434 Erich S. Gruen
The application of modern categories and experiences to antiquity can often be most
instructive and illuminating. But beguiling familiarity can also mislead. Romans and Jews
possessed a complicated relationship, usually of mutual benefit, occasionally fraught with
peril and conflict. They did not, however, normally frame that relationship in ethnic
terms. Literary constructs of one another could be hostile, distorted, or imaginary. How-
ever, they did not rest on a distinction between bloodlines, nor did they employ ethnicity
as a touchstone for evaluating character and quality. Overlapping and integration might
count for more than differentiation. The Jewish practice of embracing gentile proselytes
or sympathizers and the Roman institution of according citizenship to foreigners soft-
ened the boundaries and altered the mix. Ancients, on the whole, lost little sleep over
issues of ethnicity, and, unlike moderns, did not agonize over their identity.
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