These collected studies, previously published in diverse places between 1990 and 2006, discuss important and controversial issues in the study of the development of Judaism in the Roman world from the first century C.E. to the fifth.
In describing the triangular relationship among the Jews, the Romans and the Greeks, Michael Grant treats one of the most significant themes in world history. Unlike almost all the other subject nations of the Roman empire, the Jews have survived and have maintained a religious and cultural identity that is substantially unchanged. They provide a unique bridge with the ancient world and can bring us into peculiarly close and intimate contact with life in the Roman empire. This book embraces the period in which the Jewish religion assumed virtually its final form, and in which Jews launched their two heroic, but disastrous revolts against Roman rule. This was, moreover, the time when Judaism gave birth to Christianity. Within a century after the death of Jesus, his followers had become completely independent of Judaism. Michael Grant describes the grandeur of the great multiracial Roman empire, beneath whose rule these stirring and unique developments took place.
Jews and Christians under the Roman Empire shared a unique sense of community. Set apart from their civic and cultic surroundings, both groups resisted complete assimilation into the dominant political and social structures. However, Jewish communities differed from their Christian counterparts in their overall patterns of response to the surrounding challenges. They exhibit diverse levels of integration into the civic fabric of the cities of the Empire and display contrary attitudes towards the creation of trans-local communal networks. The variety of local case studies examined in this volume offers an integrated image of the multiple factors, both internal and external, which determined the role of communal identity in creating a sense of belonging among Jews and Christians under Imperial constraints.
This volume revisits issues of empire from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and other Romans in the third to sixth centuries. Through case studies, the contributors bring Jewish perspectives to bear on longstanding debates concerning Romanization, Christianization, and late antiquity.
Professor Harry J. Leon achieved an authentic portrait of that community by means of thorough investigation of the Jewish catacombs. The brief inscriptions reveal a wealth of significant information: the language of the people, their labors, their religion, and their manner of life. Many of the inscriptions are reproduced in photographs. The reader, whether layperson or scholar, will find Dr.
First Published in 1995, the main emphasis of this book is on the political history of the Jews in Palestine, where "political" is to be understood not as the mere succession of rulers and battles but as the interaction between political activity and social, economic and religious circumstances. A particular concern is the investigation of social and economic conditions in the history of Palestinian Judaism.
Relations between Jews and non-Jews in the Hellenistic-Roman period were marked by suspicion and hate, maintain most studies of that topic. But if such conjectures are true, asks Louis Feldman, how did Jews succeed in winning so many adherents, whether full-fledged proselytes or "sympathizers" who adopted one or more Jewish practices? Systematically evaluating attitudes toward Jews from the time of Alexander the Great to the fifth century A.D., Feldman finds that Judaism elicited strongly positive and not merely unfavorable responses from the non-Jewish population. Jews were a vigorous presence in the ancient world, and Judaism was strengthened substantially by the development of the Talmud. Although Jews in the Diaspora were deeply Hellenized, those who remained in Israel were able to resist the cultural inroads of Hellenism and even to initiate intellectual counterattacks. Feldman draws on a wide variety of material, from Philo, Josephus, and other Graeco-Jewish writers through the Apocrypha, the Pseudepigrapha, the Church Councils, Church Fathers, and imperial decrees to Talmudic and Midrashic writings and inscriptions and papyri. What emerges is a rich description of a long era to which conceptions of Jewish history as uninterrupted weakness and suffering do not apply.