The Jewish Race in Ancient and Roman History

The Jewish Race in Ancient and Roman History PDF Author: Ambroise Rendu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description

The Jewish Race in Ancient and Roman History

The Jewish Race in Ancient and Roman History PDF Author: Ambroise Rendu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jews
Languages : en
Pages : 456

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Book Description


Rome and Jerusalem

Rome and Jerusalem PDF Author: Martin Goodman
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141906375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 559

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Book Description
In AD 70, after a war that had flared sporadically for four years, three Roman legions under the future Emperors Vespasian and his son Titus surrounded, laid siege to, and eventually devastated the city of Jerusalem, destroying completely the magnificent Temple which had been built by Herod only eighty years earlier. What brought about this extraordinary conflict, with its extraordinary consequences? This superb book, by one of the world’s leading scholars of the ancient Roman and Jewish worlds, narrates and explains this titanic struggle, showing why Rome’s interests were served by this policy of brutal hostility, and how the first generation of Christians first distanced themselves from its Jewish origins and then became increasingly hostile to Jews as their influence spread within the empire. The book thus also provides an exceptional and original account of the origins of anti-Semitism, whose history has had often cataclysmic reverberations down to our own time.

Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire

Jews, Christians, and the Roman Empire PDF Author: Natalie B. Dohrmann
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812245334
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
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.

Rome and Jerusalem

Rome and Jerusalem PDF Author: Moses Hess
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Jewish nationalism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description


Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter?

Ethnicity in the Ancient World – Did it matter? PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110685655
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 278

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Book Description
This study raises that difficult and complicated question on a broad front, taking into account the expressions and attitudes of a wide variety of Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian sources, including Herodotus, Polybius, Cicero, Philo, and Paul. It approaches the topic of ethnicity through the lenses of the ancients themselves rather than through the imposition of modern categories, labels, and frameworks. A central issue guides the course of the work: did ancient writers reflect upon collective identity as determined by common origins and lineage or by shared traditions and culture?

Jews and Their Roman Rivals

Jews and Their Roman Rivals PDF Author: Katell Berthelot
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691220425
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 546

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Book Description
How encounters with the Roman Empire compelled the Jews of antiquity to rethink their conceptions of Israel and the Torah Throughout their history, Jews have lived under a succession of imperial powers, from Assyria and Babylonia to Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jews and Their Roman Rivals shows how the Roman Empire posed a unique challenge to Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Josephus, and the Palestinian rabbis, who both resisted and internalized Roman standards and imperial ideology. Katell Berthelot traces how, long before the empire became Christian, Jews came to perceive Israel and Rome as rivals competing for supremacy. Both considered their laws to be the most perfect ever written, and both believed they were a most pious people who had been entrusted with a divine mission to bring order and peace to the world. Berthelot argues that the rabbinic identification of Rome with Esau, Israel's twin brother, reflected this sense of rivalry. She discusses how this challenge transformed ancient Jewish ideas about military power and the use of force, law and jurisdiction, and membership in the people of Israel. Berthelot argues that Jewish thinkers imitated the Romans in some cases and proposed competing models in others. Shedding new light on Jewish thought in antiquity, Jews and Their Roman Rivals reveals how Jewish encounters with pagan Rome gave rise to crucial evolutions in the ways Jews conceptualized the Torah and conversion to Judaism.

The Origin of the Jews

The Origin of the Jews PDF Author: Steven Weitzman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691191654
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
The scholarly quest to answer the question of Jewish origins The Jews have one of the longest continuously recorded histories of any people in the world, but what do we actually know about their origins? While many think the answer to this question can be found in the Bible, others look to archaeology or genetics. Some skeptics have even sought to debunk the very idea that the Jews have a common origin. Steven Weitzman takes a learned and lively look at what we know—or think we know—about where the Jews came from, when they arose, and how they came to be. He sheds new light on the assumptions and biases of those seeking answers—and the religious and political agendas that have made finding answers so elusive. Introducing many approaches and theories, The Origin of the Jews brings needed clarity and historical context to this enduring and divisive topic.

The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World

The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World PDF Author: Lawrence M. Wills
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1725234246
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
Lawrence M. Wills here traces the literary evolution of popular Jewish narratives written during the period 200 BCE-100 CE. In many ways, these narratives were similar to Greek and Roman novels of the same era, as well as to popular novels of indigenous peoples within the Roman Empire. Yet, as a group, they demonstrated a variety of novelistic innovations: the inclusion of adventurous episodes, passages of description and of dialogue, concern with psychological motivation, and the introduction of female characters. Wills focuses on five novels: Greek Esther, Greek Daniel, Judith, Tobit, and Joseph and Aseneth. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical works, he delineates the techniques and motifs of the Jewish novel, shows how the genre both initiated and distanced itself from nonfictional prose such as historical and philosophical writing, discusses its relation to Greco-Roman romance, and describes the social conditions governing its emergence and reception. Wills also places the novels in historical context, situating them between the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and subsequent developments in Jewish and Christian literature on the other. Wills sees the Jewish novel as a popular form of writing that provided amusement for an expanding audience of Jewish entrepreneurs, merchants, and bureaucrats. In an important sense, he maintains, it was a product of the "novelistic impulse": the impulse to transfer oral stories to a written medium to reach a more literate audience.

Race

Race PDF Author: Denise Eileen McCoskey
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755697855
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
How do different cultures think about race? In the modern era, racial distinctiveness has been assessed primarily in terms of a person's physical appearance. But it was not always so. As Denise McCoskey shows, the ancient Greeks and Romans did not use skin colour as the basis for categorising ethnic disparity. The colour of one's skin lies at the foundation of racial variability today because it was used during the heyday of European exploration and colonialism to construct a hierarchy of civilizations and then justify slavery and other forms of economic exploitation. Assumptions about race thus have to take into account factors other than mere physiognomy. This is particularly true in relation to the classical world. In fifth century Athens, racial theory during the Persian Wars produced the categories 'Greek' and 'Barbarian', and set them in brutal opposition to one another: a process that could be as intense and destructive as 'black and 'white' in our own age. Ideas about race in antiquity were therefore completely distinct but as closely bound to political and historical contexts as those that came later. This provocative book boldly explores the complex matrices of race - and the differing interpretations of ancient and modern - across epic, tragedy and the novel. Ranging from Theocritus to Toni Morrison, and from Tacitus and Pliny to Bernal's seminal study Black Athena, this is a powerful and original new assessment.

Diaspora

Diaspora PDF Author: Erich S. Gruen
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674037991
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
What was life like for Jews settled throughout the Mediterranean world of Classical antiquity--and what place did Jewish communities have in the diverse civilization dominated by Greeks and Romans? In a probing account of the Jewish diaspora in the four centuries from Alexander the Great's conquest of the Near East to the Roman destruction of the Jewish Temple in 70 C.E., Erich Gruen reaches often surprising conclusions. By the first century of our era, Jews living abroad far outnumbered those living in Palestine and had done so for generations. Substantial Jewish communities were found throughout the Greek mainland and Aegean islands, Asia Minor, the Tigris-Euphrates valley, Egypt, and Italy. Focusing especially on Alexandria, Greek cities in Asia Minor, and Rome, Gruen explores the lives of these Jews: the obstacles they encountered, the institutions they established, and their strategies for adjustment. He also delves into Jewish writing in this period, teasing out how Jews in the diaspora saw themselves. There emerges a picture of a Jewish minority that was at home in Greco-Roman cities: subject to only sporadic harassment; its intellectuals immersed in Greco-Roman culture while refashioning it for their own purposes; exhibiting little sign of insecurity in an alien society; and demonstrating both a respect for the Holy Land and a commitment to the local community and Gentile government. Gruen's innovative analysis of the historical and literary record alters our understanding of the way this vibrant minority culture engaged with the dominant Classical civilization.