Imperialism and Jewish Society, 200 B.C.E. to 640 C.E. - Seth Schwartz

6 INTRODUCTION atits center.^8 And conversely,the Jewswere alwaysdevoted toJudaism because of their overwhelmingly powerful nati ...

INTRODUCTION 7 The Israeli view of the “Talmud period” is not typical of Zionist historiogra- phy. The Talmud period had a speci ...

8 INTRODUCTION Goodenough’s argument, based as it was on a highly problematic method of “reading” ancient Jewish art, was immedi ...

INTRODUCTION 9 arein factself-contained (and not simply that for heuristic purposes they shouldbe readas ifthey were),that eacho ...

10 INTRODUCTION In addition, the search for differences neglects ancient political, demo- graphic, and social realities. As far ...

INTRODUCTION 11 the Jewish population was literate, and still more unlikely that 10 percent of the literate population could act ...

12 INTRODUCTION The scribal and priestly elites were decimated by the revolts of 66–70 and 132–135C.E., and the rabbis probably ...

INTRODUCTION 13 been the province of a Jewish elite, came, in the course of the Second Temple period or the rabbinic period, or ...

14 INTRODUCTION mainly in the fourth through sixth centuries, as a diffusion also of access to the sacred. Synagogues seem to ha ...

INTRODUCTION 15 Second Temple period (in only a few books are traces of it absent), and it is always juxtaposed with temple- and ...

16 INTRODUCTION Jews as constituting a separate and discrete religious community. This is one reason, though not the only one, f ...

PART I THEJEWSOFPALESTINETO70C.E. ...

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ONE POLITICS AND SOCIETY I N THIS CHAPTER I provide some of the political and social back- ground for the discussion in chapter ...

20 CHAPTER ONE other practices with the Jews. For example, males seem to have been circum- cised, pigs were rarely consumed, and ...

POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 21 In comparison to the Assyrians and Babylonians, who were mainly inter- ested in collecting tribute from ...

22 CHAPTER ONE that the impression of calm created by the silence of the sources, preceding the well-attested dynamism and disor ...

POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 23 which simultaneously served to integrate the upper classes of the empire and was a site of subtle resist ...

24 CHAPTER ONE identity.^9 (One of the differences between Greekness in the Hellenistic and Roman imperial periods was that in t ...

POLITICS AN DSOCIETY 25 into a flood—a development of profound cultural significance that is frustrat- ingly difficult to interp ...