Jews In The Roman World

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.

The studies in this volume examine the unique communal patterns among Jews and Christians within Roman civic culture and their diverse responses to shared challenges under Imperial rule.

Examines Judaism in Palestine throughout the Hellenistic period, from Alexander the Great's conquest in 334 BC to its capture by the Arabs in AD 636.

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.

Using in-depth examples of 'magical' practice such as exorcisms, love rites, alchemy and the transformation of humans into divine beings, this lively volume demonstrates that the word 'magic' was used widely in late antique texts as part of polemics against enemies and sometimes merely as a term for other people's rituals. Naomi Janowitz shows that 'magical' activities were integral to late antique religious practice, and that they must be understood from the perspective of those who employed them.

It was long believed that Roman Jews lived in complete isolation. This book offers a refutation of this thesis. It focuses on the Jewish community in third and fourth-century Rome, and in particular on how this community related to the larger, non-Jewish world that surrounded it. Jewish archaeological remains and Jewish funerary inscriptions from Rome are examined from various angles, and compared to pagan and early Christian material and epigraphical remains. The author has shown great comprehensiveness, thoroughness, and accuracy in examining this epigraphic evidence. He also discusses the enigmatic legal treatise called the Collatio. This volume proposes a new way in which the relationship between Jews and non-Jews in late antiquity can be studied. As such, it is an important and useful addition to the literature on Roman Jewry in the middle Empire.