CHAPTER 28
Romans and Jews
Erich S. Gruen
Denying the Dichotomy
Ethnic contests and conflicts (or what we call ethnic conflicts) continue to plague our
world. Recent decades have witnessed prolonged outbursts with distressing regularity.
One needs to think only of Serbs, Croats, and Muslims in Bosnia, of Israelis and Pales-
tinians in the Holy Land, of Copts and Muslims in Egypt, of Greeks and Turks in
Cyprus, of Catholics and Protestants in Ireland, of Maronites, Sunni, Shiites, and Druze
in Lebanon—not to mention the petty squabbles of Greeks and Slavs over who the real
Macedonians are. Ethnicity, when it forms the basis of collective identity, seems more a
curse than a blessing.
Is ethnicity, in fact, a determining factor of identity? That too has been a matter of
dispute, contention, and conflict—but primarily among academics, and without, to my
knowledge, much bloodshed. The principal divide, in earlier debates, has been between
the so-called “primordialists” or “essentialists” and the “instrumentalists” or “circum-
stantialists,” terms conceived in this context by anthropologists and gradually adopted
and applied by other disciplines. A more inventive set of labels was introduced by a
sociologist, with a degree in Classics from Oxford: he pitted the “Parmenideans” against
the “Heraclitans” (Smith 1986: 210–12). The two pre-Socratic philosophers formed a
useful pair for this purpose: Parmenides believed in the fixed and immutable nature of
matter, Heraclitus in the eternal flux of things. The “primordialists,” to put it crudely,
regard ethnicity to be a permanent feature of human groups, unchanging and enduring,
a biologically determined characteristic, akin to, indeed virtually equivalent to, “race.”
The “instrumentalists,” by contrast, reckon ethnicity as not only dynamic and changing,
but largely constructed, an artificial creation manipulated for political or social purposes,
usually by the privileged to stigmatize the disadvantaged. The devised dichotomy,
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.