Jews and Others
and to do so as regards the diaspora, ignoring Palestine (the official name of
the Holy Land in the period in question). It does so for two reasons. One is
that two major recent contributions by Seth Schwartz have both, implicitly,
taken the Jewish history of this period as meaning the history of the Jewish
people in Palestine.^2 But that is emphatically not the whole story. Secondly,
the documentary and archaeological evidence for Jewish life in the Greek
East outside Palestine has been significantly enriched by new discoveries, and
by the re-dating of older evidence. Thirdly, as indicated already, the range
of evidence for Jews and Jewish life in Christian sources is considerable, and
requires re-examination. Though there is quite striking documentary and
iconographic evidence for Jewish life in and around this period, we do how-
ever lack any Jewish literature written in the Greek diaspora. So any con-
ceptions which we have of beliefs or attitudes from the Jewish side, or of
Jewish theological thought, have to come from inscriptions or iconography,
or from the glimpses available between the lines of Christian sources.
This paper will therefore quickly review the legislation of – as it
affected the Jewish communities of the Greek East; it will then analyse the
main epigraphic and archaeological data, some very new, and others which
have recently been re-evaluated and re-dated, to place them in this em-
phatically Christian wider context; and it will finally assess the evidence of
Christian sources for the presence of Jews, and for Christian relations with
them. The result, it is hoped, will stimulate a re-consideration of the scale
and significance of the Jewish presence in the Christian Greek world, and of
Christian awareness of Judaism as a rival.
The Jewish diaspora under the pagan Empire of the first three centuries
..has been very fully studied in recent work.^3 But we need to realise that
a Jewish diaspora in an emphatically Christian empire, particularly if the
evidence seems to show it as numerous, active, and confident (and even on
occasion aggressive), represents a quite new and distinctive phase in religious
history.
. S. Schwartz,Imperialism and Jewish Society, ...to ..(), and ‘‘Histori-
ography on the Jews in the Talmudic Period,’’ in M. Goodman, ed.,The Oxford Handbook
of Jewish Studies(), . The importance of the diaspora in the Greek-speaking world is
emphasised by the publication in of the three volumes ofIJudO.
. See, for example, J. M. G. Barclay,Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora from Alexander to
Trajan (...–..)(), the papers collected in T. Rajak,The Jewish Dialogue with
Greece and Rome: Studies in Cultural and Social Interaction(), and E. Gruen,Diaspora: Jews
amidst Greeksand Romans().