reminiscent of a level of authority it in fact no longer has. At the same time, the
early emperors’ powers are defined with reference to republican legal institutions,
notwithstanding the fact that the emperor wielded a level of authority over a time-
frame unimagined in republican law. It is because of this aforementioned air of
“self-evidence,” created by such synchronic and diachronic repetitions and consis-
tencies, that the “worlds” which human communities construct for themselves are
experienced by their “inhabitants” as being as immutable and “given” as the natural
and biological world (see Douglas 1973).
Especially in pre-modern times (and still for many in modern times), what we call
religion was (and is) an integral part of these humanly constructed, shared “worlds”;
religious phenomena did not constitute some distinct realm of belief and activity apart
from others. Among other things, these religiously informed “worlds” comprise:
(a) shared perceptions of how things really are; (b) shared definitions of social roles
and institutions, (c) shared norms and rules for how people (and supernatural
beings) should interact; (d) shared stories that account for how things are and who
people are; (e) and shared rituals which celebrate and re-enact salient elements of
that story and components of the “world” (see Geertz 1966; Berger 1967). In the
following sections of this chapter, these descriptive and analytic categories cut across
the themes by which this study deals with the evidence at hand.
Second, I am informed by sociological and anthropological perspectives on
minority communities in complex, pluralistic, or quasi-pluralistic societies. Minority
communities must have, to some significant extent, shared “worlds” which the social
actors in question must reasonably perceive as particular unto themselves. These min-
ority social constructs must support and perpetuate the group’s continued existence
as a distinct community with its own identity. However, unless the minority com-
munity advocates for its members a radically sectarian existence, cut off as much as
possible from social interaction and commerce with others, shared worlds constructed
by minority communities must permit a requisite degree of participation in and
acceptance bythe host society.
In some sense, therefore, successful minority-community worlds must become par-
ticularistic instances or variations of the host society’s socially constructed “world.”
That is, at one and the same time, the social norms and institutions of the minority
community must: (1) serve the community’s needs for perpetuating a distinctive social
grouping, with particular norms, institutions, and roles; (2) be so conceived as to
appear to reflect, and be experienced in some serious sense as reflecting, those of
the host society; and (3) because of this partial overlap and/or mirroring of minority
and host-society constructs, permit and facilitate a significant degree of participation
by minority members (as individuals and/or as a community) in the host society
(and at times vice versa).
Finally, my “take” on the evidence for Jews and Judaism in the Roman Diaspora
has been significantly shaped by the results of recent case studies focusing on the
“struggle for success” of ancient Jewish, early Christian, and so-called pagan reli-
gious communities in specific urban settings of the late Roman Mediterranean
world. First and foremost, one must recognize that Greco-Roman Diaspora Jewish
communities and their Judaism were decidedly urban phenomena. Second, the
Roman Diaspora Judaism 353