lived to tell the tale. Benjamin of Tudela, the great Hebrew satirical poet of the thirteenth century, whose masterpiece, the Tachkemoni, is filled with clever, sometimes bitter jibes at the notables encountered in his many travels. Elijah of Ferrara, who describes fifteenth-century life in Jerusalem and tells of the plague in Egypt and Palestine that carried away his sons and grandson. Rich in human experience and historic detail, their accounts and 14 more revealing narratives offer rare perspectives on the unfolding drama of life in Europe, the Near East, and North Africa in the Middle Ages. This is a volume that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers, from those interested in travel and adventure to those interested in cultural history and Judaica.