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

RELIGION AND SOCIETY BEFORE 70C.E 99

less, there is ample evidence for Judaism’s success in creating a Jewish society,
loosely centralized and frayed at the edges though it was. One of the most
important corpora of evidence for this process is the emergence of apocalyp-
ticism in literaturestarting in the thirdcentury, for this material seemsto show
that the scribal and priestly elites and subelites constantly engaged in the
domestication, or judaization, of ideological systems apparently at odds with
the Torah.